Another Reason To Drink Stolichnaya

Instead, it hearkens to a time which the population of Mexico may feel was more ideal. ~Absolut

The ad depicting Mexico in its pre-1836 state, even including Texas, with the tagline “In an Absolut world,” has naturally caused some hostile reaction.  If their marketing people thought that appealing to either Mexican nostalgia or irredentism was a good way to sell vodka, they probably ought to have considered that Americans would take a dim view of the same. 

This reminds me of a recent discussion I was having about Greece and FYROM.  Someone said that Westerners probably find Balkan disputes about names and ancient territorial claims to be “petty.”  This is probably true, but it is mostly a function of not understanding the history behind the controversy.  Had Greeks not waged the Macedonian Struggle in one form or another for the better part of seventy years, the dispute over what to call the former Yugoslav republic would probably have been resolved, but because of the explicitly irredentist and separatist aspects of “Macedonian” identity over the last century it is very difficult for many Greeks to accept Skopje’s claim to the name.  In that conversation, I noted that we have our own controversies about “merely” symbolic things as well.  Of course, people tend to call them “merely” symbolic when the symbols belong to someone else and they don’t understand the significance of the symbols, especially not at a visceral level. 

You don’t even need to think that the reconquista is underway to find the ad offensive.  Of course, if the people living in what was then northern Mexico had anything to say about it in the 1830s they were only too eager to break away from Mexico, and not just in Texas.  They didn’t think being part of Mexico, at least the Mexico of Santa Anna, was ideal and essentially put up no resistance when our armies arrived.  The people who think 1830s Mexico was ideal tend to be people who never had to live in it.