Light it. Live it. Love it.

The promise of spring has started to bend our malleable scowl into a sheepish grin and the sporadic, mild winter (brought to you by our sponsor, “Global Warming®”) has finally hit its lunch break. Hanging a “We’ll be back soon” sign in the foggy windows of the thawing populace, winter has once again been so kind as to unshackle those who have dared to defy its powerful, depressing regime.

It is during this transition of seasons that we kneel before the gods of high definition and take in the almost blinding glory of the NCAA basketball tournament. Attached to the tournament are the promises of upsets, unbridled emotion, and a sense of drama that would make a teenage girl puke up her Dexatrim.

And so we enter the office pool, fill out our brackets, pretend to know what we’re talking about, and inevitably lose to “Lisa”; that girl in accounting that’s never watched a college basketball game in her life.

It is a guarantee that can’t be stamped out onto a box or diluted by the sideways language of a mail order bride’s contract (not that I would know).

However frustrating, the immeasurable chaos that can take place during the tournament pales in comparison to the maddening barrage of TV Timeouts and shitty advertising that’s plagued the NCAA tournament for years.

As if it’s not enough that the ebb and flow of a game gets abruptly halted by advertising bodies looking to brand themselves into the American psyche, we are summarily subjected to some of the most boring and ridiculous commercial spots of all time. These commercials are the “B-Sides” of an advertising cassette that was thrust into the tired tape deck of the Super Bowl. While they may not have made it onto the grandest of stages, they were still deemed “good” enough to find their way onto national television.

My question is this: If you are either Ford or State Farm and you’re purportedly knocking on the door of bankruptcy, at what point is it still economically feasible to spend millions upon millions of dollars (you supposedly don’t have) to make yourself more appealing to a population that just isn’t satisfied with your product/service?

In State Farm’s case, we have thousands of Katrina “victims” looking for money that you supposedly don’t have, but you’re throwing a cool $500K out for every televised spot throughout the tourney. Beautiful. You might as well send a letter out to all of those you’ve insured saying, “Look, we know you need the money, but so do we. We kind of messed up when we insured you. We just never anticipated a hurricane hitting New Orleans. Please accept this coupon for $1 off of your next purchase of a Hardees Thickburger.”

In Ford’s case, the sin is somewhat more forgivable. Ford has been a blue-collar bastion of American spirit for nearly a century. But despite their “good” intentions, it’s hard for me to swallow a multi-million dollar ad campaign that succeeds only in matching the unimaginable boredom and monochrome thought process that has to dominate the mind of every line worker counting down the minutes until the whistle blows and the nightmare of a life unfulfilled can be swallowed unceremoniously amongst that last swig of Miller High Life.

Label me either cynic or skeptic; I just don’t understand the apathy Americans have towards the corporations that literally control their lives.

Operating in Life’s Trivial Pursuit,

Ronald Cherry