The continual cycle of idiocy

One week it’s a brewery imprudently handing over responsibility for its words and marketing to a willing amateur in exchange for free beer, and then crazily back-peddling to apologise for the oversight when the far-from-professional output causes a global uproar that sends the brewery’s sales plummeting.  When will people learn that only squirrels work for peanuts, and squirrels have little qualms about their actions so long as they’re rewarded with a free feast?

Now it’s the turn of South Africa’s fashion-retailer-cum-brewery Vale that has embarked on an inappropriate, ill-chosen and very wrong marketing campaign that has unsurprisingly backfired stupendously.  What is laughable is the apologies that somehow suggest it was an oversight, yet it doesn’t take much to clearly see the insincerity; it was an intentional action to shock, gain publicity and ingratiate itself with a certain section of society who find this type of thing funny, acceptable and nothing to be taken too seriously.  Nobody is really this stupid and thoughtless, surely!  How can an apology from a brewery whose tagline is “Don’t say we didn’t f**kin’ warn you” be taken seriously?

The “gushing and moist” description of its Filthy Brunette is questionable, as is the statement that “all your friends have already had her” — the Easy Blonde.  The Ripe Redhead (an Irish Red) that “was previously a Ginger Pikey” introduces another inappropriate prejudice, and the Raven Porra Porter “with the best head in town” is an appalling piece of innuendo.

When will people learn?  Never, it seems.