Mall World

The Homogenization of American Culture and the Death of the Dialectic

“That’s the American Way,” added Hilton simply. “Any man who does business in God’s name is helping to build Peace on Earth. This may be Idealism, but it is Practical. And it is our right to make money, to make a profit. I sincerely believe that we are doing our bit, to spread World Peace, and to fight Socialism.” -Conrad Hilton, Founder of Hilton International

“I want to go to Magic America and be with all the magic people” -“Magic America” by Blur

“I am selling the greatest product in the world; why shouldn’t it be promoted as well as soap?”-Norman Vincent Peale on the Gospel of Christ (1954)

“Whether it’s Coca-Cola or Jimmy Carter, we don’t try to convey a point of view, but a montage of images and sounds that leaves the viewer with a positive attitude.” -Tony Bola, Coca-Cola Executive

Once upon a time Winnie the Pooh lost his head. Literally. At Disney World one day, Christopher Robin’s playtime pal backed into a bush, and his head popped off. Astonished children noticed that Pooh was not Pooh at all, but a young girl, who then picked up the head and strode off. She was fired that day because she had violated a cardinal Disney rule: never let the patrons know you are really not the character you portray.

At Disney personnel training sessions, one management exec likes to tell the story of the day he led his visiting niece into one of the underground tunnels to meet Snow White. They found her, with a Coke in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Get out of here,” she yelled. “I’m on break.” What the Wicked Witch couldn’t do to Snow White, the exec could: she was terminated.

Because Disney epitomizes a postmodern condition: we want illusions so convincing we don’t know they’re illusions. And Disney runs arguably the most efficient, rule-ridden business in the world to convince its patrons that Jimminy Cricket was right: your dreams can come true. Because dreams sell for a lot these days. Three centuries ago the American dream was to own land. One century ago it was to own a business. Half a century ago it was to own a home. Now we only want to own our dreams.

For as the wealth of the baby boomers has given way to the austerity of Generation X, a generation grows up knowing it will be lucky to have decent employment, much less land, business, or even a home. So the frontier has turned inward, where unpleasant reality is replaced by virtual reality, where if our dreams do not have solidity, for the right amount of money they can last long enough to get us through another day. And in time we can convince ourselves that the dreams are as good as—no, better than—reality, and we can find contentment in our postmodern times.

For why should we strive to change the world when it’s easier to change our clothes? And though the gap between opposing ideologies continues in America, the desire to decrease that gap is lessening as more members feel empowered. Nothing derails a revolution like satisfaction. And as more members of the middle and lower classes can shop at the same places as the rich, travel to the same lands, engage in the same social activities, and, via technology, feel as connected to the rest of the world, the illusion of democracy has been achieved. And it has become increasingly unimportant that these experiences in clothing, food, homes, travel and leisure are scaled down versions of their originals, that they have had their edges taken off to make them palatable to as many tastes as possible, that they are marked more by their similarities than their differences. That they are homogenized.

Democracy is the ultimate leveller, and the only way to guarantee complete equality, to (putatively) erase the hierarchy, is to find the lowest common denominator in taste. This is what promises mass happiness. Which begs the question: if the majority of Americans wasn’t in a position to create this technological utopia, who did? And why? Because there is a reason citizens are more often considered consumers; why identities are defined by commodities; why image is preferred over print; why Americans are urged to “Just do it,” “Be a rebel,” “Follow your thirst,” “Dare to be different,” and “Do It Yourself,” all by corporations who paradoxically encourage this individuality in the name of conformity.

There is a reason why the dialectic is dying. It’s taken a long time to move from “The City on the Hill” to “The Happiest Place on Earth.” Four centuries at least. So to understand what’s happened, we need to return to our roots. Back to the real frontier.

“This is the West, Senator. When you have to choose between printing the truth or printing the legend, print the legend.” -from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

“Lyndon Johnson once told his National Security Council: ‘Hell, Vietnam is just like the Alamo.’ LBJ insisted on telling young soldiers, falsely, that his great, great grandfather had died at the Alamo.” -Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History

“See the USA in your Chevrolet.
The Rockies way out west are calling you.”
-Chevrolet ad of the 50s and 60s

“Where is my John Wayne?
Where is my prairie sod?
Where is my lonely ranger?”
-Paula Cole, “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”

What drew explorers to the Americas from Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Amsterdam and England were the legends of paradise: cities of gold, fountains of youth, and, later, fertile lands and rivers. The explorers themselves added to these myths in diary and journal accounts that accented and exaggerated the qualities of the New World, because the better America sounded, the more monies could be rounded up for future voyages and investments.

Though such accounts would later be tempered with more realistic accounts, there was still enough truth in the freedom and financial possibilities of the colonies to encourage emigration. As a land of British, French, Spanish and Russian settlers, America generated legends and tales to suit its multi cultures, but as the United States formed and kicked out its competitors, specific motifs began to evolve, and the post-Revolutionary War era ushered in the rudiments of a mythology of The West.

Tales of frontiersmen proliferated, men who fought savages, tamed the land, and prepared the way for civilization. In 1784 when John Filson published a romanticized account of Daniel Boone, a major archetype entered American culture, and when in the 1820s James Fenimore Cooper borrowed the Boone myth for his five-part Leatherstocking series, the frontier hero became international reading. Davy Crockett was inspired by both when he composed an autobiographical series of highly fictional tales in 1831; in fact, Crockett only wrote the first group of myths. The series was continued by other writers very successfully over the next decade.

The success of the frontier myths encouraged a mass of New York-based writers to comb the woods for further tales; and if they couldn’t find the heroes themselves, they could just stay in New York and make up the tales without them. In the aftermath of The Civil War, writers like Ned Buntline and Prentiss Ingraham were among thousands of dime novelists who found an increasingly larger and literate audience for their tales of The West. By the end of the century, New York publishers had produced more dime novels than any other kind of literature. When the frontier was declared closed by the 1890s, and America began to deal with problems of urbanization, millions of citizens devoured tales of people and lands already perceived as in the past. As the cities closed in, the myth of the frontier grew exponentially.

This mythology was reinforced by other artistic endeavors. As early as the 1830s and 40s, painters like George Catlin, Alfred Jacob Miller, and John Stanley were already on the Plains, creating occasionally accurate but romanticized images of the land and Native Americans. A second generation of painters—particularly Albert Bierstadt and Frank Church—saw the financial worth of The West and composed, large, ornate, shimmering landscapes. But it was the influence of the dime novelists that impelled a third generation to focus on the mythologized image of the cowboy. Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell built large estates from the success of their depictions of cowboy lifestyles, animated by galloping horses, savage Indians, and—what would become the dominant image of The West in the twentieth century—guns. Though Russell did occasionally live in The West, he was the exception, and like many of his colleagues, he was more often content to create his paintings in his East Coast studio with posed models. Dime novelists and painters alike were less interested in historical accuracy than in the economics of mythology. Though farmers outnumbered cowboys 1000 to 1, it was the myth of the cowboy that sold.

Cody’s Wild West Show traveled throughout the Americas and Europe for over three decades, reaching an audience of millions, from farmers to urbanites to foreign dignitaries. His mix of stunt riders, sharpshooters, and Indians thrilled audiences who’d only read or heard of life in The West, but it was the dramatic recreations that solidified the mythologies. Each show concluded with a dramatization. One highlighted a shoot-out between cowboys and rustlers; patrons at another watched Buffalo Bill rescue women and children from a burning cabin circled by Indians; still another act featured a runaway stagecoach, pursued by Indians, eventually freed by Cody and his crew. But the most recurring—and most popular—was the creation of Custer’s Last Stand, a dramatization given supposed credibility when Chief Sitting Bull was hired to perform after his tribe of Hunkpapa Sioux had been hunted down and forced onto reservations. The spectacle of Cody himself portraying Custer must have been stirring, but what was even more dramatic was Cody’s revised ending: Custer won.

Given this history, it was predictable that, in 1903, the first full-length narrative American film, The Great Train Robbery, would become the movie industry’s first blockbuster. Cody himself lived until 1917, was filmed several times, and advised early directors and cowboy stars. Just as The West and its mythologies had been big business for writers, playwrights, painters, photographers and touring companies, it would become one of the major subjects of film in the twentieth century.

Enterprising businesses soon realized that a pseudo-experience of The West could be similarly lucrative. One of the first industries to realize this was travel. Railroads particularly—badly managed and often in debt—suspected there was gold in them western hills, if they could convince people to make the trip.

