The Cult of Marketing and Its Challenge to American Civilization

 

 

1. Daedalus and Icarus: An 'Inner Sense of the Line'

When in 1923 the Heretics Club of Cambridge University invited J. B. S. Haldane and Bertrand Russell to share their views on science and the future, few could have guessed how perceptive their distinguished respondents might be. A brilliant geneticist, Haldane believed that biotechnology would likely prove the most fertile area for scientific advance. Amazingly percipient, his descriptions of the coming revolution in biotechnology are astoundingly accurate, as portentous as anything in the science fiction fantasies of H. G. Welles. Even Russell defers to Haldane, who he says has admirably treated this area of biology and genetics.

But with respect to other predictions, Haldane seems to have been less clairvoyant. Haldane believed that the advanced industrial nations of the west would soon give up dirty, expensive, wasteful fossil fuel and adopt cleaner, cheaper and more efficient wind, wave and solar technologies as sources of renewable energy. Haldane expected this to occur in the second half of the 20th century. This was a reasonable scientific expectation in 1923, as it remains today. Was Haldane too much the idealist or did he simply expect humans to make rational choices? To read Haldane's glowing prophecy about the impending glories of wind, wave and solar energy is to feel a sad loss, a clear measure of the extent to which entrenched fossil fuel interests have obstructed and distorted our once likely future. On the whole, the future looks rosy for Haldane's "Daedalus: Or, Science and the Future."

Not so for the inimitable philosopher of science, Lord Russell. If Haldane's error lay in anticipating human rationality, Russell (imprisoned for conscientious objection during World War One) knew better. In "Icarus: Or, The Future of Science", the equally astute Russell recaps recent political and institutional history: The world of nations is marked by an "increase of organisation" (this is "of the essence of industrialism") and specifically "organisation in marketing," Russell notes. "Already advertisers in America employ eminent psychologists to instruct them in the art of producing irrational belief." But his depiction of the economic system of the early 20th century is striking:

Experience has shown, however, that the existing economic system is incompatible with all forms of free competition except between States by means of armaments. I should wish, for my part, to preserve free competition between ideas, though not between individuals and groups, but this is only possible by means of what an old-fashioned liberal would regard as interferences with personal liberty.

Phrases like "free competition", "interferences with personal liberty" and "old-fashioned liberal" resonate weirdly, half familiar to modern ears, defined by the "knowledge explosion" that overtook America in the last century. Just in case anyone missed the point, Russell drives home the implication of his passage explicitly: "So long as the sources of economic power remain in private hands," he warns, "there will be no liberty except for the few who control those sources."

Large corporations, motivated primarily by a ruthless desire to squelch competitors (Russell likens them to "spectators at a football-match") and destined to eclipse the power of national bureaucracies, will control all resources and thereby determine how the wonders of scientific invention and technology shall be disposed. Since, by economies of scale, such corporate entities can only profit by continual growth, the entire globe will ultimately fall under the control of a single corporate monolith. Curiously, Russell sees this organization of the world into a single "producing and consuming unit" the only hope of avoiding global extinction; but that is largely because he thinks businessmen to be on the whole more rational than leaders of nations—a view that is open to dispute.

"Rival economic groups will presumably remain associated with rival nations, and will foster nationalism in order to recruit their football teams." Empirically, a lot hinges on the terms "presumably" and "associated with" (as Russell, one of the architects of modern logical and linguistic analysis, would no doubt have appreciated).

Things will be hard for the people of the world for a time, Russell speculates, but there will be stability and order and eventually life will improve.

Prescient, indeed! But we should stop short of seeing in Russell's vivid pronouncements a veritable blueprint for, or fulfillment of, American corporate gospel, acknowledging instead the extent to which Russell truly anticipated an unfolding institutional imperative, which has indeed come to pass. Through their exchange of views, Haldane and Russell predicted salient features of the corporate hegemony that would come to dominate the global economy in the Third Millenium.

2. The Cult of Marketing ("No JOB Is Too Big, No FEE Is Too Big!")

A cult of marketing has become the unacknowledged yet official religion in contemporary America, the marketing civilization par excellence. This cult has arisen largely from the alliance of advertising and electronic telecommunications, whose growing influence increasingly drives every sector of human endeavor. Under the aegis of a cult of marketing, with its compelling myths of celebrity, youth and economy-as-lottery, capitalism has been transformed into a fanatical ideology driven exclusively by profit-maximization, subsuming every other human purpose, institution and societal goal under an agenda of entrepreneurialism.

The cult of marketing has four chief defects that inform and condition our corporate hegemony, consequently tainting all existing primary institutions (politics, education, sex, family, science/knowledge-acquisition and religion): 1) it depends on advertising that promotes lying, deception, self-deception and fraud; 2) it possesses deep creedal commitments to self-perpetuating myths of entrepreneurialism, economy-as-lottery, celebrity and youth, which effectively keep consumer-citizens confused, distracted and impotent to change; 3) it is driven by a need for continuous and unchecked profit-maximization, institutional growth, monopolization and total global domination; and 4) its fear-based corporate culture, obsessed with its own often illusory issues of security, increasingly identifies its mission and formal decision procedures with those of intelligence organizations like the NSA, CIA and FBI.

Advertising trades on a certain gullibility, a willingness to suspend disbelief just long enough to foster manipulation. When Bill Murray, as the charlatan parapsychologist Dr. Peter Venkman, proclaimed "No JOB Is Too Big, No FEE Is Too Big!" in the 1984 hit movie Ghostbusters, he inadvertently expressed the inner sense of the line that Reagan-era corporate thinking was to take, namely: that profits and profit-maximization would henceforth trump every other value and social purpose.

Baldly asserted, this doctrine or dogma is rightly offensive; so it is often hidden behind slogans about job-creation, progress and other flatulent workhorses of recent economic mythology (I include in this charge all reductions of laissez-faire thinking to the belief that corporate business is a natural species whose survival is threatened by predatory government regulation, a certifiably crackpot notion if there ever was one). Corporations do create jobs but they are invariably corporations of 500 or fewer employees—not the cartels, multinational and transnational corporations with which we, like big advertising and pr firms, need to concern ourselves.

What is different today is the sophistication, invasiveness and sheer potency of electronic media themselves. Basic rhetorical strategy and techniques have not changed since Socrates haunted the marketplace of Athens: fear, intimidation, appeals to popularity and ad hominem labeling of opponents, competitors and perceived enemies are still the greatest fomenters of irrational belief; but they do so at the expense of cogent critical argumentation, genuine understanding and a search for standards of impartial or objective validation. In the context of modern advertising, this means that marketing experts will do whatever it takes to get the consumer (and client) to buy—soon degenerating into a familiar formula of sheer expedience that is the Achilles heel of every utilitarian ethic: The end justifies the means. Whatever the price or cost.

Though far removed from the notion of economists and monetarists, it is this kind of inflation—or "mark-up"—that, permeating and pervading corporate culture and its cult of marketing, has come to define modern corporate organization. "No JOB Is Too Big, No FEE Is Too Big!"

While one might expect such behavior from corporate Velociraptors like Brown and Root, Bechtel, ExxonMobil, GE and Monsanto, it is insufficiently appreciated how other organizations (large and small, commercial and not-for-profit alike) model themselves on these monstrosities or how advertising provides a common language and framework for our collective and cultural understanding (and misunderstanding). A recent fax offering to induct small business owners into the mysteries of modern marketing, with the imperative "Monopolize Your Markets!" suggests how far we have come from the mythical days of free markets and a level playing field for competition. Under aggravated conditions fostered by a cult of marketing, this spells essentially the causal overdetermining of probable market behavior for the exclusive sake of generating revenue streams.

