Car Ad Betrayal

Car advertisements seem to think that they have me pegged. They know that I'm desperately searching for a car to boister my flagging ego. They know that I am intensely attracted to bright, flashy colors. They know that I will only purchase a car if it has appeared in an action film starring Harrison Ford. They can read my poor, poor shallow mind.

So what I don't understand is how they would get it so very wrong this time around.

Yes, I'm talking to you, Honda Civic. What happened? We were so simpatico for a while. You were the only one who understood my penchant for spouting pretty little fish and tree frogs from my mouth while driving through tree-lined roads, much like a fairy princess cursed at birth by an evil sorceress to have toads leap from her lips at inconvenient moments. It was like... you got me.

Suddenly, you come out with a commercial populated by butterflies, snakes, and spiders. Ah the miracle of rebirth: a young butterfly wriggling out of its cocoon, a snake gleefully shedding its skin, baby spiders pouring in a veritable deluge from an egg sack. Nature at its finest, is it?

What's going on, Civic? You know I hate two out of three of those creatures!

For example: spiders. Civic, you know that I have called for jihad bis saif on those eight-legged bastards for the last twenty years! I don't heed the call of arachno-apologists who claim that spiders are actually our friends. "Ooooh," they say, "spiders kill insects that irritate us! They keep the population down!" Well, so does a bug zapper and you don't see me taking one of those into a passionate embrace!

And now you want me to associate your car with an animal-- nay, a creature-- that I despise?

I could have dealt with the spider thing. We have been through too much together to fall out over that. I would have questioned our relationship for a moment or two, but I would have fallen back on the idea that one can make a mistake every once and a while. That is... until you included that... other... thing.

That's right.

Butterflies.

What the hell, Civic? How could you not know that I hate butterflies with more fiery passion than can be promised by twenty Latin men simultaneously?! Don't you realize that when I swerve while driving on a deserted country road, I am actually trying to lodge one of those stupid things in the grill of my car? How could you not understand the basic butterfly conspiracy: butterflies sending out their lowly moth cousins to flutter in your face while you're trying to light a camp fire and you swat at them with the lighter fluid which splatters all over you and the fire decides to finally ignite and--poof!-- you have no eyebrows? How could you have missed something so simple? Honda Civic, you claim to be all "in" with the tree-huggers and the left-leaning Blame-America-Firsters, but how could you ignore the plight of the proletariat moth, who sacrifices itself while the bourgeois butterflies lean back in their pimped-out cocoons, sipping spiced nectar from the skulls of their enemies?

Shame on you, Civic, shame on you.

We're through. You'll find your stuff sitting in a pile outside of my door. Don't bother knocking.

K.

Thank you, The Colbert Report, for the "voice" of this piece.