When Yosemite and other national parks opened up, camping offered the illusion of recreating living in the wilderness, roughing it. As Ford’s Model T grew in mass acceptance, so did the idea of travel, until states began to build roadways to accommodate the new breed of mobile Americans. Motels (so named for being hotels for motor cars), lodges, food stands and tourist

“Take the recent blitz behind Howard Stern’s Private Parts. Among the biggest boosters for the Paramount Pictures release: MTV, which aired Stern-related specials at least 16 times prior to the film’s opening, no doubt supporting its monstrous initial-weekend box-office grosses. The beauty here is that both Paramount and MTV are owned by Viacom, the media monolith that also owns Simon & Schuster, which published the book Private Parts and stands to make millions more of additiona sales, thanks to the movie’s success.”
Pop Journal, Rolling Stone

During the Depression, the emotional power of The West only increased as Americans saw in the vanishing frontier a repository of the nation’s character:

This attraction resulted in a string of films, radio dramas, corporate ad campaigns and government programs that all drew off the appeal of the frontier. Seeking to both create employment programs and rally the nation, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corp and hired photographers and writers to seek out the folk tales and lifestyles of The West. Country music stations grew in size and popularity, all with mainstream sponsors. Even folk singer Woody Guthrie enjoyed a short stint on a station in Los Angeles, a representative of the new folk style.

Meanwhile, radio churned out weekly serials, matching the “cliffhangers” showing at movie theatres, and the product spin-offs proliferated. Aimed particularly at young boys, radio programs featuring such heroes as Tom Mix and The Lone Ranger and offered kids a wealth of commercial tie-ins: rings, watches, scarves, gun and holster sets, coloring books, records, lunch boxes and more. When radio serials made the transfer to television in the fifties, they brought their young audience and commercial tie-ins with them.

What they also brought in the Cold War era of McCarthyism was a value system. Mythologies always imply a set of beliefs, but America in the twentieth century began to spell those beliefs out, believing they offered moral guidelines as a hedge against social temptations, particularly in the emerging teen culture of the fifties. Boys and girls joining fan clubs of their western heroes received a packet of materials, often including a “Code of The West.” Witness this top ten list of “cowboy commandments” issued by Hopalong Cassidy, detailing the characteristics of the cowboy:

Walt Disney made one of the first of many forays into The West in the winter of 1954 when he unveiled a three-part series on Davy Crockett that aired on his ABC Sunday night series. The romanticized (and mostly false) details of Crockett’s life (including the disputed events of his death at The Alamo) tapped directly into Cold War America’s yeaming for good guy heroes as a symbol of America’s heritage. The series was “a ratings blockbuster” and led to an unprecedented demand for Crockett paraphenalia: rifle, powderhorn, record and book. The coonskip cap alone dramatically drove up the price of raccoon skins. Businessmen took notice:

And Nevada casinos, drawing more from myth than reality, lured to the inhospitable desert vacationers attracted to the thought of the Old West as a place of adventure and paradise, bordering on the deliciously illicit. The original Strip in Las Vegas marketed itself exclusively around the theme of the western casino, featuring stage shows, appropriately dressed waitresses, ranching decor and, of course, gambling.

When America entered the critical decade of the 60s, it brought its western sense of self with it. President John F. Kennedy invited Americans in his inaugural address to move into “the new frontier” of the future. The power of such imagery prevailed in the early years of the Vietnam War when North Vietnamese were often referred to as “the Indians,” and forays into the jungle were followed by a return to “the fort.” In his autobiographical recounting of his war experiences, marine Ron Kovic (the subject of Oliver North’s Born on the Fourth of July) recounts how the image of John Wayne as the fighting cowboy was a model for baby boomers who’d been raised on The Duke’s films (highly ironic considering Wayne’s successful efforts to stay out of World War II). But as Kovic wrote, the disillusioning of the war not only angered a generation of young men, it also revised their image of Americans as cowboys, a cynicism reflected in such revisionist westerns as Little Big Man, The Wild Bunch and Italian director Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti westerns” that launched the film career of Clint Eastwood.

Assisted by a new generation of revisionist historians, these interpretations of the West would increasingly become a part of pop culture, most recently demonstrated in such academy award-winning films as Dances with Wolves and The Unforgiven, but the power of the old mytholgies was equally apparent in the post-Vietnam era. If cowboy heroes were temporarily banished from Hollywood, their archetype wasn’t. George Lucas acknowledged his Star Wars as a space age homage to the films of director John Ford, who’d built the careers of John Wayne and other actors. Hans Solo (his name a play on the lone gunslinger image) embodied the heart-of-gold manner Wayne typified. A decade later Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove captured the Pulitzer Prize and led to a highly rated miniseries, itself spinning off a syndicated weekly show.

As The West made a comeback during the 80s (assisted by a former cowboy actor turned president who took occasional breaks to visit “the ranch” in southern California), country music began vying with rock as the most financially powerful force in music. A new generation of hip, urbanized singers who’d grown up with The Beatles as comfortably as with Buck Owens realized the power in cowboy mythology. Though few were raised on farms or ranches (Garth Brooks had his first hit while working in a hardware store), many adopted the costume and lifestyle of the cowboy, recreating the myth, and building ranches whose sizes and expense were far removed from the financial resources of nineteenth resembled the century cowboys. In fact, they resembled the lands and mansions of the European cattle barons who resided in the Midwest during the 1870s and 80s to invest in livestock. The Wyoming Cattlemen’s Association, for instance, was an aristocratic group that imported their European class standards, gathering at their own exclusive club and creating a monopoly that directed the politicians of the state. But it was neither the lifestyle of the cattle barons or the predominant farmer that country musicians emulated. What sold were boots, buckles, embroidered shirts and Stetson hats.

The mythological power of The West is seen, therefore, in its staying power, particularly in a time when historians and writers have produced literature challenging its veracity and bias. But such doubters have little effect on the psychological power and commercial viability of the myths:

What a study of The West as an expression of American culture reveals, then, is a three-tiered layering of values:

On the first level, Americans have drawn from The West a series of narratives and archetypes that appeal to a dominant group: America as the land of the rugged individualist; manifest destiny as proof of divine sanction; violence as a solution to problems; the simplicity of the land as a counter to the complexity of the city. Though it is now a cliche to point out the obvious, such beliefs are those of white males at the center of power. Native Americans, Spaniards and Mexicans, Blacks and women, the victims of much of the “civilizing” of the frontier, have been largely excluded from our mythology, and it is no

“At The Houston Post in the early 1970s, restaurant reviews were written by the advertising department—and only restaurants that advertised in the paper were reviewed.”
Stuart Ewen

coincidence that they have found a disproportionately small place in our history texts. The consequences of myth-making is apparent when we see how myth is confused with history, a problem the Smithsonian and National Museum of Art experienced recently when they put on revisionist exhibits respectively about the Enola Gay and depictions of The West in nineteenth century painting. Public and congressional response was outrage. For many Americans, these images are not mythology; they are history.

On a second, and deeper, level, mythology becomes increasingly pervasive when it is adapted for advertising and public relations. On this level, a myth is evoked not for its reference to a historical event, but for the power it can lend by association. The power of The West is again apparent in the way products gain social currency when they are placed within the context of western mythologies. One of the most famous examples of this success was the marketing of Marlboro cigarettes. First presented as a lady’s cigarette in 1923, Marlboro sold sluggishly until adman Leo Burnett decided to package the product for men and created the Marlboro Man, placing him in Marlboro country; Marlboro subsequently became the number one selling cigarette in the country. Similar makeovers have been equally pervasive in the clothing and cosmetics industries:

In the world of advertising, truth is second to finance. The myths of The West are utilized not because they are accurate, but because they are powerful.

On the third tier, mythology is most pervasive, yet least perceived. In the service of an ideology, the power of myth legitimizes a belief system. If mythology in the service of advertising is recognized—often cynically—as manipulative, nevertheless, when placed at the behest of a political, religious or social issue, both the myth and the issue are validated. On this level are found such creations as Hopalong Cassidy’s “Ten Commandments of the Cowboy,” Kennedy’s invocation of “a new frontier,” and Reagan’s homage to simpler times on “the ranch.” Thus, a belief we may already be susceptible to takes on added weight when attached to a symbol that resonates within us.

These three uses of myth are second nature in American culture, such that we neither question their use or the accuracy of the original myth. And this lulling of reason is the danger. Because while most of us are unaware of the pervasiveness and use of myth in our lives, an important part of the culture are; and knowing the selling power of myths, they need only the means to use and disperse them.

DO DO THAT VOODOO THAT YOU DO SO WELL:
PSYCHOLOGY AND MASS MANIPULATION

“When an individual is unable to face his own past and feels compelled to build his view of himself on a total denial of it and on the creations of myths to put in its place, this is normally regarded as a sign of extreme neurosis.” -George Kennan

“We’re selling smoke. They’re drinking the image, not the product.” -Paul Foley, Advertising Executive

“The advertising man of today is a schoolmaster. The world is his schoolroom and the people are his pupils.” -Sam Dobbs, Coca-Cola Executive

“Advertising is the rhetoric of democracy.” -Daniel Boorstin, Historian

“The most important assets are brands. Buildings age and become dilapidated. Machines wear out. Cars rust. People die. But what lives on are the brands.” Hector Liang, Chairman, United Biscuits.