My point here is that profit-maximizing has little or no demonstrable connection to employment, actual productivity and human social improvements. Rhetoric about the "free market" is at best empty jargon and at worst surreptitious code. Strategic planning is an integral part of the corporate enterprise, which has always been vastly better funded than government. This means that, to whatever degree it is humanly possible, the game of corporate business is rigged. The specialized craft-knowledge that marketing research affords, combined with artificially manufactured "desires" and the technical means to manipulate mass behavior, is the means by which the game is rigged.

To confirm the economic underpinnings of a cult of marketing, one need look no further than the rise in advertising profits and the growth in advertising expenditures across all industries, roughly since the mid-1950s, when television was introduced to popular American culture. These figures tell the real story of the siphoning off of capital resources and productivity, the betrayal of American business and the subjugation of the American people, during the second half of the 20th century, to a corporate mandate as alien to human concerns as any that flourished under the Third Reich.

The problem of inclusion versus exclusion is America's oldest conundrum, one that comprehends American institutional experience from pre-colonial and provincial struggles for identity down to today's rancid polemics about multicultural diversity, immigration and race. Originally a difficulty of the Half-Way Covenant faced by separating and non-separating Puritan Congregationalists, which intellectual historian Perry Miller sought to describe through numerous works, it is fundamentally a religious problem, though not one amenable or familiar to the religious sensibilities of a Falwell or a Farrakhan. What for 17th Century Puritans was essentially a means of motivating spiritual salvation comes down to us in the secularized form: Who is entitled to participate in the political community, and to enjoy whatever goods civil and political society has to offer? What is to be the principle of inclusion and—by implication—of exclusion?

These questions are, in part, attempts to formulate principles that will guide society in determining what the content and substance of a social safety net will be, the floor below which we will allow no citizen to fall. Should such a safety net include just food and shelter or, in addition, basic education, health care and work? If the latter, how can we escape the obvious implication of a basic right of citizens to health care benefits and opportunities for full employment? And, more radically (or conservatively?), if our original questions embroil us in defining a floor of welfare below which no citizen is permitted to fall, do they not equally commit us to defining a ceiling above which no citizen—not even a corporate citizen—shall rise? In a democracy, even a democratic republic like ours purports to be, oughtn’t there to be some limitation on the wealth, power and influence any individual or group is allowed to amass?

Of course: in a society dominated by a cult of marketing, exactly the opposite tendency infuses consideration about both ends of the social spectrum. If a citizen has a right to any of society's goods and services, why not to all of them? Conservative Republican fears of a black hole of welfare benefits draining America's capitalist blood-supply justifies its commitment to unbridled and unrestricted concentration of wealth, power and influence. Most proponents of this conservative, status quo agenda would be horrified, as Perry Miller once remarked, to discover that the Constitution does not specifically mention any right to make a profit.

This is America's quintessential dilemma, transcending particular formulations, regardless of whether one discusses employment, education, defense, health care, immigration or race relations, and regardless of which conceptual lens one chooses to superimpose on issues: conservative vs. liberal, urban vs.rural, equality vs.authority, stability vs.change, orthodoxy vs.heresy, public vs.private, domestic vs.foreign, provincial vs.global, man vs.woman, or young vs.old. In a society like ours, dominated by economics and conditioned by a cult of marketing, the traditional problem becomes directly related to the need for redefining productivity and work in a knowledge-based service economy.

The power and influence of modern advertising—no less contingent and entrenched than the political authority of the clergy in 17th century Massachusetts—is due largely to an accident of technology. That accident was television. While it is true that radio, cable networks, various video formats for games and movies, the internet and wireless communication gadgets are also integral parts of the electronic media and the new empire of modern telecommunications, it was television that first signaled the potential for enormous profitability.

Advertising exploits that profitability. This is why every attempt to reform political campaign financing that fails to also reform and regulate advertising and public relations (especially their excesses over the public airwaves, hijacked by private industry long before the Telecommunications Act of 1996) is doomed to fail. The problem isn't mere venality or even the suspicion that politicians are "a race of devils"; it is the sheer cost and inevitability of television advertising, which no one seems willing or able to either restrain or circumvent, and the unavoidable nature of television as the preferred medium of communication.

The great sea change in American culture and economics conceals another revelation. Under conditions of globalization as directed by transnational corporations, all marketing is niche marketing. As far as the formidable entrepreneurial spirit is concerned, distribution and transfer of goods and services (not to mention any archaic or vestigial notion of a just price) is of secondary importance only, if not a mere afterthought. Marketing's obsessive and exclusive concern with appearance defines modern corporate elan. What matters is prestige, status, "juice." How often do we mindlessly repeat and accept an economic imperative, that—in America, if not the entire globe!—the bottom line is finally all that matters? Having lionized this euphemism for so long, we have actually come to believe our own exalted metaphor (which is, in effect, to concede that nothing else does matter). But, for a culture in which money, the time clock and bottom line (gauging the value of stock shares and interest rates) define economics, the cliche is literally true, despite pious denials of maudlin moralists and "research experts" of foundations and institutes that are wholly-owned-and-operated subsidiaries of self-interested conglomerates. Substantive economic value, like moral, aesthetic and scientific merit, may well prove to be another, quite different matter. But profit, quantified as money and capital, is the only marker we have or will readily admit to: an idiosyncrasy for which Americans may yet have to pay dearly.

Both advertising and modern journalism grew up within the modern medium of television. This is why the general public so often bluntly equates the media with journalism (to the detriment of journalism's professional reputation) rather than with advertising, the influence of which nobody ever seems to want to take seriously. Most Americans believe that they are somehow magically immune to the motivational seduction and libidinal allure of advertising, which continues to reap rich harvests from this myth of an indefatigable and all-conquering free will, despite mounting disconfirmations (for example: our seeming inability to address such problems as environmental contamination by industrial wastes, drug trafficking and addiction, decline in the quality of our public schools, inflated health care costs, crumbling city infrastructure, rising patterns of wasteful consumption and other socially destructive behavior, all taking place in a world that appears to grow more bewilderingly complex each day). Modern advertising influences everybody in this society; it is the sine qua non of life in the global village and the medium in which we exist as social and political beings.

If journalism has arguably been maligned by association with the leveling influence of television, advertising has exploited this equivocation in the public mind and it has done so in three distinctive ways. First, by presenting itself to the public as trivial, negligible, barely worth noticing, advertising has kept a low profile, staying on the periphery of public scrutiny. Second, by identifying itself intimately with the very engine of industrial commerce (and so with the health and vitality of the nation's economy), it has remained nearly invisible and virtually indistinguishable in the public mind from corporate and commercial interests. Third, by draping itself (like much of the rest of corporate industry) in a sacrosanct mantle of scientific truth, advertising has thereby associated (insinuated?) itself closely with the bandwagon of (imagined) human progress.

The reality is, again, otherwise: advertising adds nothing to America's productivity, her storehouses of agriculture, retail merchandising and the cornucopia of her goods and services. Advertising is, if anything, a drain on the economy, filling its own coffers with excessive wealth extorted from corporate America by virtue of the belief that, in an age dominated by television and other electronic media, there is no alternative to advertising in order to sell goods and services. Advertising is simply the cost of doing business in the global village. So much for free will! Here resides an important source of the institutionalized contempt that has poisoned America's culture in recent decades.

