We Americans have been swimming in a soup of advertising for so long that we mistake our advertising for reality itself.What is advertising? Its not a statement as statements are supposed to be logically grounded with opinion backed up by facts. Advertising is basically simulation/dissimulation with manipulation replacing statements .Advertising is a simulated and sanitized version of reality that can only refer back to itself. It cannot withstand logic, fact finding, or reason. Advertising is like a disembodied smile with no connection to actual emotions.
We have been born and bred with this dominant type of "communication" for a long time going back several generations. The father of American advertising is a man named Edward Bernays--the founding father of "Madison Avenue". President Wilson was
desperate to get America into WWI but the American people were rabidly pacifistic. Just about everyone opposed getting involved in Europe's blood sports .But Wilson and America's elite were becoming aware of the power of advertising and Edward
Bernays was commissioned to attempt to rally support for entry into the war. This very early mass media campaign was called "The Committee for Present Danger" and it was wildly successful beyond anyone's anticipation. Bernays set up a type of road
show and took it everywhere in America denouncing the Huns as cannibalistic baby eaters, sexual predators, etc etc. Within less than a year, Americans were in line signing up for trench duty. Adolph Hitler credited American advertising for one of the main
reasons of Allied success and vowed to build up his own propaganda apparatus to equal it later on with the formation of the Nazi party.
And so it goes. With the introduction of TV our advertising culture took another quantum leap in simulation replacing thoughtful observation of reality. Disembodied statements fly across our screens relentlessly with zero thoughts attached. Our brains are constantly
distracted by flashing buzzing images enticing us to buy, vote, love, hate in an atmosphere of total manipulation. Normal human loyalty and empathy are shattered as our minds are pulled into the screen. Marshall Mc'Luhan said that, "The media is the message". What
he meant by this was that content was no longer as important as the delivery of that content. The media no longer mediates between you and reality. The media is replacing reality--replacing it with bright shining smiling facades that have no relationship to reality.
We have a faith-based reality basically with the faith placed in our simulations. Reality will eventually break in and mess up the hologram but until then we continue on our destruction. As the Swedish philosopher Nordstrom (no relation to the retail baron)
said, "There is no more loyalty. There is only shopping and fucking”. One of the reasons for our poor education in this country is the way that media saturation negates real thinking .Real thinking is dependent on you having some distance between you and what you are thinking about. Real thinking is dependent on quiet observation. The media saturation of our culture has removed this gap and the necessary quiet time. When you are totally Surrounded by the phenomenon you are trying to think about you become part of it. Thinking is dependent on being separated from what you are trying to observe instead of being part of it.
And so it goes in America on October 30,2006 on the eve of Halloween.