Two unrelated thoughts

1. What is the backstory behind the spate of commercials on television advertising the company ‘E-surance?’ For those of you who don’t pay nearly as much attention to television commercials as do I, the commercials revolve around a pair of cartoon animated people. The female of the pair is a pink-haired woman who tells her average-looking male counterpart the benefits of getting car insurance through the online firm, E-surance. As much as that bit makes sense, each of the several commercials takes place within the confines of a shorter story-piece. It is those background contexts that I simply can’t figure out.

In the original, the woman was fleeing from some bad guys and telling an unknown party through a headset that she needed a getaway car. Dropping through a skylight into a car rental place, she meets the man who is her counterpart through the later commercials. Before he can rent her a car, he needs to see her insurance, providing her with a platform from which to tout the benefits of online auto insurance. As best I can make out, she’s either a spy or a burglar, and he’s a car-rental salesman.

However, from there, things get less coherent. In another commercial, the two of them are playing some future variant of indoor football against a team of gigantic robots that have snow lasers for arms. In yet another, the two of them are fighting a gigantic tree-eating robot who is clear-cutting forests. Another commercial has the female fighting a human-sized robot in an old-west themed town. Ostensibly, she is the sheriff keeping the evil robot out of her city… until the guy shows up and drives her away on a motorcycle. Finally, a last commercial has the two of them involved in some downhill skiing being chased by a laser-wielding human adversary.

I’m really thrown for a loop here. Just what kind of a world does this pair live in? Is he still a rental car salesguy? What’s with all of the robots? Is she some operative for a robot-fighting spy agency? If so, why was she playing football against them? I just don’t get it.

2. According to one of my professors, exploitation of native peoples is a necessary condition of the concept of ‘empire.’ She isn’t saying that to maintain, or create, an empire one must exploit native peoples; rather, she is claiming that the very idea of having an empire requires that the empire exploit native peoples. Without the exploitation, they simply aren’t an empire, says the professor.

Surely there is something wrong with that idea, right? I mean, when Napoleon did his first shot at building an empire, he conquered a majority of Europe and the Mediterranean. While the native inhabitants of those countries weren’t treated with especial love and compassion, they were made citizens of France and their nations made into French Departments. When Napoleon took Egypt, he proceeded to order the construction of museums, paved roads, schools, hospitals, the installation of electric lighting on main roads in cities, and so on. French administration of Egypt, had it lasted long enough to have implemented the planned updates, would have made northern Egypt’s main cities into staggeringly modern tourist centers with all the charms of Paris or London.

And it wasn’t as if the improvements planned were made to make the area good for a vast influx of native Frenchmen. No massive wave of colonization took place in Egypt as did in the Americas. To me, that doesn’t sound a whole lot like exploitation of native peoples to me. It sounds more like brining the light of civilization to a nation long bereft of the resources to do it on its own.