In this way, corporate giants like ADM, GE, ExxonMobil, Pfizer and Microsoft are identified in the public fancy with the discoveries of a scientific technology, further blurring distinctions between science and technology, theoretical and applied. Are not the discoveries of science and subsequent applications and developments of modern technology themselves dependent on the engine of the economy and so upon the health and well being of corporations?

For appearance to overthrow reality, objective truth must be discarded. Here, modern advertising truly delivers. Contrary to what is widely believed, advertising conveys no useful product information; indeed, it conveys no information at all, except in the recondite sense in which philosophers of language sometimes use this term (syntax plus semantic content). Advertising employs very little language, except for broad slogans (for example: "She's Got the Urge to 'Erbal!," "Think Outside the Bun," "Freedom is Calling You," "ADM: the Nature of What's to Come," "GE: We Bring Good Things To Life," "Conoco-Phillips: The Great Ones Elevate" and "Only At Old Navy").

In order to get the job done (i.e., the job of hijacking rational thought for pecuniary purposes), a cult of marketing substitutes highly potent visual images for articulate language. Sometimes these images are used to tell a story, sometimes not; always they are designed with a particular manipulative strategy in mind. Effective ads may compel consumer purchasing but never by means of honest persuasion or a fair presentation of the facts. They invade a vulnerable corner of the psyche and seduce, threaten, bully or cajole potential consumers into submission. The best, most lucrative ads do so surreptitiously, without leaving a trace. "The circuit is complete!" as Darth Vader might say.

Even where an ad appears to present facts (for technically-sophisticated products like automobiles, computers, sound systems and pharmaceuticals), every word, sentence and paragraph is tightly harnessed to whatever rhetorical strategy or scheme is the focus of that particular ad campaign. And such copy always takes a back seat to the eye-catching visual imagery.

This is why, under the dominion of a cult of marketing, corporate advertising for alcohol, tobacco, caffeinated soft drinks and prescription medicines all seem to resemble illegal narcotics trafficking—after all, it is much easier to manipulate consumers into purchasing a product to which they are already addicted!—and it is also why all other product ads imitate those for beer, booze, caffeine, nicotine and prescription drugs. Like acolytes of ritualized magic employing a talisman or charm, everybody wants to mimic the gospel of success.

Advertising and public relations depend on lying, deception, self-deception and fraud. There are no real exceptions to this. I defy anyone to find a television commercial that can withstand more than five minutes of analytic scrutiny without confirming this claim. Commercial advertising, as it is presently conducted, is uniformly intended to divest consumers of their rational autonomy by manipulating and ultimately defrauding them with respect to the allocation of their economic resources.

Every TV commercial is more or less harmful; the only question is: to what degree? Take the Old Navy slogan: "Only (1 beat) at Old Navy." Is Old Navy the only store that sells sweaters and pants? Since the answer is plainly no, the slogan is either false or trivial in what it purports to convey, and is probably gibberish. What else could the slogan mean? And wouldn't we already have switched the channel were it not for the nubile, lanky, slinky Leeza-likeness strutting-her-stuff-looking-so-casual-and-approachable? "Sex Sells" may be a truism of advertising but we should be on alert when Old Navy relies on sex to peddle clothing or when Kraft resorts to Barry White in order to hawk cheese slices to middle school children ("It's A Love Thing").

As for "She's Got the Urge to 'Erbal!", to suggest that there is any connection between shampooing one's hair and having an orgasm betokens, if it does not depend on, a kind of brain damage. This ad campaign is degrading to women because it trades exclusively on the aforementioned connection regarding that gender; and it is degrading to men by implication. The issue is not the popularity of, or the longing for, orgasms—that is the hook. The issue is the expropriation of mind by repetitious exposure to advertising and marketing.

Every TV commercial distorts reality. Some undeniably use humor. What of it? Do you care that the thug hijacking your car tells funny jokes and even makes you laugh? Advertisers are betting that you do.

By fostering, fomenting and subtly enhancing public distractions (fears of governmental conspiracy or other hot-buttons like children's education, race relations and legalized abortion), those in a position to profit most (advertisers and entrenched transnational interests, the new barony of top management) can keep the citizen-consumer bolted to his seat, eyes facing the firelight shadows dancing on the cave walls. These high priests of the cult of marketing render their prey at once docile, fearful and highly suggestible by promulgating global folklore such as The Myth of Big Government Conspiracy, The Myth of the Need for Perfect Data (corporate interests always advise more "study" of problems rather than anything as radical as actual decisions or actions that might affect policy. It's a deliberate dodge. Ask anybody at the American Petroleum or Tobacco Institutes) and The Myth of the Global Economy-As-Lottery, otherwise known as Entrepreneurialism. The hook here is not the truism that anyone may become a millionaire but rather the lie that everyone can do so, that there is a marketing formula or secret recipe guaranteeing success in business.

Given the ubiquity of these essential features of commercial advertising, it is hardly surprising to find that problems which have arisen from a cult of marketing are systemic and not simply aberrant episodes or contingent accidents demonstrating the moral weakness of individuals or individual corporate "bad apples." This is not to say that every corporation is as crooked as Arthur Andersen and Enron; but rather to insist that every corporation is affected, some more and some less. "We all have to swim in the same water," as a character observes in Roman Polanski's Chinatown. This observation—a piece of political wisdom as old as Cicero—is certainly true of corporations. But it's subtext and translation is clear: To get along, you go along. So much for the conventional wisdom of corporate culture.

Public confusion about whether Microsoft is indeed a monopoly (and, more tellingly, whether this is even a bad thing) illustrates the systematic exigency posed by widespread subservience to the dictates and agenda of a cult of marketing. Anyone who doubts this claim should consider the widely-reported testimony of experts in the wake of Enron's implosion ("the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history" at the time it occurred) that both a lack of accounting standards and an underlying greed and corruption are somehow endemic to all large corporations, reflecting only the tip of the iceberg. The conflict of interest between fiduciary auditing responsibility and grossly inflated consulting fees is appropriately associated not just with Arthur Andersen but with the whole accounting industry. Events since Enron's demise (i.e., Global Crossing, WorldCom and the rest) only reinforce this point.

But the surprising impact—a virtual domino effect!—of Nine-Eleven upon the nation's corporate economy provides perhaps the most compelling evidence for a claim that the tenets of a cult of marketing are both systematic and deeply-entrenched. The precise extent to which this disaster legitimately and inescapably compromised corporate interests, or merely provided a convenient pretext for corporate downsizing, may never be adequately known. Streamlining, outsourcing and the execution of ploys to obtain government subsidies all contributed directly to a bottom line sorely depleted not so much by government taxation as by executive greed and managerial incompetence. What could possibly cause so many individuals and corporations to act in so ruthless a fashion? The task of trying to distinguish and separate "opportunistic" from "predatory" behavior is to hopelessly bandy denotations; both too regularly inform our notion of competitiveness as it is preached and practiced in contemporary America. The celerity with which General Motors, Ford and United Airlines sought to exploit the nation's tragedy with advertising campaigns, however despicable, is the result of neither chance nor divine providence—instead, it betokens a well-oiled, expertly calibrated machinery and dynamo of propaganda.

