Behold this Yuletide tale, filled with dishwater and wonder!
Maybe not quite virgin-birth material, but still richly embroidered of converging narratives: televised sport, Eastern Seaboard air travel, a Brooklyn mural, moral weakness and bisphenol A. And all these elements merge seamlessly together. It is, in a word, miraculous.
Obviously, the saga must begin with Sunday’s football contest between the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Eagles. You should not care about these things, because, as I’ve previously demonstrated, the NFL is immoral — but sadly I do care, and watched the game because I have been an Eagles fan since Kennedys roamed the White House. So imagine my delight that the Giants’ 3rd-string QB Jake Fromm went 6/17 for 25 yards along the way to his team being crushed by my team. (Disclosure: Not “my” team in the sense that I have any ownership interest, apart from the thousands of hours I’ve squandered over the years following their fortunes. Sofa equity, I consider it.)
By the way, Fromm was playing for the very reason that pro football is immoral: the chances of any player navigating a 17-game season without serious and lasting injury is perversely low, and the other QBs were shelved. But, once again, I am a hypocrite and I hung on every second of the broadcast, even when the commercials came on. Such as the one featuring two young adults swiping right for a Tinder date.
We see him dabbing Vaseline in his hair (?) and her putting in contact lenses. He walks to the saloon in his fresh white sneakers, she Ubers in an automobile while applying lipstick en route. They meet in front of the venue, with smiles — because love is blooming, or potentially chlamydia. Then up the sidewalk strolls another guy, the narrator, who has evidently been following them, like Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life, or the Night Stalker.
“That connection was brought to you by petroleum products,” he says. “But what if we lived in a world without petroleum and natural gas?”
A pretty open-ended question, for which there are at least a couple of plausible answers: 1. The world wouldn’t be on the brink of uninhabitability. 2. The Tinder dude’s pillowcases wouldn’t be so greasy.
But, no, what the ad is getting at is that there would be no romance for this couple, because there’d be no clothes, no car, no lipstick, no contact lenses, no petroleum jelly, no cell phone, no glasses, no football jerseys, no footballs (??), no sneaks, no tires, no condom (not pictured). “Life would be different,” he says, “because oil and gas are part of just about everything you touch. The world would be unrecognizable if the products we rely on just disappeared.” Then the action goes into fast-reverse and the star-crossed lovers are rendered unhookupable.
This belaboring of the obvious was brought to you by Energy Transfer, the pipeline company that distributes fossil fuels through 114,000 miles of pipe in 41 states. But why? Are they just rubbing our noses in society’s catastrophic deal with the devil? Are they somehow making the claim that reduction of petroleum products might save the planet from doom, but at the unimaginable cost of diminished sneaker availability? Or is Big Petroleum just taking that long-overdue victory lap for polyester? What a dumb commercial.
And then it dawned. Oh, my. How truth imitates fiction.