The Sin of Greed I

They’re loud, they’re intrusive, and they’ll be around for almost as long as death and taxes. They are flashy, star our favorite washed-up celebrities, and we hate them. They are commercials, and they are examples of the many things that we in the modern-day think of as Facts of Life, but which are really incredibly rude and should be wholly unacceptable.

Of course I know that without commercials, there would be no funding for decent programming, but take a second to consider what commercials are: 3-5 minutes of this.

You’re not good enough and neither is anything you own! Buy our stuff! Buy it! Not theirs, buy ours! BUY IT! YOU SUCK IF YOU DON’T BUY IT.

This is not only tolerated by the viewing community, but is actually accepted as a necessary part of the entertainment system, to the absolutely insane extent that more and more people are tuning into the Superbowl in order to watch... the commercials.

Awesome. Well, I’m not buying it (pun intended). Too often have I been watching TV, and heard during the commercial break something like,

“Most leading tissue brands actually serve to increase dryness and redness in the nose,”

OR

“Your puppy food might not be loaded with enough vegetables, causing your puppy to age faster and develop what’s called CANINE OBESITY”

OR

“If you don’t have a TV as large as this one, your penis will actually fall off and you’ll never eat steak or get laid again, and a sinkhole will appear in the earth under your house and swallow all of your worldly possessions.”

And this always makes me go like this.

"That was a slap in the face of Truth, wasn't it?"

But you can lie to me all you want, commercials, and I won’t mind because it’s got nothing to do with me until you show the absurd magnitude to which you doubt my intelligence by expecting me to listen to you. That is when I make this face

and start to think about how you are committing what I believe is known, in the Catholic Faith as a Double-Whammy. The Sin of Greed and the Sin of Bearing False Witness are at work here. Through the lies that commercials tell, they fabricate not only the idea that their product is the best out there, which by sheer logic cannot be true in all cases, but also the absurd idea that we need the product they're selling in the first place.

"Are you tired of having to use a ruler to make sure that your pictures hang straight?"

No. I'm absolutely not tired of that, don't make assumptions. I have never wiped up a spill with a paper towel and thought to myself, "I wish this damn thing were more absorbent," either. Nor have I ever thought about whether or not my cat is ingesting the vegetables he "needs" to survive (I'm sure his ancestors had their 5 servings a day in the form of the partially-digested berries inside the shrew carcasses they heartily devoured).

In someone's absolutely maniacal need to make money without contributing to the world even marginally, the famous Snuggie was brought about. The commercial, as we all know, bravely asserts what we've all been thinking:

I love how warm my blanket keeps me, but I hate how it traps my hands and holds me hostage and immobile!