“What Is Your America All About?” Our American plan of living is simple. Its ideal—that works—is the greatest good for the greatest number. You...are part owner of the United States, Inc. Our American plan of living is pleasant. Our American plan of living is the world’s envy. No nation, or group lives as well as we do. -1936 ad for the National Association of Manufacturers

“May Providence give us the faith...to serve those two billion customers who are only waiting for us to bring our product to them.” -Coca-Cola Executive, 1948

“Apparently some of our friends overseas have difficulty distinguishing between the United States and Coca-Cola. Perhaps we should not complain too much about this.” -Coca-Cola Executive, 1950

“In the factory we make cosmetics. In the store we sell hope.” -Charles Revson

In the fall of 1990, American news agencies began circulating a story of atrocities committed by the Iraqi troops of Saddam Hussein. Following the invasion of Kuwait, soldiers entered hospitals and removed hundreds of premature babies from their incubators, leaving the infants to die on the floors.

The source of the story was a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah, who testified before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10. She was a hospital volunteer, she said, and an eyewitness to the events. To ensure her safety, the head of the caucus stated, Nayirah’s true identity was being withheld.

Voice catching, hands wringing, Nayirah spoke through her tears. An emotional testimony, so powerful it was cited by several senators in January as they debated, and then approved, President Bush’s declaration of war on Iraq. The televised portion of the testimony moved citizens globally.

“Nayirah” was not a red cross volunteer, and had never worked in any Kuwaiti hospital. She was, in fact, the daugher of the Kuwaiti ambassador, and she had been coached in her performance by employees of Hill and Knowlton, one of the largest public relations firms in the world. The exiled Kuwaiti family hired the firm to manufacture public support for U.S. intervention. The firm’s vice-president, Gary Hymel, dreamed up the plan and provided all the witnesses for the Congressional hearing. When American missiles were launched at the city of Tehran three months later, President Bush conjured up visions of Americans as freedom fighters, deposing Iraq’s “Hitler,” firing missiles (appropriately named Patriots) and announced: “The liberation of Kuwait has begun.”

The American dialectic is the opposing of democracy and hierarchy, the tension generated by an essential debate: is power to be distributed equally or centered in those best able to maximize it? It is the tension that created the Revolutionary and Civil wars; that prompted the coeval rise of abolitionism and the women’s movement; that fueled labor strikes and progressive reform; that gave impetus to the civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests; that created debates on censorship, religion,

Jeers to misusing the news. “ABC’s Good Morning America” recently offered us an extensive, enthusiastic report on the Winter X Games with correspondent Chris McKendry telling us far more than we ever wanted to know about modified shovel racing and other cockamamy mountain sports. It just so happens that the Winter X Games were being carried by ABC’s sister services ESPN and ESPN2. In another shameless example of promotion masquerading as news, “Dateline NBC” did a massively hyped (and curiously empty) piece on the threat of killer meteors. This flimsy report just happened to air the week before NBC’s miniseries “Asteroid."
“Cheer & Jeers” TV Guide 3/1/97

But though the discourse continues, it has lost interested partisans, and the belief that the American dream has largely succeeded, fueled by the failure of communism, has enervated the discussion. Contentment breeds acquiescence, and whether Americans feel politically empowered or materially comfortable, the result is the same: we are happy enough to be passive. Having achieved the goals we believed we wanted, we need struggle no more.

But the nature of the goals has shifted, and the American dream, which has always been about the freedom to control our identities, has shifted in this way: we do not create our identities, they are created for us. Choice is choice only when we understand all possibilities. So if only a select number of possibilities is made available, then true choice has been eliminated. If we are free to choose only what is offered, can we then speak of having freedom? If we cannot participate in the creation of those choices, can we then speak of power? And if we do not have true choice and true power, can we still speak of democracy?

Power is the tool of those who have access to a range of choices: the more access, the more power. Understood this way, power can be understood in a second way: it is the ability to create the choices others choose from. It is what sociologist Harry Overstreet meant in 1923 when he wrote, “If we can create what people shall see.. .we add not only to the clarity of our thought, but also to the power of our influence over human behavior” (Ewen 198). It is what journalist Walter Lippman meant in 1922 when he wrote, “A leader or an interest group that can make itself master of current symbols is the master of the current situation” (Ewen xiii). And it is what professor of sociology Mark Gottdiener means when he speaks of a “code” that enables those who understand its operation to use it upon others: “Thus, powerful interests control the meaning of things by propagating codes that constrain the interpretation of symbols in desired ways” (10).

It is what Neil Postman means in the preface to Amusing Ourselves to Death when he asks the question, is our future to be more like George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? The latter, he insists. For Orwell’s vision of control through a police state is impractical (witness the Soviet Union), whereas Huxley’s vision of a government that controls its citizens by amusing and pleasuring them is the true state of affairs. Citizens in Orwell’s world rebel because they are deprived; citizens in Huxley’s world do not because they are not. In both worlds the power brokers have won, but only in the second have they won with, not without, the consent of their citizenry. Because the leaders define for the masses what they want, and then supply it, the latter believe they have not been controlled by the state; they believe they are the state. In other terms, the

“In 1990 Michael Jordan declined to endorse his fellow black North Carolinian Harvey Gantt over troglodyte racist Jesse Helms in a close contest for the U.S. Senate on the grounds that ‘Republicans buy shoes too.’ More recently, Jordan brushed off questions about whether Nike, which pays him $20 million a year in endorsement fees, was violating standards of decency by paying Indonesian workers only 30 cents a day. His curt comment: ‘My job with Nike is to endorse the product. Their job is to be up on that.”’
“Stepping Up to the Plate” TIME 3/31/97

dualists have appropriated the terminology of the transcendentalists in the service of dualistic agendas. The counter-revolution is co-opted. The debate is dead.

As America applied its ideologies to The West in the nineteenth century, it applied them to East and South as well. The Industrial Revolution was creating wealth, but it was also creating problems. Industrialists were able to increase production, but their plants required more and more workers, many of them immigrants who brought differing customs and beliefs. And as cities grappled with overcrowding and new levels of poverty, the mythologies of American freedom and democracy buckled under the idealogical weight.

For a time, the myth of science held sway, Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” leading to the progressive reforms. If science could be applied to industry and urban plights, leaders argued, a solution would emerge. That was the philosophy of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. At the center of both were industrial halls that honored the machine as the liberator of mankind. Chicago went further than Philadelphia when it created The White City as the central feature of its exposition. A series of classically designed buildings, The White City was offered as a model urban environment, where workers and captains of industry strove together harmoniously and efficiently.

But this nineteenth century belief in science gave way to the reality of increased poverty, disease, homelessness, racial strife and labor unrest, and by World War I, even leaders of progressive reforms were beginning to distance themselves from some of the very masses they had enlisted to help. The hope that Americans could rationally work their way to a “melting pot” society wherein all achieved the American dream began to fade. Men were not rational, went the argument, they were driven by fears and need.

It was then, as the progressive movement stumbled, that some observers believed the way to solve the problems was really not to solve them at all, but merely give the appearance of solving them. If the masses could not be integrated, perhaps they could at least be led. If, as sociologist Everett Dean Martin argued, “Recent social psychology has abandoned the theory that social behavior is primarily governed by reason or by consideration,” then leaders should find an alternative way to lead (Ewen 138): .. .

As French philosopher Gustave LeBon (whose work influenced a large circle of American businessmen) states here, the mass of men are not subject to rational discourse; it is subject to emotional manipulation. A generation later, American Edward Bernays would emphatically echo these sentiments:

A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays was an early proponent of applying psychology to mass manipulation. Considered by many to be the father of the public relations industry, Bernays argued in the 1920s that leaders had more than an opportunity to use emotional manipulation on the masses; they had a moral obligation:

As Machiavellian as Bernays sounds, he was merely describing in psychological jargon what many of his contemporaries believed, and others had enacted.

It was the philosophy behind the donated libraries, museums, and schools of nineteenth century robber barons Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and others. Motivated by the Victorian belief in science, the millionaries donated the institutions in the hope that educated, historically informed immigrants would abandon their opposing views and customs and support industrial capitalism:

Ford had the same motivation when he constructed his town of Deerborn, a living museum that celebrated the rural values of the independent American. Similarly, John Rockefeller sought to teach the masses the beauty of American history and correctness of the founding fathers when he purchased and renovated

As this poster typifies, George Creel’s committee played to the emotional sentiments of its audience, in this case directing its discussion toward recent immigrants. Politicians were also aware of the need to emotionally manipulate the masses. In 1898 Theodore Roosevelt borrowed the term “Rough Riders” from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, special-ordered a designed military uniform from Brooks Brothers, and, accompanied by a small army of handpicked soldiers (and reporters), charged up Kettle Hill in Cuba. When all involved decided that nearby San Juan Hill was more atttractively named, the location was so reported. (Cody, swapping myth for myth, later re-enacted Roosevelt’s ride in his 1903 season.)

