Connect: Squeezing goo that looked like warm Christmas cake icing from a diseased and dismembered human aorta, an anti-smoking ad set the tone. Next was a cautionary tale featuring children, a farm and a coffin. After this appropriate warm-up, came the controversial rats 'n' rubbish shockfest. In a single commercial break, Irish TV was thoroughly polluted with repulsive images.
In a week in which a 19-year-old gave two fingers to the State and its people, television too treated us with contempt. Rats, filth, rubbish, coffins, a diseased human heart and, as ever, smarmy voices and daft claims, featured in ad breaks with revolting regularity. Intended to shock, such ads principally incite fear, disgust and, no doubt, widespread and counter-productive zapping.
The rats 'n' rubbish effort is especially contemptuous. In a country with one of the lowest population densities in Europe (53 people per square kilometre compared with, for instance, Holland's 424, Britain's 242 and Germany's 230) the suggestion that we Irish are so filthy we risk burying ourselves in showers of rats 'n' rubbish is arguably racist and certainly disproportionate.
Perhaps, as the defenders of such ads would have it, it's all admissibly deliberate exaggeration for the sake of effect.
However, try some similar hyperbole to describe the people who foist these polluting and propagandistic images upon us and see what happens. Within the rude and hectoring tone of such ads, you can hear a growing growl of authoritarianism.
A similar sound can be detected from managements that refuse to talk to workers. Their silence is derisive. Intent on centralising naked power (disingenuously dubbed "authority") such outfits fit seamlessly into the coarse authoritarianism that is growing louder. Although anti-bullying measures are cosmetically encouraged, TV is now routinely used to bully decent people.
We are all being bullied and, as ever, many of the bullied, though likely to discount their good selves, support the bullying. That's how it works. After all, those ads are really for other people - you know, dirty, polluting people - and they need to be shocked into cleanliness. But it's well to remember that all people are other people's "other people" and the ratfest is aimed at you too.
Fair enough, there is an undeniable case against smoking. There is a genuine problem about waste-disposal - hence the so-called "bintifada" and its political disputes. Safety on farms is also a serious issue. But the browbeating tone of these television ads is reminiscent of extreme devices formerly used by the Catholic Church to instill fear in people.
"You'll burn in hell for eternity" is, in effect, little different from "you'll be buried alive under rats and rubbish" if you don't change your filthy habits. How are children - many of whom will see the putrescent shockfest despite the post-watershed safeguard - to cope with this? Indeed, to maximise its repulsive impact, that particular ad includes sewer rats scurrying near a child.
In itself, the waste-management sermon is a form of pollution. Its aims may be laudable but its means - shocking exaggeration - are not. Such means perpetrate a form of psychological violence on the population, most of whom are not polluters. Most, in fact, are people who pay their taxes and then get lectured to as though they were feckless filth-creators. In that sense, the insulting and would-be justifying cliché - "the polluter pays" - is yet more insincerity. Ostensibly it treats everyone the same (everyone is a dirty polluter). However, it never links growing mountains of rubbish to the fact that people are relentlessly encouraged - by business and government and primarily through TV advertising - to buy all sorts of junk.
Much TV advertising is polluting. Easy but punitive money loans, dodgy claims for cosmetics (some maybe as carcinogenic as cigarettes), alcohol that makes you a sex god or goddess - all are interminably advertised. Yet the psychological pollution caused by television advertising helps maximise the physical rubbish that is your fault, you scummy, scabrous, squalid polluter.
Perhaps it's being too thin-skinned to object to shock ads on public welfare matters. But the lack of context, of proportion and of normal civility in these "messages" manifest the hectoring tone of the wagging finger. We don't ever see rats in ads for obscenely expensive housing estates (or ramshackle primary schools) even though building is a notorious catalyst of rodent-infestation.
Meanwhile, a practically ubiquitous ad for a mobile phone outfit revels in designer vacuousness before asking with a contrived jauntiness: "How are you?" How am I? How could anybody be after sitting in front of a TV broadcasting shock-sermons about rats, rubbish, filth, coffins and a diseased human heart? Informed? Educated? Entertained? Yeah, right.
We know, to paraphrase another ad, when we've been tangoed, taunted and trampled. It would be good if the powerful spoke to the people in a respectful manner. Sure, there will always be recalcitrants who require a firmer approach. But bullying ads bespeak a bullying mentality and should be scrapped. As the mobile phone crowd insist: "now is good". Get the ratfest off TV.