12.10.2008

car dealership radio ad spreads the hate

So get this. In Savannah, Georgia, O.C. Welch, a Ford dealer who is angry over the proposed bailout of U.S. automakers, took out a radio ad criticizing buyers of Japanese cars, calling the vehicles "rice ready... not road ready." Say what? Say hello anti-Asian sentiment on the airwaves: Angry Ford dealer in SC blasts imports in ads.

Welch owns a dealership near Savannah in Hardeeville, South Carolina. He began airing the minute-long ad, which sounds more like a talk-radio tirade than a sales pitch, on a dozen stations in the area over the weekend:
All you people that buy all your Toyotas and send that money to Japan, you know, when you don't have a job to make your Toyota car payment, don't come crying to me," Welch says in the ad. "All those cars are rice ready. They're not road ready."
What the hell does "rice ready" mean anyway? Welch apparently believes he is doing his part to help the sagging American economy. What he's really doing is spreading ignorance, hate and xenophobia in the form of an economic scapegoat. Funny, we've heard this before. It's rhetoric like this that can lead to an Asian American guy getting his head bashed in with a baseball bat...

UPDATE: With all this rhetoric about "buying American," and people making idiotic radio commercials to that effect, this CNN article asks a very relevant question for our times: What makes a car American?.

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