It's not just Ford. In a commercial for Hummer, the monster SUV that's more Abrams tank than something fit for the road, two moms are minding their children at a playground swing. One of the other kids shoves her child off the swing, and the mother of the shoving kid just shrugs. That does it. The mom of the shovee races off to buy a Hummer, and we're to conclude that she may not necessarily intend to run over the next kid who shoves her child off a swing, but now she's got the moving sheet metal to take her half of the highway of life out of the middle of the road.
Ford and Hummer and the rest of Detroit are trying to survive in the era of $3 a gallon gasoline, and they're stuck with cars the size of trucks. Sympathy for the plight of American automakers is not what it used to be. Republicans in Michigan are miffed that George W. Bush and his friends in Congress are saying that Detroit has brought its woes on itself, and should focus, like the Japanese and the Koreans, on building more "relevant" vehicles. Michigan Republicans think they have a shot at electing a governor this year and in 2008 turning the state from blue to red for the first time in 18 years. Indifference by their friends in Washington stings.
Television commercials reflect reality far more accurately than prime-time comedies and PBS documentaries, and divorce and broken homes are our reality, shorn of stigma but not sadness. So are wrecks on the highway, flat tires in the rain and angst around Granny's deathbed. Is that the next stop on the road to the showroom?