On the manipulation of the American mind

by commercial advertising:

 

At this particular moment the Great State of California is officially celebrating its 150^th anniversary of statehood. It struck me as coincidental, if curious, that I should be simultaneously engaged in a re-read of Irving Stone’s great and eminently readable history of the final settlement of the American West (the Pacific States), entitled Men to Match My Mountains (first published in 1956).  Stone’s book is one of the great modern classics of the expansionist story of white America’s ‘manifest destiny’.

 

150 years of history is relatively scant, in contrast to that recorded for settled regions other parts of the world. However, when one remembers that the entire history of the United States is a mere 250 years, it is somewhat easier to fit into proper context the average American’s amazing absence of any substantial awareness of or appreciation for the value of ‘older’ things (such as history, subject in reference).

 

For many years, one of my chief annoyances has been the near-pathological and almost reverent regard accorded “newness” by our society (read: social economy). Ever since my earliest days I recall encountering the statement “New and Improved” used over and over by the corporate snake-oil sellers to hawk their commercial products. It is almost as if this incessant refrain somehow intrinsically sanctifies the reintroduction of an ordinary commercial product that is in all likelihood essentially identical to that which preceded it. We see and hear this refrain used over and over, each day in modern media driven US commercial advertising and it is used so frequently and so unceasingly that most Americans appear to have become anaesthetized by it, much as they have by the word “Free!” (a word that is equally meaningless within the wide-open, free-for-all bullring of American commercial hype and hucksterism, for absolutely nothing in America comes without a price associated with it).

 

Seen, however, in the sterile, objective floodlight of reason, there is nothing intrinsic to “New and Improved” that should make a new object any better or more desirable than one which is “Old and Unchanged!” That amorphously moldable, anonymously adaptable, and yet all-important entity known as the American Consumer has simply been taken in by another absolutely spurious commercial catch phrase, formulated and promulgated simply to ensure the perpetual consumption of material goods by Americans  (a process that is by now the chief production resource of economic wealth in this country.

 

This obsession with the “New” is reflected in virtually every aspect of American life, from the most insignificant consumer product to the highest expressions of art, science, and culture in our nation. The cry has been so profoundly driven home by commercial advertising (through virtue of the unending efforts of its media minions), that we even regard older people as being somehow less deserving of respect and dignity (and of therefore less value in the demographic and social make-up of the nation than younger people, accordingly). Young people, aside from being possessed of those desirable virtues of youthful vigor and excellent health, have been illogically elevated by consumer market powers to an ascendant status in American society; conversely, older people (unless they have significant wealth, hence influence) are devalued in direct proportion to their increasing age.

 

Truly, when one really considers the magnitude of commercial America’s pathological obsession with “newness” free of any residual effects of the monstrous daily brain-washing that commercial advertising equates to, it is readily apparent that this obsessive doting on “new” is an excellent indicator of the massive, subtle, yet intensely dangerous social and intellectual dementia that threatens our cultural sanity today.

 

Returning to the current California Sesquicentennial Celebration, this sad lack of appreciation for the qualities of older things (read: a sense of history in this specific context, if you will) is even reflected in the fact that so little genuine regard was given the matter of festively marking one hundred and fifty years of California history that only a pathetically small amount of funding was provided by the State Legislature to celebrate the occasion. To compound the insult, California’s collective wealth is presently proportionate to that of the world’s 7^th greatest economy, possessed as it is with a current budget surplus that is reckoned in the billions of dollars.  As a result of this inexcusable legislative parsimony, so little money was spent promoting California’s Sesquicentennial that most of the state is completely unaware that this event is currently going on. The only reason I an aware of it myself is due to the fact that I presently work in the State Treasury Building, directly across the street from the Capitol (where it is extremely difficult for even the most dimwitted and disinterested of souls to ignore the hoopla and cheap tricks that are being performed on the immediate Capitol grounds as a token festive event). I am convinced, from my observations on how little Sesquicentennial promotion there has been in the media, that even so near a city as Stockton (50 miles south of the State Capitol) is virtually unmindful and blissfully unaware of this ostensibly ‘important’ celebration.

 

Considering the vastly important role that the state of California has played, not just in the settling and development of the last phase of America’s westward movement, but in the social and economic history of the entire nation over the past 150 years, such neglect is shameful and yet at the same time profoundly characteristic of this greater lack of value that America manifests in its collective regard for anything that smacks of ‘old’ (versus the new).

 

In examining this phenomenon further, under the same coldly clinical beacon of objective analysis, much of this ignorance that the average American has (in the pages of my personal lexicon, the term ‘citizen’ is a very high accolade to bestow; under the same set of considerations, the term ‘consumer’ is just about equal to calling someone a drunk, a worthless bum, or a brain-dead sleaze ball) may be directly attributed to the unrelenting and irresistible commercial/corporate media advertising that have been dutifully washing American brains for at least the past 60 or so years.

 

Partly as a consequence of this, Americans collectively have a grossly incomplete and poorly developed sense of the importance of preserving things (historical, social, architectural, natural, et al) in their haste to tear everything down and put up something “new” in its place.  We see this across the entire nation, as buildings that have been put up (cheaply and with no eye to ensuring enduring permanence) just a few years earlier are bulldozed for even newer, cheap architectural abominations. The most direct and saddest result is that aside from a few remnants of our earliest history (read: 1776 and our original colonial past), and a vestige from the Civil War, there is very little in the way of observable history left about us. Even in California, where our history only really extends back about 150 years or so (“white American” history, not Native American history), there is almost nothing left of the life, times, buildings, or edifices of the first 100 years of California Statehood to remind us of this wild era of discovery and development.