Two decades later, President Wilson reversed his pledge to keep America out of World War I and found himself needing to persuade the American public to support the war effort. Going Roosevelt one better, Wilson formed a committee under former journalist George Creel, whose sole duty was to orchestrate a public relations campaign on behalf of the war. Creel’s committee reversed the tide of public opinion, enlisting painters, actors, sculptors, songwriters, private citizens, newspaper magnates, and the movie industry, portraying the Germans as apelike Huns who needed to be stopped if liberty was to be saved. So successful was Creel’s committee that it set a model for post WWI business: “The war taught us the power of propaganda,” commented business analyst Roger Babson in 1921. “Now when we have anything to sell the American people, we know how to sell it” (Ewen 121).

The post-war economics of America created a messianic belief among many corporations that they were doing more than selling a product; they were disseminating a way of life:

Coca-Cola’s enthusiasm was representative not just of its times but of an emerging corporate stance. Years later, Coke executive Henry Link would argue that business must “promote the principles, the ideas, the freedoms which make plenty possible” (Pendergrast 360).

This evolving vision of a corporate America spreading democracy and doing God’s work developed in conjunction with the evolving forms of media. Though newspapers continued as a dominant form of cultural influence, radio and movies began to exert an even stronger pull, and for a significantly different reason.

“Add the magic of movies to a promotion, and you can rise above the clutter to get people’s attention.” Disney executive

“Because everyone who comes from England to America and goes back says one thing first: ‘It’s more like the movies than you’d ever dream.’ And it is.” Quentin Crisp, The Celluloid Closet

By the mid 1920s, American Telephone and Telegraph began distributing films free of charge to schools, civic organizations, churches and civic groups, and theaters. By the end of the 20s, over 50 million Americans had seen these homages to American business, wrapped up in entertaining scripts and news formats. AT&T had realized two things: first, a corporation could sell its products by selling itself; second, movies were an exceedingly effective way to sell anything.

Again, Gustave LeBon had anticipated the future. If, as he argued, the masses were most susceptible to emotional manipulation, then the most effective way to bypass the logical and touch the emotional was to employ the image, an argument Walter Lippman would echo in the 20s:

If corporate America was going to be the molders of opinion, then, it needed to control the media. And it did. By 1929 four newspaper syndicates ran 87 of the nation’s leading newspapers. Similarly, radio in the 20s and 30s was largely underwritten by national commercial enterprises. And why radio and television would so quickly come under commercial control was disturbing, particularly as they were the government’s to parcel out. As Edward Herman notes:

Thus was established in 1934 what would become a pattern in conglomerate acquisitions of media. Though established to provide equal access for all Americans (a transcendental stance), the Federal Communications Commission repeatedly accepted assurances from corporations that airwaves would serve the public good, only to be turned into commercial enterprises. When the FCC had to divvy up broadcasting licenses for television in the 40s, it was similarly assured that television—radio having gone admittedly commercial—would be the place for symphonic performances, debates and culturally educative programming. But by the 1950s television had gone the way of radio, and corporate-sponsored shows were the rule. Because the government would neither sponsor nor underwrite programming (a common practice in Europe), the airwaves were supported by business, who not only included their names in the titles (“soap opera” was a domestic drama sponsored by a particular soap company) but oversaw the scripts and production, eliminating anything they found objectionable. The FCC made small concessions when it provided financial support for public broadcasting stations on radio and television,

Number of wars ever fought between countries that both had at least one McDonald’s franchise: 0
Average number of 101 Dalmatians products introduced each day since the film’s release last winter: 380
Distance from the Sphinx's nose to the nearest Kentucky Fried Chicken, in yards: 200
Number of Planet Hollywood franchises to be opened in the Middle East this year:
Harper’s Index, January 1997

and when it opened up and encouraged FM radio, but in time funding for PBS decreased dramatically, and by the 1970s, FM radio was as commercially formatted as AM. Finally, cable television, because it would be subscriber-based, was proposed as the answer to commercial exploitation. But by the 1980s, the FCC refused to enforce cultural or informational expectations on the new industry, and subject to the marketplace, cable eventually turned to the more lucrative broadcasting of old movies, syndicated programming, and recycled shows.

Banning echoed the sentiments of the era: masses responded on an emotional level, making them malleable and ripe for propaganda. Political scientist William Hard concurred in 1935:

As business and government became aware of the ability of film to persuade, they chose to direct the angle of persuasion. The intent was not to limit the commercial options of the movie industry, but rather to cater to the hidden agendas of ideology. In the 1920s Republican politician Will Hays was selected to head the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America, charged with regulating the social behaviors in Hollywood scripts. In 1927 the Hays Office created eleven “don’ts” and twenty-seven “be carefuls” regarding filmed behavior. In 1930 the Motion Picture Production Code was drafted and unanimously adopted. The Purity Seal of Approval was created by Hays in 1934, a seal that influenced the content of films well into the 70s. Movies were also expected to pay homage to patriotism:

“Combining good picture-making with good citizenship” was the motto of The Warner Brothers Studio.

Finally, what movies could show was the benefits of a consumer society. Required to be moral, expected to be patriotic, they were also lavishly materialistic:

The handmaiden to all these sums of liberty was advertising. If public relations intended to promote ideologies, advertising was the means to do so. The message and the medium. Exploding in the nineteenth century, advertising had initially done little more than inform the public of a product’s existence, but by the end of the century, advances in printing and color photography enabled advertisers to dress up ads, increasing the appeal of their products. When Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Wards began producing catalogues to attract customers in rural America, they employed illustrations to accompany their detailed descriptions. Thus was image used to enhance goods.

But just as public relations and film began subscribing to the emotional manipulation of the public in the 1920s, ads shifted

As products began to glut the market, advertisers sought new ways to conduct efficient campaigns. Because a typical consumer responds to only 76 ads out of the nearly 1500 he is exposed to daily, ad agencies began developing marketing strategies. Surveys indicated what products would receive a favorable reception and what wouldn’t, and grouping consumers by market segments enabled businesses to target those most like to buy. Responding to the same emotional underpinnings the government, public relations and the media were identifying, advertisers sought out those images that would be most easily and pleasurably associated with their products:

Advertising entered a new world when television debuted. The possibilites of utilizing images in short bursts of time fit neatly in a medium that would become the dominant form of influence in the second half of the century. The early promise of television’s role as a cultural enhancement shifted when the staid image of a symphony ran up against the concentrated, moving image:

Initially regarded as a smaller version of the movies, television began to exert a psychological pull on its audiences few predicted. Its presentation, pace, content and compressed narration had a nearly opposite effect from movies. The quick shift through a variety of programs and images pulled viewers in, but also discouraged review or analysis. If movies were engulfing, television was hypnotic.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard saw in television the ultimate negation of meaning-making activity. Television, he argued, gave the illusion of meaning by creating dramatic situations, in both its programming and its news presentations; but its superficial and uni-dimensional treatment of material in fact offered ineffectual solutions. Viewers, believing they were being informed, were in reality being short-changed: television was sensation, not analysis. A shaper of fantasies and a molder of beliefs, television was touted as the family’s alternative to a night at the movies. Americans were cncouraged to spend qualilty time together around the set, imbibing the values of 50s dramas and sitcoms.

Viewers were not being invited to act, he argued, they were invited merely to watch. This made the medium a formidable conduit of values programmers wanted to present without inspection. A Trojan horse for ideology. As sociologist Hal Himmelstein noted, television has become “one of our society’s principal repositories of [conventional] ideology” (Parenti 195).

Bombarded by images on a variety of fronts now, Americans in the postmodern world found themselves increasingly attracted to sensation and decreasingly interested in analysis. Because information was valuable only as it generated sales, that information most pervasive was that which provided comfort or pleasure, not challenge. And as sales became a dominating factor in choosing what to present to the public, the selection of information/images/programming was guided by economic viability. As long as a proposal stayed within established ideological guidelines and made money, the final question was, How much?

This is when the walls between advertising and journalism began to tumble. If the typical journalist had initially seen himself as a champion of the public, the corporation he worked for did not. The journalist saw himself as responsible to the readers; the publisher saw himself as responsible to the stockholders. In 1967, according to media analyst Philip Meyer, “The Wall Street Journal cited a survey of 162 business and financial editors, in which 23 percent said they routinely had to ‘puff up’ or alter and downgrade business stories at the request of the advertisers” (57). When MS magazine publisher Gloria Steinem made the decision in 1989 to continue publishing without advertising, she cited the unabashed wedding of news and advertising as the temptation she wanted to avoid:

But what Arledge proved to the networks was that news could be profitable. Hugely profitable. By the 1990s, all three networks had beefed up their graphics but cut back on reporters, as the former generated money and the latter did not. CBS, once the home of investigative journalism, suffered the worst cuts, and many staffers who were not fired chose to work elsewhere.

