Sweet ol’ Dolly Parton’s new Super Bowl ad has her flirting with cancel culture. According to one freelance journalist and political organizer writing for NBC.com’s “Think” section, the "9 to 5" singer's TV spot sang the praises of working and having a job a bit too much.
After all, living in Joe Biden's socialist-leaning America means jobs are literally slashed and burned via executive order. Parton and her values of hard work are a bit old time-y, are they not?
The thrust of the op-ed, written by Kim Kelly, aimed squarely at Parton’s promotion of what the writer deemed, “false virtues of working overtime.” Well sure we’d all like to be couch potatoes and do away with paying our rent on time, but some of us, including Mrs. Parton, still live in a reality where millions of normal Americans have to endure getting up in the morning to earn a living.
Some even have to work more than one job, out of necessity, or -- as Kelly fails to consider -- to build something more ambitious. To most people it’s essential to freedom. To many on the left, the idea fills them with horror.
On the day after the Super Bowl, the “Think” piece called the singer’s ad a “miscalculation.” Specifically, the TV spot featured an updated rendition of Parton’s classic to promote Squarespace, a company which allows people to design their own website. The aim of Parton’s rework was to sell Squarespace’s product as a means for people to be entrepreneurs. One of the updated lyrics reads, “be your own boss, climb your own ladder” This new version of the song makes working the “side hustle” out to be “free, fun and fulfilling,” as the op-ed’s author described it, presumably with a scowl on her face.
According to the piece, “It’s a perfect storm of gig economy propaganda. And it’s a particularly disappointing message to hear from someone like Parton, who once warned us, ‘You're just a step on the boss man's ladder.’” Yes, she was once lamenting being a slave to the man, but now she’s advocating more backbreaking toil?
Sounds terrible? However, the piece merely established the false dichotomy between when Parton skewered the “kind of drudgery, disrespect and degradation that so many workers, especially women, face on the job” then and now, when her “voice is being used to promote the false virtues of working overtime.”
Though, it’s not like Miss Dolly’s old ode hated working for a living. By her own admission, Kelly implied that Dolly has always argued for people to have more freedom to work. They described her earlier crusade as echoing “the goals of the real-life and still-active 9to5 movement, which fought for better pay, better working conditions and an end to sexual harassment at work.”
Ok so a better work environment for better focus, more productivity, more money? Is that not what Parton’s updated message is going for now? The idea that someone is building their own website to sell a product; for more focus, their own standard of productivity and more money; is that not total work freedom?
But of course, NBC took the most cynical interpretation possible, writing, “it’s so disappointing to read the lyrics to this new song and hear her literally sing the praises of ‘working, working, working,’” as if Parton is joyously singing about an impoverished mother and her brood of five surviving with the use of the laptop and website she's paying for with that McDonald’s paycheck.
How about the fact that someone who has the means to improve their life can do so with a new website and hard work? Nope, that’s slavery according to the far left.