 

One of the first inklings of awareness that the neophyte American tourist abroad experiences is a vague glimmering of the storied history of other lands and people; not surprisingly, it is an awareness that could never take root back in the USA, with our obsessive-compulsive, exclusionist doting on newness, speed, and so-called ‘leading-edge’ technology. This was perhaps most profoundly brought home to me back in 1984, while standing on the bluffs above Ludwig II’s Neuschwanstein, near Fussen, Bavaria. I had just walked up the path to a panoramic vantage that presents the beautiful story-book castle in an idyllic scenic tableaux and was admiring the marvelous view, when a couple of (obviously) American tourists in their 40s waddled up next to me. Taking out a guide book, the woman squinted first at the real castle, then at her book, repeating this several times before floridly exclaiming to her husband: “Ya know….that castle looks just like the one at Disneyland, honey.” It was painfully obvious that this woman was not yet aware of the fact that Ludwig’s castle had preceded Walt Disney’s, and not the other way ‘round…sic semper tourismus!

 

Contemplation of this pitched battle between ‘new’ and ‘old’ in American culture prompts the reflection that much of this media focus on youth/newness, at least as it impacts on individual members of society, selectively exhorts the virtues of new to the youthful consumers in today’s marketplace. While modern fashion is obsessed with impossibly thin, waif-like female models, and most trendy pop-culture advertising campaigns are aimed squarely at those under the age of 25, it is no coincidence that these are the choice targets companies choose to aim at in the consumer gallery. One of the supposed (I throw this caveat in simply because the presumption doesn’t necessarily obtain in all cases) virtues of being older is having a broader range of experience and a greater level of maturity to draw on, upon which to base economic decisions and matters of personal choice. The younger one is (in theory), the less mature and experienced one is, hence the less capable of making objective decisions relatively free of the taints of excess hormones and youthful impetuousness that all too easily skew perceptivity. Thus, the cutting emphasis in advertising is always on this youthful quality of extremist sensation-seeking behavior and/or personal gratification. Not only is there a lot of money in the youth sector of the consumer economy, the advertisers also know that much of their hype is functionally wasted on older, more mature consumers.

 

In the end, however, advertisers do an end-run around this more-objective ‘older’ attitude by skillfully engendering a sense in older people of how much they are missing out on by not being young and impulsive. Thus, they end up goading otherwise mature people who would normally sit back and view all the advertising emphasis on “new and improved, better, faster, more powerful, more thrilling, etc.” as a bunch of horse exhaust, into feeling cheated out of a youthful state of mind that they can all too easily recall and regret the loss of. The result of that is all too predictable and soon the older, more mature members of society are madly scrambling after an irretrievably departed youthfulness that requires them to buy into the same, silly consumer culture obsession on ‘newer, younger’, bigger, better, etc.’ that the kids are hooked on. That is, after all, the essence of a ‘youth culture’, is it not?

 

When we consider all the billions of dollars that are spent by the corporations on media advertising that drops this addictive effluvia upon all of us against a backdrop of crowded personal agendas that leave little time for the elective exercise of reflective intelligence with which to make economic decisions, it is no wonder that the average American abnegates responsibility to actively resist this insidious conditioning and simply allows it to take hold. After all, even in Korea and Vietnam, the captive human mind & spirit had definable thresholds of resistance that could be predictably broached and resolutely overcome.

 

Sadly, the greater damage of all this manifests in near complete lack of social awareness across the entire sociodemographic spectrum of the inherently positive qualities of ‘older’ things, the values found in preceding forms of expression, thought, action, and behavior, etc. that may provide standards by which to measure and gauge our lives, our thoughts, actions,  behaviors, and spiritual aspirations.

 

Thus, the pathetic little celebratory ‘event’ thrown by the Great State of California to mark 150 years of historical evolution, thus the unending consumer quest after next year’s automobile model (when the presently owned one is still near-new), thus the idiotic destruction of older buildings so as to erect newer ones (instead of preserving them or taking prudent care of them to begin with), and thus the present youthful obsession with ‘extreme’ sports (instead of cultivating or aesthetically refining the practice of older ones), etc.

 

In the final assessment, “new and improved” is far more costly, far more destructive, far less efficient, and by all means radically less fulfilling that virtually any of the older, historically established forms that went before. It is perhaps the greatest irony of the cycle of human life experience that this higher awareness of what is better and what is less so comes at the nether extremity of life rather than nearer the onset. It would be encouraging if more people had the personal courage to stand up to this formula of cancerous commercial reactivity that our responsive social  awareness has been reduced to and take positive action to fight it—perhaps even to the extreme found in Edward Abbey’s allegorical tales of covert, reactive physical resistance (The Monkey Wrench Gang). Otherwise, there is seemingly no hope that America shall become anything more than just one yawningly massive and endless digestive system, taking in the world’s resources at one end and spewing out materialistic, consumable excrement at the other until there is nothing left of the world to consume…and the monster dies of starvation (coincidentally taking the human race with it).

 

As with most things today, we still have a marginal ability to make a choice and do something. To eschew this remaining option (of taking intelligence action now, before the ‘game’ is all but over) is to ignore Orwell’s alarms and the warnings of all other contemporary American social critics that we truly appear to be nothing but silly, inconsequential little life forms with no greater lasting consequence on this planet than figuratively ‘eating’ ourselves ignorantly and brainlessly to death.

 

“Out with the old and in with the new!”  Bah! What a load of liquid baby feces!

 

 Happy Autumnal Equinox, everyone. I would strongly suggest that you go out and view the beautiful full Autumn moon and give silent thanks that the words Microsoft, General Motors, Chevron Oil, or some other advertising message are not yet blazoned across it (…but don’t hold your breath).

 

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