To assert that America is the Marketing Civilization par excellence is to acknowledge the incalculable prestige, status and influence that business and moneymaking have for Americans, whose self-esteem often seems to depend on these activities. Underneath our cultural angst and arrogance are profound questions about the nature and meaning of productivity and the limitations of money and capital in an information age and for a knowledge-based economy that is moving away from a manufacturing base of fossil fuel, rubber and steel; but they are questions that, so far at least, have rarely been formulated or discussed. Is it any wonder that Ideological Capitalism has, in the last twenty years, become the invasive, all-consuming Moloch I am claiming for it here? How on earth—given the Allied victory in World War Two, and America's all-but-foreordained ascent to its position as leader of nations—could it have been otherwise?

Vast profits, accumulated wealth and lust for omnipotence that wealth promises drives the entire capitalist system; this is what ultimately lies behind our myriad and apparently intractable problems. We Americans bemoan the failure of our primary social institutions while praising an organized corporate confiscation of our common welfare and societal resources, never noticing how our two-headed cynicism regarding these same social institutions pollutes the health of our cities and our quality of life, the consequences of which we are doomed to bequeath to posterity, our children's children.

3. The Institutional Challenge ("Freedom Is Calling You!")

Much has been written and said during the last ten years about the need to devise a new vision for international relations, in light of the implosion of Soviet-style Communism and America's ascension to its perhaps unenviable position as sole superpower. Yet our political leaders seem to think it is still 1945 and Winston Churchill the only conceivable prototype of political excellence. That world is, and has been, gone since 1945. Failure to realize this and its implications for the transformations of work and productivity, family and society, which have subsequently overtaken America and the world during the second half of the 20th century, now jeopardizes our capacity for adequate understanding, realistic appraisal and effective action.

Can our institutions adapt to a changed and changing concept of productive work? There is evidence of cracking seams on the Ship of State, exemplified by James K. Galbraith's warning that, with the election of 2000, "the United States left behind constitutional republicanism, and turned to a different form of government"—i.e., the Corporate Democratic State. When conservative Republicans claim they are opposed in principle to judicial activism, they are being disingenuous, as Bush's well orchestrated legal maneuvering, and calculated appeal to the Supreme Court in order to expropriate the results of election 2000 clearly demonstrated. Such activists only resent and oppose judicial activism which does not advance their perceived agenda. It is the same with their worthless charge of "playing politics" so often leveled against liberal Democrats (as if it were somehow unnatural or unthinkable for politicians to "play politics." What else should politicians play? Once again: the public mind has been carefully prepared by decades of television advertising to accept such nonsense). Nor is the author of "Corporate Democracy, Civic Disrespect" without his pedigree: the son of distinguished Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who pioneered study of the corporate democratic state in such works as The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, he is a professor in his own right at the University of Texas.

On Galbraith's account, the corporate state into which we have mutated is no democracy but out-and-out oligarchy, with the President functioning as CEO, the Supreme Court his de facto Board of Directors, and the electorate proxy shareholders permitted a straw vote but with no real influence over management's day-to-day decisions and policies. Galbraith's alarm and his argument deserve to be taken seriously and not simply because he has an illustrious father.

Was Hannah Arendt essentially correct when she judged that America had become a nation of jobholders, galvanized exclusively by their pocketbook concerns? If true, this would constitute more evidence for a decline of political language and culture, its replacement by economic jargon and the sorry influence of what I have termed a cult of marketing. Bush's scurrying to revamp intelligence organizations since Nine-Eleven raises the question of whether this reorganization, like the one he proposed for the SEC in dealing with rogue corporations, is not simply superficial and cosmetic, a deliberately contrived diversion that accords with entrenched corporate interests for maximum destabilization of the body politic. One could, after all, reasonably make the case that Bush's every action since taking office—a $1.6 trillion tax rebate skewed in favor of the wealthiest citizens and corporations; promotion of a "faith-based initiative" to divert and reallocate current social service funding, thereby rendering these services vulnerable to privatization; oil drilling in the ANWR; executive fiat that puts Presidential papers of the prior Bush and Reagan administrations beyond the reach of FOIA requests and other forms of public scrutiny; proposed privatizing of Social Security; a lame prescription drugs-for-seniors bill; an airlines bailout after Nine-Eleven; the virtual bankrupting of state treasuries by withholding federal funds; a "War on Terrorism" of indeterminate intelligibility, duration and cost; and consolidating executive and military power in an unprecedented creation of a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security—has been single-mindedly directed towards the goal of "de-funding" the federal government by depleting its treasury, an agenda not altogether out of line with the desire of transnational and other large corporate interests (such as tobacco, oil, natural gas, coal, petrochemicals, cars, etcetera) to evade and escape meaningful public regulation.

How much does Bush really understand about the needs of an information economy or is he simply reenacting the old 1945 geopolitical model? From a slightly different vantage: is George W. Bush, as either the ape or dupe of a corporate culture to which he owes fealty, presiding over a corporate gutting of the United States and the reduction of its citizens to Third World status?

These words will no doubt antagonize some; for that reason, I urge my readers to consider them carefully, weighing and reflecting upon what I have said. A wise historian once prayed to whatever divinities presided over his discipline that he would not blame or demonize individual persons for the results of historical trends and processes that lay far beyond the limited scope and control of any human being. Since I subscribe to, and hope to emulate, this same view, I will admit that I dislike the question I have raised about George W. Bush at the close of my last paragraph. But I like even less the fact that I feel obliged to raise such questions in the first place. "Let Justice Be Done, Though the World Perish." —The President can take care of himself.

It is time to rethink the substance of principles governing the practices of Western Corporate Hegemony. If we really wanted to eradicate terrorism overnight, effectively isolating it, and reduce global tensions, especially throughout the Islamic and Arab worlds, creating a space in which diplomacy can prove most effective, our leaders might consider urging Corporate America to tone down its rhetoric of commercial imperialism, the MTV-in-your-face style of mass-marketing that the traditional Arab world finds so poisonous. Given widely publicized American paranoia in recent decades about movies, TV and popular music as likely causes of a wide variety of destructive social behaviors, people of the Middle East may not be the only ones who feel threatened by an unbridled cult of marketing.

For the past two decades, America has agonized over issues including alcoholism, drug addiction, gun control and violence, reproductive rights and abortion, the need for religion in public schools, a general decline of public morality and an increasing barbarization of our political and cultural life. What role has advertising played in conditioning, manipulating and exploiting this degenerative process, why has no one ever publicly raised this question before and why is there presently no vigorous public discussion of these matters?

Our entire institutional array is fear-based. One need look no further than the growing Defense (Pentagon and CIA) budget for the last twenty years, the physical modifications of Air Force One since JFK's assassination, or the siege mentality of every American administration since Nixon and Watergate. Of course, one could justifiably argue that Bill Clinton was under siege, not from International Terrorists but from sworn Republican enemies determined to destroy his Presidency (if not Clinton personally), an oblique vindication of Henry Adams's definition of politics as "the systematic organization of hatreds." We desperately need an open public discussion and dialogue between citizens and elected officials to assess the contempt that runs throughout all levels of American society, determining the extent to which such contempt promotes and fosters intimidation and reprisal, both at home and abroad.

