Thanks for the Memories

     Before going to work this morning, I saw an interesting and unsettling TV ad.
     Nissan Rogue, Nissan Murano, Nissan Pathfinder.  The Rogue is mainly shown, a red one, driven by a cool and collected woman with a bearded male passenger, escaping from a city beset by some Marvel Comics-like storm cloud expanding and blazing with lightning.  The cloud's expansion is shown from above at first, a helicopter shot looking straight down past skyscrapers at streets darkened by the swiftly moving mass.  It moves like the collapsed towers' dust clouds of 9/11.  What are Nissan's advertising people attempting to convey with this ad?
     "Take on any road with intuitive all wheel drive," says the narrator at the end.
     Indeed, the car gets splashed with heavy rain, trees fall, the driver swerves around a sparking power cable, speeds through a tunnel ahead of the cloud that's shooting along like liquid through a hypodermic.  A long distance shot shows the unnatural cloud spreading over the city, a bicyclist sitting motionless on the street, watching from a sunny distance.  The Rogue emerges out of the cloud through the tunnel, flanked on either side by the Pathfinder and Murano.
     "Innovation that excites."
     Ads that confuse.
     The driver first notices something's up when heavy raindrops begin hitting her windshield, making loud plopping sounds.  If this ad is a 9/11 reference, do these plopping drops symbolize the unfortunates above the fire line who jumped from the Towers' highest floors?  She looks up, as New Yorkers did that day, an uncharacteristic action on their parts, because September 11, 2001, is the first day New Yorkers looked up, doing what visiting hick tourists always do.
     What the fuck is going on with the Nissan ad?  The overhead view of the expanding cloud is painfully similar to the Towers' fall.  I saw part of a documentary many years ago, featuring footage shot by a photographer who lived near the World Trade Center.  She woke up hearing Flight 11 impact with the North Tower, got her videocamera and went outside, documenting the experience, and then returned to her second or third floor apartment on a side street.  The apartment's living room featured wide windows which could be cranked open and closed.  The windows that morning were open, the weather was lovely.  She heard and felt the South Tower's death roar and aimed her videocamera down at the street.  People appeared, running fast to the right, followed by a dark cloud moving with the speed of a truck going about twenty to thirty miles per hour.
     The cloud looked a lot like the spreading monstrosity in the Nissan TV ad.  It no doubt overtook the running people seen by the woman through her camera lens.  The cloud entered her apartment, punishing her curiosity.  Blinded and choked, she ran upstairs inside the building to the top floor, where an old woman gave her temporary sanctuary in her apartment.
     9/11 is now a car commercial.  Patriot Day is four days away.  Honor the fallen victims by buying things.

                                                                               Vic Neptune