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Worshiping At The Altar Of "Free-Market" Prosperity
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Worshiping At The Altar Of "Free-Market" Prosperity
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by Sean Gonsalves
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The other day I went to check out that flick "Mission Impossible 2" and had to sit through not one, but three, stupid commercials.
Pay $8.50? And how many people go to the movies alone? Plus commercials? I'm not talking movie previews, which seem like an acceptable thing to impose on movie-goers. I'm talking television-type commercials before the movie.
It's bad enough you pay an arm and a leg for a ticket. Then get robbed at the goodies bar for a  $5 cup of soda that should come with a free car wash or something. Now you've got to watch commercials. It just goes against the whole logic of what my mother once told me was the reason for ads. "That's how TV stations make money, honey." Illicit drug money isn't the only "dirty" money in circulation, I thought.
One of the few non-movie programs that I watch on television, besides an occasional C-Span segment, are pro sports games - mostly NFL and NBA games. I've come to accept the absolutely absurd athletic shoe and soft drink ads. It's the halftime-is-being-brought-to you-by.blurbs that make me wanna holler like Nathan McCall.
"The near-total utilization of television for corporate marketing represents at the same time the daily ideological instruction of the viewing audience. This occurs, first of all, in the incessant identification of consumerism with democracy. Marketing has become so much a part of the political process that it is increasingly difficult to determine where it leaves off and politics begins," writes Herbert Schiller in his excellent book "Corporate Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression."
We all like to think we're super sophisticated, unable to be influenced by media images. Of course, our minds are sophisticated. And if we use our brains for thinking, it becomes clear that human minds are pliable, especially "educated" minds. Madison Avenue banks on this truism - to the tune of something like $350 billion a year.
Just think: How many people are convinced that "globalization" and the "new economy" are about freedom and democracy, precisely because the "free-market" offers countless "goods" to those who are able to afford them. As if consumer choice and democratic freedom are the same thing?
The funny thing is in my conversations with thought-leaders, WTO protest haters, economists and military planners - all highly educated - they talk as if the essence of liberty is the opportunity to consume products (and sometimes each other).
What do you say to someone who justifies American imperialism, and the mind-numbing amount of violence and deceit needed to maintain the social order, on the grounds that progress has been made because most poor people in America have a TV set with a VCR?
Incidentally, I heard Fed Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan make this argument at a function right here on the Cape a few years ago - all with a straight face, mind you.
Judging from the contemptuous disdain that pundits, pols and policy-makers have for Ralph Nader and all those WTO/IMF/World Bank protesters, evidently we are not quite prepared to democratize economic life and thus complete the revolution implicit with the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
But all hope is not lost. Kierkegaard says "hope is the passion for what is possible." It may be possible, say, to submit legislation that would require all consumer products to reveal the conditions under which the "good" was made and at what wage. It's just an extension of the logic undergirding the current requirement that consumer products must disclose their ingredients.
Why? We have the right to know what we are putting into our bodies. Shouldn't we have the right to know what we are feeding our souls? Of course, you don't have to be religious to be concerned about the human ingredients that go into making the "goods" we buy.
For example, if Nike wants to make shoes at a few dollars a pair in sweatshop conditions, pay a black superstar athlete millions to sell the shoes to poor blacks for $150 a pair, then at the very least consumers should be informed of that, either in commercials or at the point of purchase, perhaps with a label of some sort, maybe an image of a child slaving in a decrepit factory.
That mainline Christian denominations didn't call for something like this years ago is a perfect example of why my old pastor used to say, "Some churches are so heaven-bound that they have no earthly good." Malcolm X put it like this: "They got you so focused on heaven after death, that you're catching hell down here."
Ironically, both of these religious men are echoing Marx's famous critique of religion as being the opiate of the people. Of course, now we collectively worship at the altar of "free-market" prosperity.
Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and syndicated columinist. He can be reached via email: sgonsalves@capecodonline.com
Copyright © 2000 Cape Cod Times
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