America needs to end her domination by rogue capitalism and a cult of marketing as primary vehicles for expressing American political culture and to redesign a viable international strategy based on honesty and understanding instead of the sophistical tolerance of fraud, deception and self-deception, which have come almost exclusively to dominate western advertising, marketing and political thinking. We must stop shoving the American way of life down the throat of the traditional and developing worlds. Does America really want to refashion the whole world in its mirror image—or rather: in the image of what is best in American civilization and culture?

The former would have to include a glut of superhighways and gutted cities; growing industrial and petrochemical wastes; rampant alcoholism and chemical abuse; a proclivity for reactionary violence and the highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized west. The latter alternative could include our Constitution and other sacred political institutions and documents; our native ingenuity, enthusiasm and genuine productivity; our rich heritage of literary wisdom addressing the nature of American social identity; our achievements in the arts and sciences as well as an abiding faith in essential human goodness that, while often tested by experiments in depravity, is probably ultimately what makes America "the last, best hope of earth"—namely: America's resistance to formula and convention, our pragmatic willingness to embrace the new and unorthodox. Even if we had the God-like power and ability to reconstruct nature and the world of nations in our own image, we would never achieve the desired result but would instead get a perverted caricature of America, of which we have had many glimpses in the relationships we have formed—perhaps ineluctably—with petty dictators like the late Shah Reza Pahlevi of Iran, Somoza, Pinochet and, most recently and regrettably (thanks to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush), Saddam Hussein.

The real enemy of America is toxic industrial pollution and chemical carcinogens that threaten to degrade and destroy our air and habitat and the lazy behaviors, capitalist conventions and pernicious myths about the sanctity of profits so often mindlessly invoked to justify the status quo. Traditional "thinking" would seem to welcome the loss of breathable atmosphere as an "opportunity" for entrepreneurs to make a killing selling oxygen tanks and masks; and there is little doubt that the fossil fuel industry and its dependents are counting on opulent returns resulting from the vicissitudes of global warming—indeed the conservative and Republican solution to radioactive waste and other toxic pollutants is simply: build a bigger trash can with a tighter lid. Once the water table in North America is lost, we will commence a new and brutal social experiment, one to make our Civil War look like a grade school rehearsal. In such an eventuality, we would quickly descend into feral barbarity, producing a Hobbesian "state of nature" in which life is "nasty, brutish, solitary and short."

I don't know if Lord of the Rings has enjoyed worldwide the kind of success that Peter Jackson's film has had in America; I have no doubt that foreign audiences will project themselves into the protagonist's role, identifying with Frodo, Sam, Gandalf and the rest of the company of nine heroes, sworn to destroy the "one ring of power." But it requires no ingenuity to predict whom they will cast in the role of Dark Lord of Mordor, with its polluted air, scorched and barren landscape and impending threat of war and doom. (I’ll give you three guesses and it isn't Vladimir Putin or Saddam Hussein, or even Bin Laden.) One may defensively protest that America does not deserve to be cast in such a role—true enough—but that will not change the stark reality and vulnerability of America's position as superpower.

The sooner we begin letting less developed nations pick and choose those elements of market capitalism that work best for their people and societies, the sooner we shall see them evolve institutions of democratic freedom and political responsibility. No doubt such an evolution will produce surprises, as other nations find ways of expressing democracy that are unique to their respective cultures. But that is how America works to discover and bequeath to subsequent generations what is best in our democratic civilization. We have much work yet to do. Perhaps America has as much to learn about democracy from other nations as they have from us.

Along these lines we will need to rehabilitate that devil-word "socialism," exploring a deeper and more robust appreciation of our own labor and corporate history. In this way we may find that it is expedient as well as in our best long term interest to do what probably should have been done in 1945, namely: to allow the socialist economies of less developed nations the same room to develop and trade with capitalist economies that we accord to the many already-existing socialist economies (e.g., Canada, Mexico, South and Central America, Europe, Scandinavia, Africa and Asia). Economic socialism does not preclude political democracy; and democratic socialism can harmonize quite well with robust democratic capitalism, as America has itself demonstrated in achievements in child labor laws, forty-hour work weeks, and social security. Of course: these were all achieved during FDR's presidency. It is high time we had some new achievements, relevant to our own time.

Our intelligence services are outmoded and in dire need of rejuvenation and repair. The basic problem with the CIA is that it inherited an institutionalized split within its predecessor, the OSS, an organization created for the specific purpose of fighting the Axis powers in World War II. The institutional split or division is between those who favor covert action over research and a research arm that favors careful sifting and analysis of intelligence data as a solution to political problems. The institutional schizophrenia generated by this split has operated throughout the Cold War era, a period of roughly 50 years. While it is understandable how such a division arose in the context of war, institutionalized competition between the two factions has subsequently led a life of its own, with increasingly deleterious consequences for America's foreign policy in the decades since the end of the Second World War.

The basic problem with the FBI is its deeply entrenched inferiority; its jealous competition with, and envy of, the status accorded the CIA. The FBI feels that it has been supplanted by the relative newcomer, the CIA, in executive favor, funding and political attention (in fact, both have long been surpassed by the NSA). This has fed paranoia inside both organizations, diverting resources and diluting vitality better spent addressing actual intelligence concerns. The remaining problems of intelligence services (like the Pentagon and NSA) result entirely from their own internal insecurities, bloated bureaucracy and the cancerous duplication of services that these deficiencies engender.

Among other catastrophes in which the CIA (conspiring with transnational corporations like ITT, Anaconda and Kennecott, to cite only a few) has played a major role, one must rank, as second perhaps only to the prolonged agony of Vietnam, the engineered destabilization of Chile's government and the 1973 assassination of Salvador Allende, that tortured nation's first democratically elected socialist leader. This is not the place to detail that sordid history, the long list of US corporations and executive "personalities" involved, or the role that ad agencies like McCann-Erickson and J. Walter Thompson played in efforts to manipulate and derail Chilean politics going back to 1962. These shameful events (up to and including the murder of Orlando Letelier outside the U.S. capitol in 1976) remain a permanent blot on America's conscience and record.

If McCarthyism had been a mistake, why did it continue to dominate our Cold War strategy? If Western Capitalism defeated Soviet Communism, why not acknowledge Cuba as a neighbor who shares our hemisphere and use trade relations to actually encourage Castro to solve his problem of succession by restoring Cuban citizens to a workable democracy? And by workable, I mean workable according to Cuban—not U.S.—standards. Originally, the U.S.A. supported Fidel Castro in the overthrow of the dictator Batista. Had we continued our support, instead of succumbing to the facile reactions of redbaiting and conspiracy theories, Castro would never have needed to turn to the Soviets for aid. The Cuban Missile Crisis itself might have been averted. The irrational need to replace Hitler and the Nazis with the threat of a Worldwide Communist Conspiracy to destroy America blinded our political leaders to the need for a rational peacetime policy, with what disastrous consequences Americans may not yet have fully come to appreciate. If the goal of American policy had been to strangle democracy in its cradle around the world by sponsoring every petty thug and tyrant we could find, then the virulent anti-Communist ideology that dominated the Cold War era was pure genius. But such an ideological premise did not express strength and confidence in American capitalism but rather American capitalism's fearful projections, economic insecurity and geopolitical paranoia.

America is no place, and should provide no refuge, for ideological fanaticism of any stripe. That it has become so in recent years is probably the best measure of the extent to which American institutions have become conspicuously fear-based, under pressures of rapid technological change and societal transformation.

