Djelloul Marbrook

It’s often said our government is a cosmology of checks and balances, and lately it’s often said the Bush Administration has labored mightily to subvert it in favor of executive authority. In nature, too, there seem to be checks and balances that humanity labors mightily to subvert.

I have been wondering lately whether advertising has played the role of the Bush Administration in subverting culture in favor of appearance over content. It seems clear to me that a precariously broad segment of the electorate favors appearance over discourse and slogan over an intricate interplay of facts and ideas.

I’m already out of my depth, but I can speak knowledgeably about the newspaper business. There was a time when information and opinion was presented in columns, sticks, of type. The overall appearance of the page was severely vertical. Photographs were used largely to relieve fields of gray but were given little authority of their own.

Sometime in the early nineteen-sixties this began to change. Packaging began to triumph over content. Newspaper owners realized that it was cheaper to make a newspaper look good than to maintain the staffs necessary to fully report local, regional, national and international news. A few good editors could put out a pretty product that enclosed an increasingly content-free zone.

This trend has continued unabated. It no doubt arose in the advertising culture where the most meretricious product can be made to look important by slick design.

The trend was bound to change our culture. Subliminally we believed you could look godlike, guzzle beer and win sailboat races, for example. Gorgeous advertisements assured us this was so. We believed it was cool to light up. The business sector was swift-boating us. A Chevrolet could be made to appear rival to a Jaguar.

I don’t mean to contend that a preference for trash was created out of whole cloth. I sold newspapers on the streets of Manhattan in the early nineteen-fifties, so I know how rooted is our interest in women in various states of undress, in gossip, in cheap rumor and scandal. But I think that in the nineteen-sixties journalism began to cross certain lines between appearance and a responsible presentation of fact and opinion. I think it was becoming apparent that a good package could conceal a lack of depth.

As the Bush Administration whipped up war fever prior to its disastrous incursion into Iraq the press swallowed the rationale without digesting it, even down to accepting the bogus idea that we had to go to war against a nation-state enemy that proved to have nothing to do with 9/11. In decades to come, presuming our republic survives the present corruption of its liberties, cable news tapes will be re-examined in our universities and we will marvel at their propagandistic nature. There was CNN literally beating war drums, using graphics that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels could only have dreamed of to instill the idea that there was a real enemy in Iraq, real weapons of mass destruction and a front line in the war on terrorism. The facts were otherwise, but CNN—it was a foregone conclusion Fox News would help the Administration sell the lie—fell to the temptation to present a Wagnerian package rather than pursue the hard task of challenging the Adminstration’s bushwah.

It’s like the difference between examining the technical specifications for an appliance and simply taking the advertiser’s word for it. We have come as a culture to take somebody’s word for it as long as it panders to our expectations. We have carried our aversion to disappointment to extremes and come to regard difficult news as offensive to our sensibilities.

The promise of advertising to make everything easy and beautiful has lured our culture away from the task of sorting out information, fact from appearance, complexity from seductive simplicity. In our preference for simplicity, half-truths and lies, simply because they go down well with our prejudices, we have come to accept the appearance of things for their reality.

There is nothing new about this. Battle cries and the lame-brained certitudes of mullahs and priests have often gulled a people into war and other catastrophes, but our particular American tragedy is that it was thought from the very beginning of the republic that its citizens would have to work hard to understand the complexities before them or they would lose their ideals to the attractive witlessness of authoritarian regime. In this historic task advertising—the triumph of appearance over actuality—has not served us well.                       —DM