Enervating the Culture's Non-Commercial Symbols
Moving to the normative realm, when the mind makes a quantum leap from a culture's values to the commercial objects with which they are juxtaposed, it does so at a cost to the common meaning of those values. For example, why should the ideal of nonviolent social reform as heralded in the song Revolution be equated with Brand X sneakers? Can this be done without perverting the songwriter's hope to "change the world"? 90 T.J. Jackson Lears offers this response: "Think, for example, of the beating that words like ... 'revolutionary' have taken in the consumer culture. One does not need to assume a precapitalist unity between word and thing to concede ... [that, u]nder capitalism, visual and verbal signs become detached from all traditional associations and meaning in general is eroded." 91 Additionally, why should the ideal of the flag (raised at Iwo Jima) be the stockintrade of jean and pastry ads? Do we not risk debasing the symbol of American sacrifice by these associations?
These examples demonstrate that the energizing of the commercial culture occurs, in part, by enervating the noncommercial culture; the meanings of commodities develop as the standard meanings of symbols collapse. Advertising, seen in this light, "waters down values, wears them out by slow attrition, makes them banal and, in the long run, helps Americans become indifferent to them and even cynical." 92 This can be seen by way of two striking illustrations. In the summer of 1991, National Public Radio aired the following interview concerning the advertising strategies of a major clothing manufacturer:
National Public Radio Interviewer Linda Wertheimer: [T]hree controversial [doublepage clothing] ads depict a very young nun kissing a priest, a newborn baby only seconds old and a little blonde white girl next to a little black boy whose hair is fashioned in something that looks a little bit like horns.... What about these ads? What do nuns and priests, and newborns and little toddlers, blonde and black, have to do with selling Tshirts?
Bob Garfield, advertising critic for Advertising Age: An important element of this whole campaign is to create controversy and generate publicity, which not only has a media value all of its own, it also enhances every consumer's exposure to [the clothing manufacturer's] ads .... So that when you're paging through some magazine and run across a picture of this newborn baby covered with the blood and the vernix and with the umbilicus still attached, instead of casually passing it, being aware of the controversy, ... you're apt to look at it more seriously and to react one way or another. 93
Commenting on what he called "distraction marketing," Mr. Garfield continued:
These ads were created for the express purpose of ticking people off, for creating controversy, for inflaming consumer outrage and so forth and so on.... It's really very cunning advertising ... for a lot of reasons.
Not only is there the publicity benefit, they also are a great example of what I call distraction marketing, and it's distracting because rather than focus on trying to ... come up with some sort of rational benefit for buying a $49 cotton Tshirt, which [the clothes manufacturer knows is not a rational kind of consumer behavior, they're kind of supplying a little three card monte in creating a distraction over here so you won't pay attention to ... the facts of the matter being that a $119 cardigan sweater is not a particularly good buy. 94
Thereafter, the same national clothing company mounted a $60 million advertising campaign aimed at shocking the consumer and presumably geared to enhance the products' name recognition. In the service of selling jeans and sweaters, the magazine ads depicted reallife tragedies: an anguished family at the bedside of a dying AIDS victim; 95 three women mourning over a shrouded corpse, apparently shot and left to die in a pool of blood in the street; 96 hundreds of refugees frantically swarming aboard a ship at dock; 97 and an armed soldier clenching a human bone. 98 In these and similar ads, the explicit commercial message was limited to a colorful company logo strategically situated in the scenes.