4.Two Visions of the Corporate Body ("The Nature Of What's To Come")

Two visions of the future of Corporate Democracy exist. The first is a vision of corporate hegemony, capitalism as ideology and a cult of marketing pursued with all the fervor of any fanatical religion. It is a vision of the future in which corporate monoliths, ever more invasive and fewer in number, control all the earth's resources and society's capital; in which every activity and endeavor is subjugated to the lofty purpose of corporate profit-maximization. Such a world will be dominated by alternating distractions of war and recession, all part of planned corporate strategy. The gap between haves and have-nots will widen, the have-nots growing ever more numerous, disaffected and potentially violent. Most Americans will be grateful for the privilege of a $20K-a-year job. In a world of totalitarian despair where boredom is offset by state-provided drugs, the power of celebrity and the fantasy of attaining upper class status will be kept alive by the lottery of entrepreneurship and by a numbed populace which relies on ever crueler "reality-based" recreations and diversions in order to distract itself from the degradation and slavery into which it has sunk. In such a world, individualism will continue to be praised as the corporate virtue while human individuality will either be forgotten or else condemned as unnatural aberration, criminality and vice.

The future predicted by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four will have come to pass at last, in substance if not every detail. The political state will have withered globally, as Marx once predicted it would do, nation-states functioning as mere ancillaries and ornaments of the new corporate state, existing only for purposes of marketing and propaganda.

To bring such a world and future into being, we have only to keep treading water and to maintain the status quo.

A second possibility exists, although it does not seem likely. On this scenario, the American people reawaken to their public duty, wresting back control of basic institutions from corporate cartels, their greedy shills and minions, the whole greasy congregation of fortune-hunting fixers, lobbyists and power-brokers. Reasserting the rule of law to regulate multinational and transnational giants, citizens and their elected officials will join forces to break open monopolies and concentrations of power and interest; to severely curtail the absurd practice of regarding advertising and marketing as "free speech"; and to criminalize the practice of pursuing frivolous lawsuits as a constitutionally-protected right, thereby curtailing the corporate political strategy behind "slap suits" and other diversions deliberately designed and intended to slow down the courts and obstruct justice.

Special taxes may be levied against, and collected from, corporate ogres like GE and ExxonMobil in exchange for granting these entities the privilege of reaping titanic profits; and new laws can be implemented, requiring such corporate juggernauts to underwrite worthwhile enterprises like public television and radio, free public education for our children and prudent health care benefits for all citizens.

Similarly, in a deliberate effort to redistribute institutional corporate power and influence more equitably, Congress might enact laws applying exclusively to small businesses (of 500 or fewer employees), awarding tax breaks and subsidies for increasing the number of jobs, creating new jobs and solving societal problems through innovative, cost-effective measures. To reward small businesses for staying small instead of punishing them for not becoming behemoths is the way to ensure diversity and competition in an economy that is strong, resilient and flexible because it is well-regulated.

In such a society capitalism is restrained by social impulses and humane principles; it knows its place and performs its vital work with pride, no longer vying with or trying to dominate other primary institutions of family, education, science, sex and religion. Instead of worrying about outcome studies and test scores, we must educate with a view to children's mental health, encouraging and rewarding emotional I.Q. and social cooperation as well as creativity, discovery and the mastering of particular competencies in the traditional humanities, arts and sciences. Not literacy alone but an ability to read with real comprehension and understanding is the birthright of every citizen and should be the standard for which we strive as a nation.

Advertising and marketing, far from disappearing, may rise to the challenge of telling the truth, perhaps becoming a legitimate source of product information after all. If advertising no longer feels obliged to distort and exploit reality for the sake of appearances, substantive public discourse may begin to flourish once again as we start facing problems of environmental pollution, drug abuse and slavery as these practices (and the institutions maintaining them) actually exist in our world today.

The American people have faced such obstacles and exigencies before and proven equal to the challenge, often in unexpected ways. It should not surprise us to find that, in addressing these problems, we shall overcome our aberrant tendencies toward shortsighted xenophobia and reactionary violence, discovering what actual progress has already been made in race relations during the last half-century. Redefining our collective enterprise, changing and adjusting the norms and standards by which we appraise and evaluate both concepts and actual practices of productive work, we may find that employment, like resurgent economic value itself, is virtually boundless.

5.Conclusion: "Renewing a Common World" ("Are You In? Wake Up and Drive.")

The emergence of a strident ideology in the form of a cult of marketing is by no means the only plausible or viable one for capitalism to take. To recover political institutions from lobbyists and vested interests, to reshape, inform and invigorate our basic institutions of education and commerce, religion, family, science, politics and morality and to accomplish this in an open, rational and tolerant way, without resorting to divisive rhetoric or violence, Americans will first have to salvage and restore a language of political discourse that all of her citizens can once again learn to trust. Such trust can learn to be faithful not blind, courageous not invasive and wise rather than clever.

But restoring a common language of political discourse will not solve every problem. If employment is to be the ultimate gateway to full participation in society and the enjoyment of goods, services and freedom, then governmental authority—whether of nation-state or corporate confederation—must guarantee full employment. The world in which oil, rubber and steel might justifiably dominate economies is gone. How can we achieve full employment without first redefining our basic categories and notions of work? Will doing so not lower the bar for productivity itself?

There is a quandary here that I can only indicate in passing, which has to do with Thomas Jefferson's inspired substitution of the phrase, "the pursuit of Happiness," for the Lockean term "property" in the phrase immortalized in The Declaration of Independence. [Note: Many Republicans—notoriously poor readers (Cf. Laura Bush's famous obsession with the teaching of reading skills)—have confused Jefferson's Declaration with that other sacred political document, The Constitution of the United States of America—probably because the Declaration is considerably shorter, easier to read and understand—Did I mention that Republicans, who are urged as a matter of patriotism to take easy courses of study in college, don't like to read?—than our Constitution. John Roberts may be an exception to this well-documented predilection…] To many patriotic Americans, Jefferson's alteration is probably suspect, possibly meaningless and so vague as to be wholly unreliable. To such persons the term "happiness" has an insufferable air of indefiniteness about it and is simply a mirage of idealism.

But suppose that Jefferson had no specific notion in mind for his choice of terms and simply meant to contrast it with property, in the sense of "anything other than property" or "not the accumulation of property"? Is it possible that Jefferson envisioned America's purpose to be some activity or activities beyond acquiring property and accumulating wealth, or that he foresaw the goal of a democratic republic as something altogether different from the philosophy of success enshrined in Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth?

We need not be strict constructionists or "originalists" here, insisting that Jefferson himself intended such a view or interpretation, for the idea to possess intrinsic merit and deserve discussion. Jefferson's mercurial, exploratory genius was accustomed to roaming over the boundless prospect of human institutions and possibility; he was no stranger to hypothesis and experiment. It may have sufficed for Thomas Jefferson to have allowed for the likelihood that free, educated humans, left to their own devices, would find something more valuable than the incessant piling up of property, some activity or enterprise of greater significance and worth than the unrestrained accumulation of excessive wealth. It is as if Jefferson were saying to us by his choice of phrase: "Look here: it might be enough simply to allow for such a possibility!"

Decent sane humans might well prefer to opt out of the pursuit of business and commercial goals in order to study mathematics, music, literature, philosophy, theoretical physics, the plastic arts or even theology. Yet by so doing citizens surely do not relinquish their need for—or concede any rights to—food, shelter, dignity, friends, family and work. Perhaps, as Plato and Aristotle believed, there is something better, after all, than a life devoted to commercial acquisition. Is it possible that such a distinction and divergence of purpose offers a way out of our current predicament?

