What is wrong with this ad by Acura, the luxury car brand of the Japanese automaker Honda Motor Company?

It seems pretty harmless. Crows are making lots of noise outside; a beautiful woman sits in her luxury car and hears none of it. Everyone knows that the sound crows make is hard on human ears. This woman has the privilege of owning a car that blocks out those awful sounds. How fortunate she is. How fortunate you would be if you had a car like this. But what you own is an ordinary car, one that provides no such defense to the mania of crows. The rich have it good. You have it bad. But you want to be like the good and not who you are, the bad. This message is harmless on the surface.

But on a deeper (and therefore truer) level, the ad is a killer of human beings. What it wants you to buy is an automobile that isolates you from the city—from its stresses, activities, and bird babbling. But the city is not occupied solely by crows; this animal makes up a small part of city life. Crows are with other animals, such as humans—they are synanthropic. What this ad is basically promoting is a kind of driving that is sealed from the outside, a kind of driving that makes a tank of the car.

Indeed, a whole school of traffic engineering is devoted to breaking the dangerous spell of this isolation by throwing drivers outside of their cars into the world of urban activities. The less a driver is in his/her car when driving about, the less dangerous they are to bikers and pedestrians and dogs. This school of traffic engineering had its start in Holland in the 1970s and promotes woonerf design principles. You can see some of these principles in Belltown's Bell Street Park. There is a weak and strong version to woonerf. The weak version is all about Bell Street Park. The strong version, which has the late Hans Monderman as its leading figure, believes that the removal of "features such as curbs, road surface markings, traffic signs, and regulations" makes roads safer because the drivers are no longer following rules but paying attention to the street. Cars are made for humans, but humans are not made for cars. We will never evolve into them (the dark core of J. G. Ballard's Crash). A car brings with it something that we are not prepared for and will never work out: shelter (separation from the outside) and fast motion (the radical outside). This is an evolutionary dead end.

But the Acura ad is promoting a car that essentially adds danger to the life of an American city. It can do this without any worry of a political or democratic backlash because no one sees it as a form of social engineering (that happens only in socialist countries). What's really bad in all of this is not that you will buy the car or not, but that the idea of being isolated from other forms of traffic is sold/promoted as normal. This message, however, is much more deadly than anything ISIS could inflict on the United States, and yet the president is giving us speeches about ISIS and not the Acura ad.