daisy ad

<give:peace> support the impactful work of the campaign for nuclear disarmament

<learn> you’re watching NBC Monday Night at the Movies on television on the evening of September 7, 1964. unlike the present day smorgasbord of video media, viewers that evening had only three television channels from which to choose. the shadow of the cuban missile crisis, the closest that the United States had gotten to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, looms in the collective memory. A young girl appears on the screen, standing in a field picking petals off a daisy. She counts them one by one. When she reaches the number nine, you hear an ominous male voiceover counting backwards from ten to zero. It is a missile launch countdown. The scene cuts to a mushroom cloud borne from the nuclear detonation. President Lyndon Johnson’s voiceover: "These are the stakes: To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die."

What is the context and relevance of this commercial looking back from our vantage point today?

<> This political advertisement, known colloquially as the “Daisy” ad is widely considered as the first modern "attack ad", and is still regarded as one of the most effective and notorious examples of political advertising in history. Many people today forget that this type of aggressive, tonally negative attack on a political opponent was not the norm of typical political advertising prior to this point. This ad implicitly reminds viewers about Goldwater’s casual comments advocating for the use of nuclear weapons as part of traditional combat operations. The commercial resonated with an American public that was still rattled by its brush with nuclear war as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

<> Barry Goldwater is quoted with the phrase, ‘Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice’. This is one jumping-off point for the polarization of Contemporary American politics. This lineage runs from Goldwater, through Ronald Reagen’s charming mistrust of government as an efficient force for good, through Newt Gingrich’s no-holds-barred approach to leading a Republican Congress to all but cease operations to avoid any success attributed to the Democratic President Bill Clinton, to today’s current political climate and dismantling of the US Federal government by the second Trump administration. Ironically, it was an ad considered extreme at the time that contributed to the landslide loss for Goldwater, the candidate who advocated for extremism, and from whose womb sprung the current extremist political norms and behavior.

<> This commercial was aired only once, but due to the controversy it stirred, was replayed through news coverage, ultimately reaching approximately 100 million viewers. This long-tail of post-event media coverage is a precursor to today’s current environment where the event is merely an amuse-bouche before the buffet of fragmented videos chopped up and replayed on YouTube and TikTok.   

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