Considering how cliquish and exclusionary the culture of modern transnational corporations is, it hardly seems likely that they will suddenly transform themselves into paradigms of democratic inclusion and providers of the "common welfare"—indeed: conditioned by a cult of marketing, their very nature as corporate institutions precludes their doing so.

According to Corporate Watch there are 63,000 transnational corporations worldwide, with 753,000 foreign affiliates. Three-quarters of these are located in North America, Western Europe and Japan. Fifty-one of the world’s top 100 economies are corporations. The USA has 82% of the world's top 200 corporations. 1999 sales for the top five corporations (GM, ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart, Ford and Daimler-Chrysler) were greater than the combined GDPs of 182 countries.

By contrast, there are 25.5 million small businesses, accounting for 40% of the offline economy. Small businesses employ more than half of the USA's private employees, creating three out of every four new jobs. Astoundingly, small business accounts for 99% of all employers.

Small businesses outnumber transnationals by a ratio of 404 to 1 for the first figure cited above and nearly 34 to 1 if we include the foreign affiliates. Given these facts the question that comes most insistently to mind is: Why do small businesses have so much less political and cultural clout, relatively speaking, than do multinatinal and transnational corporations? In this disparity lies the paradox of modern capitalism and, quite possibly, its gravest challenge.

Despite all the recent agonizing of experts over the stock market and investor confidence, one senses they are still not getting the point. To implement a truly global economy, we will have to embrace a changed world, all the features of which we will never adequately anticipate. The central questions of globalization are: (1) Can the world's resources, goods and services be redistributed more equitably among the nations and peoples of the world, without causing either cataclysmic upheaval in the industrial west or civil war and economic implosion in the less developed nations? (2) Can capitalism meet this challenge? (3) Is ideological capitalism as presently constituted (i.e., based on monetarism, narrowly quantifiable profit-maximizing, and conditioned by a cult of marketing) even capable of meeting the actual needs of a global economy? While the first question strikes me as empirically dubious and possibly unknowable, it seems to me that the answers to the second and third questions are no on both counts; and this for two reasons:

First: Russel's analysis of corporate behavior is essentially correct. Large corporations are inherently predatory and monopolistic. Under its present form of organization, market capitalism is impotent to solve the problem of redistribution of goods among less developed nations because it simply has no motivation to do so in terms of its own ideological presuppositions. Consider, for example, the failures of modern western capitalism to seriously address either cyclic worldwide famine or the AIDS pandemic—note the wildly inflated research and development costs consistently supplied by pharmaceutical companies, and their preferred position on the issue of making HIV drugs available to the poorest and most afflicted nations. Peruse the long list of corporations, heavily invested and engaged in biotech research, on the issue of intellectual property and patent rights—and you will have a good idea of what we may reasonably expect from private industry as far as substantively addressing the needs of the world in a truly global economy may be concerned. As an empirical matter, we can set aside questions of a social audit and whether transnationals will ever make good corporate citizens. Though these questions, like all empirical matters, involve an element of contingency, the rosy ad-copy and self-serving slogans of GE and ADM, of Boeing, Exxon or Kerr-McGee on the future of the planet may be safely ignored: you would not bet your 401(k) on the predictions implicit in their TV ads.

Second: There is an even more serious problem than those of basic corporate structure, culture and disposition, or whether it is possible to expand the number and variety of jobs by redefining work and productivity, so as to guarantee full employment. Is it possible that present-day capitalism has become the unwitting victim of its own extravagant success; that money, capital and quantifiable profit-maximizing are simply obsolete under impending conditions of globalization; that ideological capitalism is flatly incapable of providing a foundation for human and societal values and a method of "bookkeeping" for those transactions necessary in the Third Millenium?

If capitalism is not up to the challenge of securing a world containing more of the features that people desire, then we may need to find an alternative to money, capital and the bottom-line; and to devise institutions better adapted than IMF, WTO or World Bank, for example, in order to achieve these goals (among which I suggest we include: (1) securing a cleaner, safer environment by ultimately reversing the process of global warming that, contrary to the main "line" and interests of the energy establishment, has received sufficient empirical confirmation to warrant immediate and global collective action; (2) reallocating resources to allow citizens to rebuild their crumbling core cities, infrastructure and schools; and (3) establishing real peace, security and stability worldwide by allowing citizens of all countries the freedom to participate in a world economy in ways in which they see fit to develop their natural, cultural and human resources. Adopting a tolerant and flexible approach to the spread of capitalism by embracing the actual interests of the peoples of the rest of the international community—instead of simply viewing them as potential markets to manipulate and exploit—will save everyone a lot of grief in the long run, especially a superpower isolated by virtue of its unique position and place in recent history).

Although some might contend that the course I am proposing is an abdication of America's role (her rightful place?) as superpower, I would counter that the path suggested here offers the best way for America to retain her unique position and authority on this planet. In the long run, I suspect it may prove the least arduous way. I believe it is the right way to plot our course.

We can either have a world in which full employment flourishes or one in which corporate dinosaurs rule the earth, dictating human affairs; but we cannot have both. The main view opposing this, I suppose, finds in paltry humans and their miserable history ample evidence of political fragility and concludes, on this basis, that human democracy cannot be trusted with the fate of the world. Better to accept the security of Leviathan, such voices proclaim, the might of large corporate organization, than to risk losing all to human foible and flaw. And I admit that, in a certain frame of mind and mood, this view possesses a certain fatalistic charm.

But the claim is illusory. The conviction that democracy cannot succeed is an illusion based on fear—primarily of the unknown. I would argue that the exact opposite is true: democratic human scale can be trusted. How has corporate industry taken care of our environment and health in the last hundred years? I would be the last to deny the value of universities and hospitals, modern medicine and science. Large corporate organization has given us Roman law, aqua-ducts and superhighways, to be sure, but also gladiators, crucifixion and some of the most barbaric tyrannies in recorded history. Corporate organization has given us witch hunts and inquisitions, countless religious wars, The Third Reich and the death-camps of Hitler and Stalin. Given the entrenched power and stubborn resistance to change of corporate interests, curiously at one with the policies and actions of the current American regime, a redefinition of work can only be accomplished by reining in that power; and this requires a political will that seems very distant from current political sentiments.

I would be delighted to be proven wrong by subsequent events, to watch as the corporate community rises to the challenge of meeting the authentic needs of the world's people (instead of "needs" as defined by corporate marketing and its motives of self-aggrandizement, lust for power and pure avarice), and to bear witness to the redemptive possibility of human nature as capitalism and advertising "clean house," so to speak. I think it would be terrific if corporations like Anheuser-Busch, GE, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, Ford, ADM and General Dynamics were to pick up the slack of government by underwriting and addressing (with the same missionary zeal they have hitherto reserved exclusively for marketing campaigns and excessive executive compensation) the legitimate needs of citizens for adequate housing, universal health care, full employment and a safe environment for ourselves and for posterity.

No one knows or can predict with absolute certainty what the future holds, not even a Cheney, Lay or Rumsfeld (whatever their personal beliefs to the contrary might be). While a few of my sentences may have sounded as if they had a ring of prophecy, I am no augur or soothsayer. I have no personal investment in being right.

