Responding to Salon’s piece on the subway ad campaign for Amazon’s “The Man in the High Castle,” which involved Nazi imagery.

I can understand people being offended by the intrusive subway ads for Amazon’s “The Man in the High Castle,” but they’ve got to understand that this works the other way, too. There are plenty of people offended by ads for breast augmentation surgery or any of the other many “sex sells” ads; there are likewise people angered by ads either for or against abortion, or by certain messages of faith. That’s just a part of your daily commute to work, and you either tune the advertisements out, or you don’t.

Just because the ad is Nazi imagery, then, shouldn’t make it easier to condemn. Especially for flaccid reasons like this: “On the train, seeing the American flag paired with a Nazi symbol is viscerally offensive, because there is no context as to what it means.” No context? Like the advertisements above all of the seats that explain that this is pitching an alternate-reality show in which the Nazis won World War II? I mean, the next step from there is to say that the show itself ought not to have been made. “Beyond insensitive,” claims the author of this op-ed, but that’s so deeply subjective that it means nothing, and its placement in the headline aims at priming the audience for the suggestion that this is wrong, period, denying us the chance to experience the piece as intended and to judge for ourselves. Continue reading →