OK, football fans, is everyone else as tired of the horrid Domino's Brooklyn Style Pizza ads as I am? If I hear "Fold it like a man!" one more time I think I am going to give up pizza for Nativity Lent or something radical like that.
Still, I have to admit that the little New York Times story on this ad campaign -- "'Brooklyn Style Pizza' Meets the Real Deal" -- left me feeling a stab of sympathy for the giant corporation.
As you would imagine, reporter Kim Severson didn't find too many people in Brooklyn who were happy or excited about this mass-marketing of a pseudo-New York tradition. Nevertheless, there is a passage near the end that is jarring, to say the least. There are people who believe that the Times can find a way to spin almost any story in a way that sticks needles into the sensitive skins of conservative Christians, especially Roman Catholics.
But did we really need the pizza-culture wars? In the ads, Severson writes,
An older Italian woman yells out of a brownstone window. A man with the look of an extra from "The Sopranos" pumps iron on the roof. A Rosie O'Donnell lookalike berates a taxi driver for not folding his slice like a man. And there's an African-American guy. You can't hear what he's saying because the rap music pouring from his car speakers is too loud.
That kind of imagery just grinds at Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president.
"It's a multinational right-wing company, mass marketing the Brooklyn attitude with obsolete ethnic stereotypes, not to mention flimsy crusts," he said through a spokesman.
. . . The right-wing reference is to Domino's founder, Thomas S. Monaghan, who sold the company in 1998. He has supported the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue and earlier this year announced his intention to build a town called Ave Maria in Florida based on strict Roman Catholic principles.
What a plot twist. Not only is this fake Brooklyn pizza, it's dangerous Brooklyn pizza. It is Brooklyn pizza with bad political and theological DNA.
You have been warned.