Hasta La Ideas

“WE ARE ALL WORKERS” is the message that accosts me every day as I wait in the crowds for the bus to work. Sure, Levi’s hoi polloi proclamation is true enough in their recent campaign, well, save for the idle rich and a workless 9.1% of the U.S. But are we really the workers we imagine or romanticize that we are? My daily routine, like many of you, involves floor to ceiling windows, perfectly climate-controlled environs, about ten hours a day in front of a wide-screen monitor, and a spine-friendly standing desk (a recent addition). This hardly hearkens back to a time when work meant sunrise to sunset in the field, factory or (for the unluckiest) mine.

The “Go Forth” campaign, developed for Levi’s by presumably moustached, plaid-clad art directors within its target demographic at advertising juggernaut Wieden + Kennedy, is just one illustration of the Manifest-Destiny-ian wildfire issuing from Brooklyn to the Mission District and beyond onto the frontiers of the Internet in search of the handmade, authentic, imperfect and purportedly “genuine.” One of the campaign’s centerpieces, a minute-long video featuring a misappropriated voice-over of Walt Whitman’s poem, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” is a marvel of modern advertising. My first listening, hunched over my glowing laptop screen in my darkened living room, elicited goosebumps. Not so much for the choppy, almost angry scenes of twenty-somethings pulling on jeans, mimicking the poses of statues and running aimlessly with torches, but for Whitman’s words from 1865; words that sprung out of a nation on the verge of destroying itself, ringing tinnily out of my equally tinny speakers hundreds of years later.

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