Network news was also being challenged by a new kind of entertainment or tabloid journalism that created “Hard Copy” and other programs, not only influenced by the “MacNews” approach of USA Today, but financed by the same company. Though network news scoffed at the upstarts, the high ratings the new programs garnered illustrated what attracted viewers, and by the 1990s, the scandals of Lorena and John Bobbitt, Joey Buttafuoco, Tonya Harding, and Michael Jackson showed up as regularly on network news as on the tabloid shows. In a final irony, network news occasionally bought film footage from the tabloids.

The opposite side of the same coin of entertaiment was available on “Entertainment Tonight,” which would eventually produce offspring, such as the recent “Access Hollywood.” Though “ET” entered the fray in the early 80s with the same desire for confrontational journalism as the tabloid shows, it changed its tactics when Hollywood producers began refusing access to their stars and productions if the program continued its negative publicity. ET did an about face. Today it runs pieces that provide little insight or information, often acting as shills to promote upcoming events. And when the show began running segments that consisted only of the same trailers for films that ran in theaters, the ultimate dissolution between information and advertising had occurred.

In such an atmosphere, few Americans protested when corporations found the best way to advertise: they simply bought the media. In 1982 Coca-Cola bought 49 percent of Columbia Pictures and began at once to plug (its own) products in (its own) movies. In 1987 General Electric purchased NBC; within two years, network reporters filed complaints that stories critical of GE products were often scotched. In 1994 Disney took over ABC, and though the new parent company insisted it would not make the network a vehicle for its ideologies, within the first year seven sitcoms (including “Roseanne”) broadcast shows from Disney World, and the theme park’s Easter Parade was first broadcast on ABC, but nowhere else. And in March of 1997, ABC unveiled an anti-drug month of programming that involved everyone from sitcoms to dramas to “Peter Jennings and the Nightly News.” Though drug abuse is a serious problem in need of in-depth discussion, ABC borrowed Disney’s superficial approach to problem-solving:

It is also worth asking why, if ABC wants to address serious drug problems, its month-long campaign made no assault on alcohol or cigarettes, though both these drugs kill at a rate far exceeding marijuana and other illegal drugs (cigarettes kill an average 450,000 Americans annually, nearly ten times the deaths of all illegal drugs combined). But the answer is not hard to find: cigarettes and alcohol advertise; marijuana dealers do not. And being anti-drug is good for a corporation’s, or a politician’s, image. Under the aegis of supposedly tackling serious social problems, news divisions are actually substituting their own agendas, and they are often more involved with self-promotion than education. In this manner the public is convinced that its needs are being addressed when the needs of the corporation are instead.

That all of this did not go unheeded in the world of politics is the final failure of democracy. Though politicians have always been aware of the power of the media, it was James Baker and Michael Deaver, guiding a former cowboy actor to the presidency, who realized the ability of the image to create good feelings and circumvent logic:

In the political environment of the 80s and 90s, advertising, public relations, news, politics, image and ideology crawled into the same bed. Their philosophical distinctions began to disappear as select persons realized all areas could be used in service to a common goal of power.

Thus the atmosphere of postmodern America is one of pervasive commercialism in the service of power. For the pleasure of being entertained, Americans are unknowingly disenfranchised by those better able to understand and manipulate the cultural environment. The true participants in democracy are not the masses, but the programmers of democracy.

If media critic Erik Barnouw’s assertion is true, that “popular entertainment is basically propaganda for the status quo,” then the questions that Stuart Ewen poses become increasingly important to answer: “Can there be democracy when the tools of communication are neither democratically distributed nor democratically controlled? Can there be democracy when the content of media is determined, almost universally, by commercial considerations?” (410)

Ewen argues that the democracy most Americans perceive themselves a part of is not the true power base. It is a simulation of a democratic environment, but its construction is imposed from without, not built from within, and the identities of its citizenry are borrowed from commercial imagery, not political thought. Content to function in a world that addresses their material needs, they are neither aware of, nor interested in accessing, the world that has created their own.

“I’d like to teach the world to sing In perfect harmony I’d like to buy the world a Coke And keep it company” Coca-Cola jingle, 1973

“We are defined by the things we are made to want, rather than by what we think or feel. Be aware of the frames we have put around things.” John Carlin, The Beats

“‘Cause I’m young,
And I’m hip,
And I’m beautiful,
I want to be a Supermodel” Jill Sobule, “Supermodel”

“Efficient! Prosperous! Productive. What Muzak calls the Programmed Environment. Yes, we say. We are manipulating your subconscious. But we are doing it for your own good!” Bill Michael, Muzak Managing Director

“The perfect Caribbean island didn’t exist. So we created it.” Paradise Island ad

“My gut tells me that people aren’t just going to get a meal. They’re looking for a Happening...an Event. So we make a big thing of decor...the whole experience...how the package is presented.” Al Lapin, Jr Chairman of International Industries (a fast food conglomerate)

“Profit is the thing that hauls dreams into focus.” John Rouse, Mall developer

“People are looking for illusions; they don’t want the world’s realities.” Morris Lapidus, Designer of the Fontainbleau, Miami.

At any Hard Rock Cafe, you can find a fifties-ish decor with rock and roll memorabilia all about you; signed guitars, photographs and movie clips; retro booths and tables; waiters and waitresses designed to make you feel like you’ve walked into a time warp; and music, music everywhere.

But the food (mediocre and overpriced) is not why people patronize Hard Rock Cafe and places like it. Like many postmodern experiences, this restaurant is not about eating, it’s about atmosphere, about participating in a sensorial event. It’s about sharing in a cultural experience that you can talk about with others or wear the t-shirt from as a constant reminder (and advertisement). It’s about theming.

When advertising, public relations, and money coalesce, particularly in the service of a common ideology, theming occurs.

Writing in Managing the Human Climate, Philip Lesley suggests that theming is the ultimate cultural shaping experience. When all aspects of a particular environment overlap, participants support a range of ideologies, though they are ostensibly engaged in serving only one. Patrons of The Railroad Museum in Sacramento; The Alamo in San Antonio; or The Hershey Museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania, enter to learn the history of specific events. But the history (often inaccurate or censored) is the gateway to presentations on nationalism, capitalism, free market enterprise, and other ideologies, and the exhibits offer selected materials and information intended to make the patron emotionally attached to the events recounted, enough to at least purchase a postcard from the gift shop on the way out. In the blurring of cultural distinctions, history and commercialism reinforce each other in a themed environment. As Mark Gottdiener writes in The Theming of America, “Our present themed environment merges fluidly with contemporary, commercialized popular culture and the entertainment media” (3). Theming, Gottdiener continues, is so pervasive as to serve a wide variety of locales beyond history:

When owners of The Texas Rangers announced plans to build an extensive ballpark in Arlington, local citizens complained about the price tag for what they believed would only be a ball Classically deszgned, the buildings of The White Guy were meant to evoke the ideals of Greece, the harmony and balance inspiring city builders of the upcoming century. park and thus bring in few revenues to offset its expense. But the owners had not thought that small. Incorporated into the stadium would be a museum, restaurants, bars and a sport shop. Regardless of when the Rangers played, the ballpark would always be open for business. The Ball Park in Arlington (its eventual name) was not about baseball; baseball was merely a means to another level of experience. It is worth noting the DeBartolo family’s recent proposal for a new 49ers football stadium, which will combine dining, shopping and entertainment all in one complex. It is no accident that the DeBartolo fortunes were largely made from the development of malls across the country.

Theming is unique to postmodern culture, but it has its roots in the most basic rural and early urban constructions. As Gottdiener notes, folk villages were often built for functional and symbolic reasons, their centers constructed around altars or buildings associated with spiritual worship, spiraling outward to the most honored members of the village and on from there to the less essential persons and activities. In Latin America, Mayan and Aztec villages developed around large centers where denizens enacted religious rites that overlapped with the political. In Athens, the Greeks laid out The Parthenon in alliance with specific rituals of worship, the Parthenon itself symbolically set on a hill above the city, so that worshippers ascended toward the gods. When Rome rebuilt itself, it did so with a significant change, placing in its squares the buildings of senators and justice, indicating a veering away from the heavenly and more to the wordly where man did the work of the gods on earth. Similarly, during the Renaissance, Italian towns placed their churches in strategic places, but alongside them went their banks and the homes of leading familes, showing their appreciation of wealth and honor.

