When I was young I remember going to a Car Show and seeing good looking girls draped over the cars. Sex was also used to sell cars in TV ads at that time as men were being targeted for car sales. Today I saw an ad for a Jeep. It was a video of popular war game with lots of killing, explorations and military might. However a Jeep vehicle was featured in the game and what the clip was selling was this car. Yes, young woman in bathing suits have been replaced by military war and violence to sell cars to men.
Militarism is so pervasive in our society that often we do not even see it. “Be All You Can Be” is not a phrase to describe being a true human and/or Christian but to be a member of the Army. President Eisenhower in the 50’s before leaving office warned us about the “military/industrial complex which after elimination of the selective service system in the 70’s has become the military/industrial/educational complex. Select universities, like Marquette University, have become the officer training bases and military high school and middle school programs grow as the new source of recruits. Interesting enough it was the military that first funded computer game businesses to develop war games.
There is another life style offered as an alternative to militarism. It is the way of nonviolence. We honor those who are symbols of nonviolence like Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi but disgrace what they believed and practiced by Teaching War and spending a good part of budget, as USA and India do, on War Spending.
We all knew car dealers were associating cars with sexy woman to sell cars. However, do we all know that car dealers use war and violence to sell cars? It is a sign of our times.
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