But, it may well be easier for educated generalists to take a synoptic view, to identify and articulate anomalies on the social and political horizon, than it is for those with more narrow technical proficiencies. The time-bombs embedded in our social policies and practices are not the work of terrorists conspiring to bring about our collective ruin but are of our own making; it is to the trip-wires of such minefields that we are most blind. Generalists are therefore a potential safeguard against social discord and should be valued for what they uniquely bring to the table of public discourse, decision-making and policy. Specialized knowledge and technical expertise cannot solve every problem we confront; quite possibly they can solve none of the most important problems, difficulties and challenges. As Hannah Arendt understood, our quintessentially political problems (those involving our capacity for speech, freedom and our attempts to answer the question "How shall we live together?") are, with respect to this notorious shortcoming of specialized expertise, unique. For that reason alone, we should perhaps reassess the value we place on our poets, writers and other generalist thinkers, for they truly represent a vast untapped resource of collective experience. In this, I concur with much of the exposition and reasoning recently made by the distinguished jurist, Richard Posner, in his work on Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline (Harvard University Press, 2001).

A President with half a mind, enough political will and backbone would announce to the American people: "In two years 20% of all residential and business energy in America will be supplied by technological alternatives to fossil fuel," thereby putting the energy establishment on notice that it needs to start adapting to the world's changing demands, instead of trying to control them. Within a year, Ford and GM would probably begin marketing cars that get 80 miles to the gallon! The recent pretense of having an energy policy advanced by George Bush is sham, a strategy designed to protect for a few paltry decades longer the profits of an entrenched fossil fuel industry that sees the writing on the wall and knows its days are numbered.

It is time for our institutions to grow up and for America to make good on her promise of being a shining example of democracy, compassion and justice for the whole world. If history teaches anything it is this: nations that try to evade inevitable change by holding on to a dead past exhaust themselves in tyranny before they decline into paralyzed dotage. Is American Civilization intrinsically different or better than Rome's or Great Britain's? Is America's empire greater, more illustrious, multicultural or richer in resources and creative ingenuity than was Bismarck's Germany in the decades between 1870 and the collapse of the Weimar Republic? Though a child of my time, nation and culture, I must admit that to answer either question affirmatively is to indulge an ethnocentric fantasy, to entertain delusions of grandeur and to insist that the most provincial of pipe dreams is foreordained destiny. Very few notions of class superiority or sanctimonious election are capable of sustaining such obnoxious imbecility.

To pursue effectively a middle path between isolationism and playing super-cop for the world demands that America's people and her leaders take a hard critical look at our political, military and intelligence policies of the past 50 years and take up the challenge of devising a new strategy that better accords with the actual conditions of our planet.

Copyright © Dennis Weiser 2003 All Rights Reserved.

 

ALLEGORY

The Work of Dennis Weiser

Hi. My name is Dennis Weiser and I'm a poet, philosopher and writer of fiction. At 54, I am in the fifth creative period of my life and have recently published my first novel, a roman á clef [French for "novel with a key"] entitled Allegory.

 

I've recently finished my second novel, a full-blown yarn about Mayan sorcery, time travel and Iran-Contra. It's called Crash Dummies; and it's a big book, over 400 pages; a potential literary juggernaut and movie. I hope to find a big time agent and publisher for it soon.

 

Chin Music, a select group of poems, was published in April 2005. I have completed nine other books of poetry, work produced over many years. You see: I'm new to marketing and shameless self-promotion, having spent thirty years mastering my craft. Now I'm ready to reap the rewards (LOL!). No, I haven't devoted my life to literary art simply in order to garner lucrative profits. But some rewards would be nice.

 

Allegory is available at my Lulu storefront, where you can read a brief precis of the book, even down a preview of the first three chapters for free! There's a photo of me plus a capsule biography at http://www.lulu.com/CrashDummies.

 

I also authored and designed the website, American Weimar: Hannah Arendt and De Jure Authority It's had more than 13,000 visitors since I created it in 1995, more than I ever expected (That's cuz it's so well-written).

 

In my long, versatile and occasionally pathetic career, I've done many interesting things ("No, not clinically interesting, Helen!"). I've met a lot of interesting people, including Howard Nemerov, Stanley Elkin, George Starbuck John Ciardi, William H. Gass, James Tate, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, Bill Bleifuss, Stanley Baldwin, Jay Karr, Wayne Zade, David and Judy Ray, Dave Collins, David Perkins, Larry Stebbing, Laura and Colin Gage, Sarah Dobrauc and Sean Young (celebrities come last in my ontology!).

 

I even once competed in a beauty contest, a fund-raiser for a women's college in mid-Missouri. I was roped into it by the other clowns in my dormitory and came near to winning the thing, I'm told—until the talent portion of the contest, when I recited TEXAS BARBECUE & TEA. So I'll leave you to ponder and enjoy this small parable of our culture, somewhat in the style of Robert W. Service, Eugene Field or Edward Lear, in southwestern dialect.

 

TEXAS BARBECUE & TEA

Wa-al, the cattle drive's ovuh, the hosses ack strange

And the cowpokes've all come home from the range

With the sun jes' br'ilin'… Shove a spit through that Jew-boy

An' twirl yer lasso! Yuh cain't stop smilin' so I know you see

That it's ti-i-i-me for Texas Barbecue…and Tea!

Jes' between youenme-cuz ah know you agree:

Do yuh take one lump or two in yore tea? —How yuh like

Yore chews? Ah likes my chews well done, don't-choo?

Well done Chew Chew! Wel-dun Choo-Choo!

Nothing betterna ol' Nazi Barbecue-Texas-Style, that is.

And the cows go: Moo! Beep-Beep! Honk-Honk! Well-Done-

Choo-Choo! Then they all chow down and Johnson does too

As he wags his Stetson an' twirls-a lasso

At the dee-lish, down-home y'awl Texas Feed.

Burn some wetbacks too, they're so good to chomp and chew

-Yes, indeed, the filthy breed is good to eat!

Where the horses all whinny cuz they don't git any,

He tries to count swastikas but there's just too many.

Nothing on earth is better for yew

Than a good old Texas-Barbecue-&-Tea.

Y'awl Git Screwed Now, Heah?!

[Copyright Dennis Weiser 1978]

 

MY FAVORITE WEBSITES

Visit My Storefront at Lulu.Com where you can pick up my new novel, CRASH DUMMIES, Allegory, or is/2, a volume of poetry (containing two books, Chin Music and Verdigris).

For those as fond as I am of theoretical physicist and genius Richard Feynman, there's The Tuva Trader.

       The Ishmael Community is an interesting bunch, spun from the yarn of Daniel Quinn's first novel, Ishmael, about a talking gorilla with anthropological pretensions.  I preferred his later work, The Holy, a work I found more terrifying than The Exorcist.)  Quinn certainly has a lot to answer for!  

To all you Jargon Hunters, I recommend the Plain Language folks.  Or is Global Economics  your thing?  Why not try the World Wide Web's Virtual Library of Economic and Business History?  It's much more enlightening than The Wall Street Journal.  And while you're at it, check out the University of Chicago's superb Dictionary of Economic Jargon.
        Brush up on European Voyages of Discovery and Conquistadors.

There's a fantastic Interactive U.S. Constitution with a page for kids.
        Last but not least, I post My Checkered Resumejust in case you have a job for me. 

Check me out!

 

Come visit my store on CafePress!