With the development of science, city planners began to shift again, a change markedly felt in the emerging American colonies. Though early developments (strongly influenced by the classical world) constructed centers built around worship, economics and law, by the 1800s the symbolism of many of these constructions began to slip away. In ancient world cities, citizens were reminded of the interconnection of the spiritual and the material. By the 1800s they were focused more on the material. This in large part came as a reaction to the industrial revolution that turned urban environments into squalid hodgepodges. Reformers, bent on wedding the material and the economic, began designing environments that were functional, not symbolic. Even The City Beautiful movement of the 1800s—which proposed parks to relieve the oppression of urban environments—saw their’s as a practical, not a spiritual, movement.

These nineteenth century visions of utopia were evidenced in the fairs and expositions around the country, most particularly the aforementioned White City of Chicago in 1893. Classically designed, rationally laid out, The White City modeled how metropolises could handle housing, garbage, transportation and employment problems. They also preached that participation in the marketplace was a key solution to urban problems:

These expositions and fairs continued well into the twentieth century, the most famous being the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 and the New York World’s Fair of 1939, both built around themes of cultural progress through business. General Electric’s “Century of Progress” in 1939 took patrons on a circular track around a miniature city of the future. In a mix of propaganda and ideology, the exhibit trumpeted the place of technology in solving urban problems. It was the same mix of entertainment and business that would create EPCOT thirty years later.

What this shift toward the economic and material in environment construction had done was refocus citizens away from the spiritual, leaving behind the signs and symbols of the ancient world: “Over time,” wrote Gottdiener, “we have been left not only with the material artifacts of ancient cultures that signify this rather extensive spirit world but, in many cases, with the discourses of ancient cultures that specify legends, tales, and myths” (17). In other words, once the gods had been integrated into the public sector, now, like Ozymandias, only their statues remained. But though this spiritual dimension had been relegated from the public into the private, the yearning for meaningful, symbolic environments never disappeared. It was simply redirected. And in a world focused on the material plane, and even more on materialism, it was inevitable that the modern environment would take its signs and symbols from the commercial world.

Taking their cue from public sectors that celebrated the commercial world, Americans followed the advice of post-World War II designers who advocated theming their homes. When suburbia came along, housing tracts and their streets were given names, and each model home built thematically as a Victorian, split-ranch, Spanish, Mediterranean, Tudor or any number of possible symbols. As Westinghouse, Frigidaire, General Motors and other corporations began distributing films for viewing in theaters and schools, home owners learned how to carry out the theming process from room to room. Houses were designed with kitchen sets, diningroom sets, livingroom sets and bedroom sets, each a coordination of furniture, color, objects and layout.

In such an increasingly commercialized environment, two conditions result. In the first, commercial imagery becomes a part of all our experiences, from clothing, to hobbies, to dining, to travel, to social experiences, to education, to career. The omnipresence of symbols of business goes unnoticed; note how the viewing of a football game becomes an inundation of logos: designs in grass in the endzones and at the 50-yard line, trivia questions sponsored by AFLAC, updates on other games called a “McDonald’s Break,” sponsored kick-offs, a Miller Lite player of the game, Nike sportwear on the players, shots from the Goodyear Blimp, all played at a renamed institution like 3-Com Park. Any player (or fan) surviving this season can see the highly touted debut of corporate commercials during the Superbowl, finished off by the awarding of the MVP who within hours will be proudly announcing, “I’m going to Disneyland.” Songwriter Neil Young wryly attacked the similar penetration of the music world by corporate rock, declaring to his fans, “This note’s for you.”

The second condition of this commercializing of environments results when individuals draw their identity from the world they are immersed in. As each of us seeks out those symbols and signs whose exterior existence reflect our interior selves, we inevitable select from what is at hand. In a commericially themed environment, our choices are selective and fraught with the ideologies of their manufacturers. As Margaret Crawford argues, shopping becomes the easiest means of accumulating symbols with which we identify:

Surrounded by commercially themed environments, desiring to fill our personal worlds with symbols reflective of our values, citizens seek out those places where they can merge with these symbolic selves, and acquire symbolic identities. In carefully themed environments, they can experience on several levels the symbolism of the culture they inhabit:

Noting that the typical mall visit has expanded from twenty minutes in 1960 to nearly three hours in the 1990s, Crawford sees themed environments offering interchangeable mixes of consumerism and entertainment: “Theme-park attractions are now commonplace in shopping malls; indeed, the two forms converge—malls routinely entertain, while theme parks function as disguised marketplaces” (16). Within these spaces, the coalescing of symbols creates an all-pervasive environment. Like diners at the Hard Rock Cafe, consumers come primarily for the experience:

The success of the themed environment is demonstrated not only in the explosive growth of malls, which, like the Great Mall of America in Wisconsin, can incorporate shopping with theme parks, live entertainment, restaurants and hotels. The themed environment’s success is also evident in its adaptation by museums, historical venues, gated communities, revitalized downtowns and cities. San Jose has bought into the philosophy, apparent in its architecturally restructured downtown which has made the city more attractive to visitors while simultaneously driving out small businesses and customers unable to afford the tonier shops, hotels and restaurants. Though Las Vegas long ago recognized the financial wisdom of a themed environment when it adapted motifs of The West for its downtown, it recently approached a metathematic state when it began creating a series of individually

In December, Barbara Walters did a happy, heartfelt profile on Andrew Lloyd Webber and noted that Disney, which owns ABC, was one of Lloyd Webber ‘s investors. But she neglected to mention that she herself had put $100,000 into Sunset Boulevard. ‘I should have disclosed the investment,’ said Walters. ‘It won’t happen again."
TV Guide January 7, 1997

themed areas: “The city itself has become a theme park,” notes Gottdiener. “New York or Paris are replaced by a casino simulating New York or Paris as Epcot Center in Disneyworld simulates visits to other countries....Las Vegas is the best example of the proposition that today’s style of economic competition increasingly forces commercial enterprises to rely on evermore elaborate thematic appeals” (186).

In themed environments, citizens become consumers, finding a sense of self that is purchasable. What they also find is culture, one fashioned by the creators of the setting, a culture stripped of symbols that refer to any idea or experience that would detract from the sensations of the setting. On this level, the Trojan horse of ideology makes an unobtrusive appearance, and consumers imbibe with Cokes and clothing the values of the commercial world: happiness can be purchased; the quickest solution is the best; cooperation is preferable to questioning. These become believable when the identity of the consumer, and his heritage, are replaced with symbols that find meaning only in an all-pervasive commercial scene.

This reduction of self, community and heritage to purchasable logos is characteristic of most themed environments, but it finds its greatest demonstration in the worlds of Disney.

“California dreaming is becoming a reality.” John Phillips, “California Dreaming”

“I just shot President George; I’m going to DizNee Land” Dada, “DizNee Land”

“We’re not in the reality business. There’s plenty of that on the TV news every night. We’re the antidote to reality.” Roy Disney Vice-Chairman

“The next best thing to being there is shopping there.” Sign at The Fountain of Information at EPCOT

“World Showcase represents what people would expect to find on their travel rather than what they actually will see in a given country’s shops.” Disney training manual

“For millions of Americans, Disneyland is just like the world, only better.” Michael Sorkin, “See You in Disneyland”

The Fulton Fish Market lies along the southern tip of Manhattan, a mile east of the Battery, where immigrants once entered America after passing through Ellis Island. In the 1800s clipper ships debarked there, and shops lined the neighboring streets, selling the day’s catch. By the mid 1900s, though the fish market continued to operate, the area around turned seedy, and land values dropped. So much so that in the 1970s, city planners (including David Rockefeller) purchased the land at cheap prices, intending to turn it over to a developer who could revitalize the area. In 1976, Rouse Company, the same group who pioneered mall development internationally, made a proposal. The area could be made commercially attractive by capitalizing on its history; a small shopping mall built around the theme of shipping could lure consumers to the area, and a museum of maritime history could tap its heritage. But the Fulton Fish Market would have to go. As the intent was to create a pleasant, themed atmosphere, the smelly, run-down fish shops needed to be razed and replaced. The only way to sell history was to replace it. To sell history, they would have to rewrite it. South Street Seaport was born.

What strikes consumers about any experience with Disney is the company’s penchant for fantasy. To enter a Disney experience is to willingly suspend disbelief, opening oneself to the experience without question or cynicism. It is an agreement that Disney maintains by rigorous adoption of regulations and codes intended to blur the line between fantasy and reality. As the incidents involving Winnie the Pooh and Snow White illustrate, Disney can be fanatical in its insistence that reality not invade its space. Characters are never “out of character,” patrolling security blend in with the crowd, machinery and wires are hidden, and employees only project personalities consistent with the theme under which they operate. As one Disney executive noted, “What we create is a ‘Disney Realism,’ sort of utopian in nature, where we carefully program out all the negative, unwanted elements and program in the positive elements” (Wallace 137)

As with any themed experience, Disney provides escape, something only possible if reality is avoided. But there is a difference between avoiding reality and replacing it. Or changing it. Themed environments like Disney’s are interested in reality only insofar as it serves their interests; all that conflicts with these interests must be done away with, even if this means altering reality. In the themed environment, truth must serve the higher goal of economics.

