David Rieff: The Road to Hell is Paved

After almost a month in India, I returned to New York via Berlin the day after the Super Bowl. In many media accounts in the run-up to the game, the New Orleans Saints had been associated with liberals and the Indianapolis Colts with conservatives. Presumably, President Obama's telling Diane Sawyer that he was rooting for New Orleans played some role. Though why the victory of a squad of overpaid, steroid-ingesting Hessians, with not much more connection to the Crescent City than I have to the cities I visit regularly for work, should be cause for liberal rejoicing or conservative rue is beyond me. But major sporting events, whether in America, Germany, or India are invariably contexts for harmless irrationality. Complaining about that is about as useful as complaining about the weather. What was disturbing was the amount of television airtime the next devoted to seriously discussing the merits of the advertisements that were run during the game. Walter Mitty fantasies are part of human nature; treating lies—which is what advertisements really are, however amusingly they are presented—as if they were the truth, or, worse, as if the truth or falsity of their content were irrelevant, should tell us that our culture is deeply, perhaps irretrievably deranged.

“Don't be so serious, David, lighten up: They're just commercials.” Well, no, actually they're not. The reality is that the term ‘commercial culture’ is an oxymoron, and a dangerous one at that. In a decent society, advertisements would come with warning labels, like cigarettes. In our society, they are treated as if they were benign, harmless performance pieces with little or no political or moral implications. But the history of 20th-century totalitarianism should have taught us otherwise. It is in the manufacturing of an ersatz reality based on lies—or, in our present case, on the eliding of the distinction between lies and truth—that people come to connive in their own misrule. The genius of the present age is how deeply these lies have become internalized.

Any social worker will tell you that junkies lie, that it goes with the territory. But what about a society incapable of getting beyond the lies on which its psychic tranquility depends, that is to say, a society bound and determined to lie to itself? Will democracy survive for long in such a society? Has it survived? My own view is that, if it has, that survival now hangs by a thread. Fueling the vanity of the present is that we see the lies of the past with such piercing clarity. But scrutinizing our own time with the same rigor? Not a chance. For to face the implications of the victory of branding—not just of consumer goods, but of political ideas, nations, even of human feelings—and of the hollowing out of democracy, will be the true legacy of the wired world that is too terrible to face. Better to cuddle up with the fantasy world of the specialists in 'framing,' the focus-group meisters and the copywriters.

Dorothy Parker said of Katharine Hepburn's acting that it ran the gamut of the emotions from “A to B.” The same thing can surely be said of the U.S. political debate at present. In fairness, there are still a few dissenting voices. The welcome reappearance, after a long hiatus, of the Chicago-based magazine, The Baffler, is an object lesson in what critical thinking can be at its best. But will it be heard? One should hope, but not be hopeful. In Denmark as recently as a generation ago, children who were being overly solemn were told “not to be a little Soren.” But the Soren in question, Soren Kierkegaard, knew something about the corrosive connection between mendacity and passivity. "What the age needs is awakening," he wrote. But what it needs is emphatically not what it prefers. And isn't the customer always right?