On Hot Pockets

Hot Pockets, Jim Gaffigan's favorite food-like product of lyrical self-reference, have a new product for which they are jamming the airwaves: hamburger Hot Pockets.

Yes, they've gone the extra mile to break apart the mystery meat in their oddity-filled pasty crusts. Ostensibly this is so we don't have to chew as much.

What bothers me is that they're not really marketing this as a product to be desired. Instead they're taking the more modern approach, that is selling us on an emotion that makes us feel better than everyone else. They're selling us not-racism.


There's not even a veil over it. Hot Pockets is comparing it's the method by which you eat their product, hands-only, with other qualities that have experienced unwarranted social injustice, i.e. race, gender and sexuality.

They can't even include a black guy in the commercial, because then we'd be wondering if all the "foodist" fuddy-duddies were just bigots. Of course they obviously couldn't include any gays, as no self respecting homosexual is going to set foot anywhere near a Hot Pocket unless it's greaseless, vegetarian and stuffed with a spinach and artichoke cream sauce. Or hummus.

Now, I'll admit one of my favorite internet images of all time is the picture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a delicious frozen orange treat simply captions, "I HAVE A DREAMSICLE."


But this is just a step too far. I'm supposed to like Hot Pockets filled with granulated, pre-processed beef(?) sauteed in its own grease and non-dairy cheese substitute because other white people fucking feel bad?

No, I'm sorry. Yeah, that whole slavery thing sucked. Yeah, Christians fucked a lot of people over. Constantly. Still do. But you know what? That wasn't me. In fact I'm Jewish. We did the whole slavery thing ourselves so that second trip around can't even be considered our fault. The rest of my family's non-practicing Protestants.

And frankly even they were poor as fuck. Not like they could have afforded a slave.

Although I've always wondered why our Southern Italian family caries an African-only genetic blood disorder. Great Uncle Othello always keeps mum about it.