When history is treated by commercial entrepreneurs, the temptation is to alter whatever would offend or fail to attract consumers. Pop culture has rarely been interested in historical fidelity, preferring instead a marketable nostalgia. But as sociologist Christopher Lasch has noted, “Nostalgia neither provides a necessary sense of continuity in a time of rapid change nor seves as unadulterated escapism. It evokes the past only to bury it alive” (Aquila 101). When history is treated nostalgically, history is the first casualty;

the lesson of history is exchanged for the ideologies of mass

“We rediscover our history not through books or college courses, but from visits to themed environments that simulate the past,” laments Gottdiener (10). Histories invoked to serve ideologies must necessarily be revised and thus fail to inform citizens of their heritage, and in their bowdlerization of American’s heritage, theme parks have uniformly created false impressions. Disney executive John Hench wanted to recreate the Victorian Era, “which is probably one of the great optimistic periods of the world, where we thought progress was great and we all knew where we were going. [Main Street] reflects that prosperity, that enthusiasm” (Wallace 137). Just as Colonial Williamsburg originally excised the blacks from its city—50% of its original population—and Ford’s Deerborn made no references to foreclosures or the farmer’s movements, Disney wanted to purge the nineteenth century of its racism, native American genocide, labor strikes, class disparity and crime. The fact that the Main Street of Disney’s parks has little correlation to nineteenth century experience does not dissuade another Disney exec, who says without a hint of irony: “This is what the real Main Street should have been like” (Wallace 138).

When the Disney Corporation proposed a history theme park to be built near Manassas, one of the original Civil War sites, the company suffered one of its first major setbacks. Though many locals protested on the grounds that the park would alter their community, historians argued against the idea itself. At first, Disney executives argued that they would present an informative, and entertaining, rendition of America’s past. But how the corporation would cover a history that included the enslavement of Blacks, the genocide of Native Americans, the internment of Japanese, or the colonialism of Vietnam subsequently seemed daunting, so the corporation regrouped. The park would proceed, explained CEO Michael Eisner, but the emphasis would be on “serious fun.” Or as the park’s general manager explained, “The idea is to walk out of Disney’s America with a smile on your face. It is going to be fun with a capital ‘F.”’ (Lippert-Martin 61). Eventually, Disney pulled out, but refusing to abandon the concept, the organization said it would seek land less controversial.

Just how Disney will treat history can be inferred from its previous exhibits. When the company built Disney World, it did not transfer its Hall of Presidents from Disneyland, sensitive to charges of whitewashing. Instead it created “American Adventure,” a chronological overview that included comments from Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. But the “fun and feel good” philosophy remained, an ideology built by cutting historical corners:

Thus, years after the melting pot theory has been discredited, it pops up at Disney World. Even at American Adventure, programmers ran up against reality and backed down, as when they attempted to put a good face on America’s involvement in Vietnam: “One of the designers explained that he ‘searched for a long time for a photograph of an anti-war demonstration that would be optimistic, but I never found one”’ (Wallace 152). Examining the treatments of history at Disney World and museums, Wallace notes a distinction that consumers do not always make:

Despite the onslaught of criticism Disney receives for its treatment of history, the organization perseveres. In part this is because nostalgia sells, but in part it is also that its ideological treatment of American history is identical to the vision of history its co-sponsors promulgate:

EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) was originally Walt Disney’s version of a utopian community, but when the Disney Corporation set about completing Disney World in the early 70s, they decided to refurbish the idea. Maintaining little more allegiance to the original idea than its relation to the future, the company proposed a series of exhibits that would envision a “brighter tomorrow.” Because the costs were enormous, they decided to kill two birds with a single stone, and invited a number of corporations to co-sponsor the exhibit, creating rides that would, the corporations knew, be avenues for corporate ideology:

As Gottdiener notes, “Thus Disneyland as a theme park is a large sign-vehicle of the Disney ideology” (9). “It’s a world where democracy comes to mean the compatible arrangement of vastly dissimilar goods offered up for sale,” adds sociologist Susan Willis (42). Because the Disney organization believes in its ideology and believes it should be available beyond its theme parks, it has made serious bids to promulgate its philosophy worldwide. Beyond its parks, stores, publications, theaters and films, it has entered the world of television, first creating and buying cable channels, but finally purchasing ABC (discussed in a previous section). To say all Disney desires is to sell, is to sell the corporation short; it has a vision:

“The newest program implemented in secondary and even elementary schools has been the Tattoo You Too! program. In exchange for a fixed fee students ‘volunteer’ to receive a stylized and updated tatoo of common and famous corporate logos. ‘It’s a win-win situation,’ said Christopher Simmons, principal of Applegate High School, in Akron, Ohio. ‘With the current tattooing fad, kids get a chance to look ‘hip while eaming money for the school.’ The companies themselves are also very pleased with the response. Said Brad Randolph, industry insider, ‘This is wonderful. It delights me to see that so many people’s lives are being enriched.”’
The New York Times, 12/12/96

This is most evident in Disney’s desire to follow up on Walt’s original vision forEPCOT. By creating its own model community, the company hopes to illustrate the viability of its philosophy. Located just outside Orlando, the town of Celebration is its first, full-scale attempt to create a community combining housing, leisure, business and employment. Its nostalgic vision is unveiled in the film shown in the Visitor’s Center:

Over 5000 people showed up at Celebration’s grand opening in 1996 for the chance to put $1200 down on one of 470 homes and apartments available. But this is not a lottery. Because Celebration is a controlled environment, the ultimate themed environment, candidates will be selected on their ability to contribute to the overall make-up of the community. Whereas towns normally achieve demographics based on internal developments, Celebration’s demographics will be created for it. And though there will be a town hall, there will be no town government; Celebration will not be run by its citizens, but by the corporation. It will have a newspaper, but that will be edited by the company. And a special board has been designated to create special functions for celebrating that will give this town without heritage a sense of heritage.

In such a state of control, one suspects fantasy is still Disney’s goal, even when it invades reality:

It would be far-fetched to suggest that Celebration will succeed and be the first of a number of towns Disney uses to convert the world. That won’t happen. But the disquieting aspect of Disney’s vision is that, in some ways, it has already infiltrated the world. The Disney Corporation did not create the postmodern world, it is simply one reflection of it, albeit a very successful one. And

“When the recession hammers the De KaIb County school budget, an innovative marketer pays the Georgia board $300,000 a year to permit video monitors in the school hallways (strategically placed above the pay phones). Major advertiser: Coca-Cola, finding another way into the schools.”
Mark Pendergrast For God, Country and Coca-Cola

what it reflects is a culture that seeks to make an image of itself from what it knows, largely unaware that what it knows is what it has been fed, and what it has come to desire is what it has been told it desires. In such a world, democracy means nothing, as it cannot exist except as a heart-tugging word to be whipped out for the next promotion. In such a world, the mild void consumerism does not fill will not make sense, as by all rights, such a void should not exist.

If we can vote (for selected choices), if we can believe (in selected choices), if we are free to create our own identities (from selected choices), how could we be anything less than happy?

“We shape our tools; and thereafter our tools shape us.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

When British comediene Tracey Ullman contracted with the Fox Network in 1987 to produce a half hour show, she hired cartoonist Matt Groening to create a segue between the skits. Drawing from his reservoir of misfit characters, Groening produced “The Simpsons,” a contemporary family that redefined “dysfunctional.” Though Ullman’s show succumbed two seasons later, “The Simpsons” emerged as a half hour show. Irreverent from the start, the show quickly emerged as a juvenalian satire of postmodern America. Politicians, fanatics, fundamentalists, corporations, pop heroes, film stars and television were constant targets. Especially television. Sparing no one, Groening’s creations skewered ham actors, bad sitcoms, news anchors, commercials, other cartoons, the Fox Network and even themselves.

Douglas Rushkoff, a self-designated Generation X writer, insists that the dialectic is not only alive and well, subversives have wormed their way into the media centers and taken over the controls. In the age of the internet, when every American with access to a computer can fire off salvos at any target he chooses, the traditional centers of power are outmoded. Washington-based papers are no longer the main source of information, and the three networks are being outflanked by local affiliates, themselves outflanked by citizens with VCRs and local cable shows.

America has long treasured the trickster, that impudent upstart who challenges authority in an indirect, subversive manner. Aware of their cultural inferiority to England, American colonists oft discounted the difference by simply undermining the worth of such authority. In early nineteenth century dramas, English dandies made their appearance, bewigged, overly powdered, effiminate types who were vulnerable to a rapscallion of a Yankee who knew how to take them down a peg or two. In time the satiric wrath was turned on the elite of American society: the upper class, the politician, the intellectual, the powerful. Mark Twain skewered them mercilessly.

