I wasn’t going to cover this advert because I am trying to downplay my commentary and concentrate more on my music stuff here, but I’ve watched it a couple of times and it disturbs me so much that I have to write something.

Now we know that AIDs is a bad thing and that Hitler was a bad man, but I was told that two wrongs don’t make a right and this advert is a classic case of giving out mixed messages in the media. Now to me, it looks as if Hitler invented AIDs and somehow the health authorities are passing the blame to the Third Reich, but this is supposedly an attempt to give the disease “a face”. Awww, c’mon. We all know that Hitler wouldn’t fuck on the first date and even if he did, he was really into that German efficiency ethos and would have obviously used a condom!
But it got me thinking about how you could give faces to other diseases. For example, cancer could be Richard Nixon, sickle cell could be Idi Amin, Yellow Fever could be Mao Tse Tung. But then I am worrying if I am getting racist. Would Gordon Brown be diarrhoea? Think about it…
But will this stem the tide of sexual diseases? I hear that they are also using Stalin and possibly Mussolini into the mix. But the thing is that most young people today don’t even know who these historical figures are and would be lucky if they could identify Mr Blobby out of a line-up of other 1990s celebrities, such is their disinterest in the past.
But let’s riff on the theme of mass murderers taking on the mantle of other killer diseases. Fred West as salmonella, Ted Bundy is tuberculosis, and George Best is cirrhosis of the liver. OK, I fudged that last one, but you get my drift…

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