What about a state of Tarzana, I suggest idly, with your own coinage and stamps? “Don’t laugh!” Bob Hodes says. “Don’t laugh! This is not just pie in the sky. We’ve been talking to the Rothschild Bank in Paris. .There are a number of very, very small African countries that have abolutely nothing. No economy, no nothing! “All they have is their independence and their UN ambassador, and the thought is to merchandise. ..Take it over! Change the name, and just take this resort idea on a national scale, so the entire country is run as a ...beautiful place.” Comments of Bob Hodes, Vice-President of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., the estate that handles the properties of Tarzan.

When the movies caught fire, largely propelled by an illiterate immigrant cross-section, lower class sensibilities abounded, and Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Keystone Cops, and Laurel and Hardy de-puffed the high and mighty. When vaudeville and burlesque—two more immigrant-based entertainments—migrated to the talkies and radio, the lower class humor continued, most clearly seen in the antics of The Marx Brothers, chastening the wealthy Margaret DuMont or downgrading operatic snobs. When Warner Brothers Studios—the creation of Jewish Brothers who emerged from lower class surroundings and perceived themselves as outsiders—started its cartoon studio, they created Bugs Bunny, the “wascally wabbit” who never failed to outwit the stuffily named and characterized Elmer Fudd.

The fifties saw the birth of a more profound counterculture in the works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and others, a “beat” movement that crystallized into the cultural upheaval of the hippies, yippies and love children of the 60s. Rejecting the commercial materialism of their elders, the baby boomers took naturally to irreverence, and the 70s were littered with the concoctions of their creative vision: National Lampoon, “Second City TV,” and the ultimate undercutting of The Establishment, “Saturday Night Live.” Their humor would nurture the dadaesque antics of such 80s comedians as Andy Kaufmann, Pee Wee Herman and Steve Martin. Rushkoff might also cite as support the creation of pop art in the 5Os and 60s, when art mavericks Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol appropriated the very symbols of mass culture themselves, often nakedly displaying them as art. Pop art both delighted in and played with the commercial themes of America. When Andy Warhol created “Campbell’s Soup” in 1965, an oil on canvas construction that pretty much looked like what its name implied, an art gallery in Los Angeles displayed a stack of Campbell’s Soup cans with a sign reading, “Get the real thing for 29 cents” (Wheeler 151). And when an art critic suggested that Warhol’s creation was a satire on the consumerism of the modern community, Warhol responded that he’d painted the can simply because he’d had the same soup every day as a child.

What Warhol and the pop artists created is what Rushkoff calls a “media virus,” a counter-attacking of the body system by an agent that moves into the host’s territory and takes over the controls. It doesn’t destroy the host, it imitates it. If Warhol’s soup can was not an attack on consumerism, the fact that it would be declared art and awarded a princely sum was. For many pop artists, the creation was only part of the game; the befuddled and naive response of the public was the other part.

What pop art and other subversive cultural forms ultimately created was a world of the insider, a group in-the-know that turned being excluded into being exclusive. To be a member, you had to be hip, aware of what only the few knew. When Johnny Carson’s stint as the leading late night host drew to a close, he had already been left behind by such insider humorists as Dave Letterman, whose disingenuous undercutting of anything within view was increasingly appreciated by an audience that held few things sacred.

Rushkoff’s examples are accurate and his point compelling, but they reveal an inadequately analyzed cultural condition. Though counterpoints to the hierarchy do exist within the hierarchy, two truths should be noted: first, the hierarchy itself admits or allows them; second, it admits or allows them because they serve its (usually financial) purpose. If Kurt Cobain and Nirvana can sing of Generation X alienation with such passion that followers will gather, then a record company can sell that alienation until so many listeners share in it that its original impact decreases: suddenly it’s hip to be alienated, and companies rush to Seattle to bring alienation into the mainstream where it is wonderfully marketable, right down to its bargain bin flannel shirts, which subsequently are co-opted at high fashioned boutiques (Levis, remember, were once working man’s jeans, and though they may still be advertised as such, many workingmen can no longer afford them). Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder can decry the difficulty of being an alienated artist, but his alienated artist stance is similarly very marketable, and the lead singer now finds masses of audiences screaming back at him the lyrics he wrote to describe his very personal alienation. And what does this alienated stance produce? More records. More alternate music groups, until Seattle dries up, and record companies look for the next marketably counterculture sound. Meanwhile, driven to despair, Kurt Cobain commits suicide, apotheosizing himself in the process as a martyr to alienation. Right behind him are the writers, poster makers, photographers, and record executives offering enough consumable objects to propel Nirvana’s posthumous record into the charts and give left-behind-wife Courtney Love enough visibility to make her a marketable actress (do note her recent fashion change: the cocaine look is gone). The only way alternative icons can be remembered, it seems, is by purchasing associated products. Businesses are willing to help us with our grief.

This is not big news to the baby boomers, who have watched their world co-opted from the time of The Monkees through presidential candidate George McGovern to Batman movies. Sometimes the co-opting was done surreptitiously by the advertising world (launching their own media virus, I suppose), as when the cry of militant blacks, “Black is beautiful,” became a hair ad for brunettes. Protest singers and their songs, who encouraged a generation “Down with The Establishment,” now find their songs turned into advertising jingles: Stephen Stills’s “Something’s Happenin’ Here,” The Band’s “The Weight,” and even Bob Dylan (“The Times They are a-Changin”) have moved from attacking war hawks to hawking wares. Michael Jackson adored The Beatles so much that he bought their entire catalogue and immediately began releasing songs for commercial use; “Revolution” became a foot soldier for Nike. Even Country Joe McDonald—the son of a communist leader erroneously convicted and jailed, and the composer of the most biting, anti-Vietnam song of the 60s, “The I-Feel-Like¬ I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag”—thirty years later was hired to join fellow folk singer John Sebastian in a Pepsi commercial spoofing the achievements of Woodstock.

As mentioned earlier, the themes of rebellion are the catch phrases of the commercial world, advising us to rebel, be a non-conformist, and follow our own desires. The fact that such campaigns are financially successful only underscores the way the ideals of the counterculture become fodder for the commercial world. Being a rugged individualist becomes possible by expressing that individuality through clothing, hair, make-up, body piercing, or tattoos. The difficulty of being counterculture is that the hunger of the commercial world for marketable ideas consumes behavior wherever two or more are gathered. Letterman, once the irreverent boy of very late night television, moved to CBS in a higher visibility slot, and found himself compelled to modify his antics. Though his surrealistic humor continues, his caustic treatment of guests, his solicitation of the confrontational, have diminished at the request of the network who paid handsomely for him. Though Letterman insisted his irreverence would continue, he acknowledged that CBS had the right to expect him to pull in a larger audience in light of the sums they were paying him.

The public’s increasing access to the media, Rushkoff argues, resulted in an avalanche of television talk and information shows that sought the opinion of the public. No longer forced to rely solely on the opinions of selected media elites, Americans could now hear the thoughts of people from backgrounds similar to their own. Here again Rushkoff fails to follow his argument through. Though the networks clearly dominated the dissemination of news into the 80s and provided very selective voices, the other extreme of making the airwaves and internet accessible to all has not guaranteed an informed and reasonable debate. Though all Americans are entitled to their thoughts, we are not necessarily made better by hearing them all. Though the comments of selected elites are not fully representative, the comments of a few well-informed observers is surely preferable to the collected emotional ravings of a Rikki Lake show.

Rushkoff acknowledges this shortcoming but attempts to excuse it: “As they [talk shows] become more popular, the shows deteriorated, perhaps, in subject matter...we were more likely to find transvestites on a forum show than we were Henry Kissinger. Lamentable, perhaps, but these are the issues people would rather watch” (61) But that’s the point. The interests of uninformed segments of the population may have a democratic right to be heard, but if they dominate the media, then we have replaced the deposed kings with an unruly mob.

Finally, though elements of subversion do exist within the media, the inability of most to see the elements for what they are diffuses their impact. Though U-2 can begin its 1997 tour (sponsoring a new record, of course) in K-Marts to (in pop art fashion) parody the overblown hype of rock concerts, few fans will understand the comment when paying hefty prices for CDs, posters and T-shirts, nor will the department store concerts make much sense to those paying over $50 for the real rock show U-2 plays elsewhere. An American tour of nothing but K-Marts might make the point; the present stance makes nothing but good publicity, and isn’t that the part of the machinery supposedly being spoofed?

In his discussion of Coney Island, the Long Island amusement park that foreshadowed Disneyland, John Kasson notes how the park that appealed predominantly to the lower classes failed to fulfill the promise of the cultural revolution its existence suggested: