ENGL 3815 Survey of
Popular Culture
Fall 2013
PH 321
Dr. David Lavery
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Boorstin’s Epigraphs
Technology . . . the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t
have to experience it.—Max Frisch
My money affairs are in a bad way. You remember before the
wedding, Anisim brought me some new rubles and half rubles? I
hid one packet, the rest I mixed with my own . . . But now I can’t
make out which is real money and which is counterfeit, it seems
to me they are all false coins. . . . When I take a ticket at the
station, I hand three rubles, then I think to myself: Are they false?
And I‘m frightened. I can't be well.—Anton-Checkhov, The Hollow
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When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect--we
even demand--that it bring us momentous events since the night
before. We turn on our car radio as we drive to work and expect
"news" to have occurred since the morning paper went to press.
Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only to shelter
us, to keep us warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but to
relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and
interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We
expect our two week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and
effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby
place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and
Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes
every month, a new literary masterpiece every week, a rare
sensation every night. . . .
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We expect everything and anything. We expect the
contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars
which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. . .
. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the
move and ever more neighborly . . . to revere God and to be
God.
Never have people been more the masters of their
environment. Yet never has a people been more deceived
and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much
more than the world could possibly offer. (3-4; my
emphasis)
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Inventing
America
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Edmundo O’Gorman
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The Copernican Revolution
 The “Discovery” of Columbus
 America as an Invention
 America as Europe’s Dream
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American
Studies
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Perry Miller
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Richard Poirier
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Reflections
on America
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When you get there, there isn't any
there there.
--Gertrude Stein
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For some reason Americans are terrified
of the very idea of passionate love going
on past middle age. Are they afraid of
being alive? Do they want to be dead, i.e.,
safe?
May Sarton, Journal of Solitude
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To furnish a barren room is one thing.
To continue to crowd in furniture until
the foundation buckles is quite
another. To have failed to solve the
problem of producing goods would
have been to continue man in his
oldest and most grievous misfortune.
But to fail to see that we have solved
it, and to fail to proceed to the next
task, would be fully as tragic.
--John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent
Society
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Americans continually find themselves in the
position of having killed someone to avoid
sharing a meal which turns out to be too large to
eat alone.
--Philip Slater, Earthwalk
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America is striving to win power over the sum
total of things, complete and absolute
mastery of nature in all its aspects. . . . To
occupy God's place, to repeat his deeds, to
recreate and organize a man-made cosmos
according to man-made laws of reason,
foresight and efficiency: that is America's
ultimate objective. . . . It destroys whatever is
primitive, whatever grows in disordered
profusion or evolved through patient
mutation.
--Robert Jungk, Tomorrow is Already Here
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Consider to what extent an "antique" is prized because
it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it
is prized because it is an antique and as such is
saturated with another time and another place and is
therefore resistant to absorption by the self just as a
pine piling saturated in creosote resists corrosion by the
sea and thus possesses a higher coefficient of
informing power for the naught of self.
If you say that a writing table made by Thomas
Sheraton is of value because it is excellently made and
beautiful, how would you go about making a writing
table now that would be similarly prized as an antique
two hundred years from now?
The real question of course is whether the twentiethcentury self is different from the eighteenth-century self,
both in its reliance on "antiques" to inform itself and in
its ability to make a writing table which is graceful and
useful and for no other reason. Was a well-to-do
eighteenth-century Englishman content to buy a
Sheraton writing table, or would he have preferred a
fifteenth-century "antique"?
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help
Book
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Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon
under these circumstances [as a sightseer] and see it for what it
is—as one picks up a strange object from one's back yard and
gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand
Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic
complex which has already been formed in the sightseer's mind.
Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the
symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer the thing as it
confronted the Spaniard; it is rather that which has already been
formulated by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders,
and the words Grand Canyon. As a result of this preformulation,
the source of the sightseer's pleasure undergoes a shift. Where the
wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his penetration of
the thing itself, from a progressive discovery of depths, patterns,
colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction
by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed
complex. If it does so, if it looks just like the postcard, he is
pleased; he might even say, "Why it is every bit as beautiful as a
picture postcard!" He feels he has not been cheated . . . .
Is looking like sucking: the more lookers, the less there is to see?
--Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle
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At different times in our history, different cities have been the focal
point of a radiating American spirit. In the late eighteenth century, for
example, Boston was the center of a political radicalism that ignited a
shot heard round the world a shot that could not have been fired any
other place but the suburbs of Boston. . . . In the mid-nineteenth
century, New York became the symbol of the idea of a melting-pot
America or at least a non-English one as the wretched refuse from all
over the world disembarked at Ellis Island and spread over the land
their strange languages and even stranger ways. In the early twentieth
century, Chicago, the city of big shoulders and heavy winds, came to
symbolize the industrial energy and dynamism of America. . . .
Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor
of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high
cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is
a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such
proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse
increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion,
news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into
congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even
much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of
amusing ourselves to death.—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to
Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
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The commonly accepted notion that
Americans are materialists is pure
bunk. A materialist is one who loves
material, a person devoted to the
enjoyment of the physical and
immediate present. By this
definition, most Americans are
abstractionists. They hate material,
and convert it as swiftly as possible
into mountains of junk and clouds
of poisonous gas. As a people, our
ideal is to have a future, and so long
as this is true we shall never have a
present.
--Alan Watts, Does It Matter?
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Someone once wrote a definition
of the difference between English
and American humor. . . . He said
that the English treat the
commonplace as if it were
remarkable and the Americans
treat the remarkable as if it were
commonplace.
--James Thurber
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If America didn't have Blacks it would
be Switzerland.
—Attributed to Roy Blount
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American life is a powerful solvent.
--George Santayana
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A new, unsteady kind of creature lurches
forth on the deserted streets of America
these days. It is the Walking Driver. You can
tell immediately that these beings are not
true pedestrians: they waddle, they are
unsteady, they have little back-of-the-head
vision, they seem unused to the true weight
of their bodies. They are not bipeds, nor are
they four-legged creatures; they are semibipeds, sitting, folded creatures. A Martian
observing the lunch hour in one of our cities
said to me that an American without a car is
gravely ill, like a snail that lost its shell. In
fact, an American body is only a "body"
when it is inside an automobile. What we
see "walking" is only part of the body. . . .
--Andrei Codrescu, "The New Body”
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The American body, my friend explained,
is an aggregation of man and machine.
The latest addition to it is the computer.
Very soon, a body not seated in front of a
blinking screen can be considered as ill as
a body outside of a car. My Martian
friend, who has been a passionate
observer of Homo Americanus since the
nineteenth century, foresees a day when
all newly born humans will have a plug
inserted in the small of their back. There
is no doubt that the new symbiosis has
occurred.
--Andrei Codrescu, "The New Body”
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"America's critical role in the planetization of
humanity does seem to be that of the catalytic
enzyme that breaks down all the traditional
cultures of the world, be they Asiatic, Islamic, or
European. With Disneyland in Paris and Tokyo,
the United States is well on its way to dissolving
all the world cultures, and I do not think any
nativistic revolt of Islam will succeed in stopping
it any more than Marxist-Leninism did." (79)
--William Irwin Thompson, The American
Replacement of Nature
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For what underlay our clearing of the continent were
the ancient fears and divisions that we brought to the
New World along with the primitive precursors of the
technology that would assist in transforming the
continent. Haunted by these fears, driven by our
divisions, we slashed and hacked at the wilderness we
saw so that within three centuries of Cortes's
penetration of the mainland a world millions of years in
the making vanished into the voracious, insatiable maw
of an alien civilization. Musing on this time scale, one
begins to sense the enormity of what we brought to our
entrance here. And one begins to sense also that it was
here in America that Western man became loosed into a
strange, ungovernable freedom so that what we now
live amidst is the culminating artifact of the civilization
of the West.
--Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography
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The View
from Abroad
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I think that in no country in the civilized world is
less attention paid to philosophy than in the
United States. . . . in most of the operations of
mind, each American appeals only to the
individual effort of his own understanding. . . .
--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
America
America is therefore one of the countries where the
precepts of Descartes are least studied, and are best
applied. Nor is this surprising. The Americans do not
read the work of Descartes, because their social
conditions deter them from speculative studies; but
they follow his maxims, because this same social
condition naturally disposes their minds to adopt them.
In the midst of the continual movement which agitates
a democratic community, the tie which unites one
generation to another is relaxed or broken; every man
there readily loses all trace of the ideas of his
forefathers, or takes no care about them. . . . Americans
are constantly brought back to their own reason as the
obvious and proximate source of truth. It is not only
confidence in his fellow man which is destroyed, but
the disposition for trusting the authority of any man
whatsoever. Every one shuts himself up in his own
breast, and affects from that point to judge the world.
--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
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The distinctive vice of the new world is
already beginning to infect old Europe
with its ferocity and is spreading a lack
of spirituality like a blanket. Even now
one is ashamed of resting, and
prolonged reflection almost gives
people a bad conscience. One thinks
with a watch in one's hand, even as
one eats one's midday meal while
reading the latest news of the stock
market; one lives as if one always
might "miss out on something."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
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There is no country on earth where the "power-word,"
the magic-formula, the slogan or advertisement is more
effective than in America. We Europeans laugh about
this, but we forget that faith in the magical power of the
word can move more than mountains. Christ himself
was a word, the Word. We have become estranged
from this psychology, but in the American it is still alive.
It has yet to be seen what America will do with it.
Thus the American presents a strange picture: A
European with Negro behavior and an Indian soul. He
shares the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil. Certain
Australian primitives assert that one cannot conquer
foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestorspirits who reincarnate themselves in the newborn.
There is a great psychological truth in this. . . .
C. G. Jung, "Mind and Earth"
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The foreign land assimilates its conqueror. But unlike the Latin
conquerors of Central and South America, the North Americans
preserved their European standards with the most rigid
Puritanism, though they could not prevent the souls of their
Indian foes from becoming theirs. Everywhere the virgin earth
causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to sink to the
level of its indigenous inhabitants. Thus, in the American, there is
a discrepancy between conscious and unconscious that is not
found in the European, a tension between an extremely high
conscious level of culture and an unconscious primitivity. This
tension forms a psychic potential which endows the American
with an indomitable spirit of enterprise and an enviable
enthusiasm which we in Europe do not know. The very fact that
we still have our ancestral spirits, and that for us everything is
steeped in history, keeps us in contact with our unconscious, but
we are so caught in this contact and held so fast in the historical
vice that the greatest catastrophes are needed to wrench us
loose and to change our political behavior from what it was five
hundred years ago.
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Our contact with the unconscious chains us to the
earth and makes it hard for us to move, and this is
certainly no advantage when it comes to
progressiveness and all the other desirable motions of
the mind. Nevertheless I would not speak ill of our
relation to good Mother Earth. Plurimi per transibunt;
but he who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation
from the unconscious and from its historical conditions
spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait
for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every
individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any
kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal,
earthy ground of his being.
C. G. Jung, "Mind and Earth"
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Europe visibly aspires to be
governed by an American
commission. Its entire policy is
directed to that end.
Not knowing how to rid
ourselves of our history, we
will be relieved of it by a
fortunate people who have
almost none. They are a
happy people and they will
force their happiness on us.
Paul Valery
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A character in Evelyn Waugh's Put
Out More Flags said that the
difference between prewar and
postwar life was that, prewar, if one
thing went wrong the day was
ruined; postwar, if one thing went
right the day would be made.
America is a prewar country,
psychologically unprepared for one
thing to go wrong.
--Anthony Burgess, "Is America Falling
Apart?”
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The Japanese may make all the
televisions but the Americans make all
the images.
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America and
the Ersatz
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Now, from America, empty indifferent
things are pouring across, sham things,
dummy life. . . . A house, in the
American sense, an American apple or
a grapevine over there, has nothing in
common with the house, the fruit, the
grape into which went the hopes and
reflections of our forefathers. . . . Live
things, things lived and conscient of us,
are running out and can no longer be
replaced. We are perhaps the last still
to have known such things.
--Rainer Maria Rilke
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Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007). French
sociologist, communication theorist,
and media critic.
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Laughter on American television has taken the place
of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the
news, the stock exchange reports, and the weather
forecast are about the only things spared. But so
obsessive is it that you go on hearing it behind the
voice of Reagan or the Marines disaster in Beirut.
Even behind the adverts. It is the monster from Alien
prowling around in all the corridors of the spaceship. it
is the sarcastic exhilaration of a puritan culture. In
other countries the business of laughing is left to the
viewers. here, their laughter is put on the screen,
integrated into the show. It is the screen that is
laughing and having a good time. You are simply left
alone with your consternation. (49)
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The glass facades merely reflect the environment,
sending back its own image. This makes them much
more formidable than any wall of stone. It's just like
people who wear dark glasses. Their eyes are hidden
and other see only their own reflection. Everywhere
the transparency of interfaces in internal refraction.
Everything pretentiously termed 'communication' and
'interaction'—walkman, dark glasses, automatic
household appliances, hi-tech cars, even the perpetual
dialogue with the computer—ends up with each
monad retreating into the shade of its own formula,
into its self-regulating little corner and its artificial
immunity." (59-60)
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There is nothing more mysterious than a TV
set left on in an empty room. it is even
stranger than a man talking to himself or a
woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is
as if another planet is communicating with
you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what
it really is: a video of another world,
ultimately addressed to no one at all,
delivering its images indifferently, indifferent
to its own messages (you can easily imagine
it still functioning after humanity has
disappeared). (50)
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Robert Frank, “Restaurant, U.S. 1 Leaving
Columbia, South Carolina” (1955)
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In America the arrival of night-time or periods of rest
cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to
see the technological process halted. Everything has
to be working all the time, there has to be no let-up in
man's artificial power, and the intermittent character of
natural cycles . . . has to be replaced by a functional
continuum that is sometimes absurd. . . . "The skylines
lit up at night, the air-conditioning systems cooling
empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the
middle of the day all have something both demented
and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a
rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as
scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his
primitive night. There is some truth in all this. But what
is striking is the fascination with artifice, with energy
and space. (50-51)
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From a historical standpoint, America is
weightless. (52)
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Europeans experience anything relating to
statistics as tragic. They immediately read in
them their individual failure and take refuge
in pained denunciation of the merely
quantitative. The Americans, by contrast, see
statistics as an optimistic stimulus, as
representing the dimensions of their good
fortune, their joyous membership of the
majority. Theirs is the only country where
quantity can be extolled without compunction.
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America
In the future, power will belong to those
peoples with no origins and no authenticity. . . .
Look at Japan, which to a certain extent has
pulled off this trick better than the US itself,
managing in what seems to us an unintelligible
paradox, to transform the power of territoriality
and feudalism into that of deterritoriality and
weightlessness. Japan is already a satellite of
the planet Earth. but America was already in its
day a satellite of the planet Europe. Whether
we like it or not, the future has shifted towards
artificial satellites.
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In Don DeLillo's White Noise, the small Midwestern town
where Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney teaches at
the College on the Hill is threatened by an "airborne toxic
event" spread by a nearby chemical factory. Soon after the
accident, Gladney speaks with a technician from
SIMUVAC, a member of a "simulated evacuation" task
force delegated to the creation of a working model of
"events" like the one that has just taken place. "But this
evacuation isn't simulated," Gladney observes. "It's real."
"We know that," the technician acknowledges. "But we
thought we could use it as a model." Asked, then, how the
actual event is going, he replies:
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The insertion curve isn't as smooth as we would like.
There's a probability excess. Plus which we don't
have our victims laid out where we'd want them if this
was an actual simulation. In other words we're forced
to take our victims where we find them. . . . You have
to make allowances for the fact that everything we
see tonight is real. There's a lot of polishing we still
have to do. . . .
In the Space Age, acoustician R.
Murray Schafer shows in The
Tuning of the World that despite an
obsessesion with "high fidelity" in
sound reproduction, we live, in the
midst of our simulations, in perhaps
the lowest fidelity soundscape in
human history (41). Against the
perpetual background noise of both
indoor and outdoor environments,
the perpetual hum and drone of
generators, motors, airconditioning, flowing electricity,
"Moozak" (the "audio analgesia of
earthly boredom" as Schafer calls
it), radio and television, individual,
"discrete" sounds have lost virtually
all definition.
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HYATT: THE PERFECT WORLD
Andrei Codrescu
I went to the Hyatt House in Indianapolis recently,
and I have come back to report that it can support
human life indefintely. Its climate very much
resembles that of the earth. There are green
plants hanging from protruding formations, and
once I stumbled into a circle of extremely real
looking potted shrubs around a black piano. The
air is neither too thin nor too thick and is slightly
scented by the thousands of bodies scrubbed with
hotel soap that stumble out of its showers every
morning. The creators of the Hyatt have contrived
to take a perfect late summer day on earth and
are able to play it over and over, no matter what
season or time is experienced on the outside.
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I had a good look at the city of Indianapolis out the window of
my room and the air outside appeared to my naked eye to be
cold, crisp and turbulent. I experienced none of those
conditions behind the plate glass window that separated me
from the city. I would have liked to go out there, to walk
around, but I immediately suppressed that nostalgic impulse
by reminding myself that, thanks to modern art which isolates
the eyes from all the other senses, I could safely view the
world without actually mucking about in it.
But the most remarkable aspect of the Hyatt was the
supportive nutritive system. On several floors discrete little
feeding stations functioned smoothly. All of them produced
several varieties of nachos, Bloody Marys, and fried zucchini.
The ones on the lower floors also stacked large slabs of
recently killed meat so that, I became convinced, an advanced
system of communication existed between the Hyatt and the
outside world.
As I rose silently in the glass bubbles of the elevators, I
surveyed the seemingly endless tiers of this perfectly
ordered world. In a large room businessmen stood before
gadgets with drinks in their hands. In another large room
writers read poems to appreciative audiences with
pockets bulging with their own poems. This was the room
where I too was expected. I pulled the paper from my
pocket. At the top it said "Hyatt, the Perfect World." I
began to read.
In a Cathy comic strip—Cathy Guisewite's ruthlessly perceptive daily
chronicle of modern spaciness—Cathy and her boyfriend Irving introduce us,
in a Sunday comic show-and-tell, to all the new material possessions in their
repertoire, all of which are "state of the art“ and none of which is ever used:
an "anodized aluminum multi-lens three-beam mini excavation spotlight that
live its life in the junk drawer with dead batteries"; a "high-tech, epoxyfinished, heavy-gauge
steel grid hanging unit for home repair tools that required two
carpenters to install and is now used as a scarf rack“
“safari clothes that will never be near a jungle";
"aerobic footgear that will never set foot in an aerobics class";
a "deep-sea dive watch that will never get damp";
"architectural magazines we don't read filled with pictures of furniture we
don't like";
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"financial strategy software keyed to a checkbook that's lost somewhere
under a computer no one knows how to work";
an "art poster from an exhibit we never went to of an artist we never heard
of.“
Guisewite brilliantly labels this post Me Decade conspicuous consumption,
"abstract materialism": materialism about as "realistic" or representational as
a Jackson Pollock canvas. "We've moved past the things we want and need
and are buying those things that have nothing to do with our lives," Cathy
herself tells us in the cartoon's final frame. In the 1980s, the age of the
yuppie, we perfected the art of what Time magazine has called
"transcendental acquisition."
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It was wonderful to find America,
but it would have been more
wonderful to miss it.
--Mark Twain
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The Daily Show
John Oliver on Ironic Distance
John Oliver on Bush’s offer to have
Rove appear before the congress
"The Long Kiss Dubai"
Holocaust Denial Conference
"Petty Woman"
Gay Nazis
The Republicans Play the Rapture
Card
"Tangled Up in Bleau"
The Colbert Report
Colbert at the White House
Correspondents' Dinner
Lithgow Does Gingrich's Press Release
Heard on "The Colbert Report"
Pap Smears at Walgreen's
Colbert Decries the Casting of a British
Superman
Blaming God
Heard on "The Colbert Report"
Carrie-ing America
"Holy F&*$ing Shit”: Profanation, Parody, and Bleeping
American Unreality in The Onion, The Daily Show, and The
Colbert Report
Giving and Taking Offence, University of Aveiro, Portugal
Jon Stewart
Space Boosters
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The Pythia of Delphi has now been replaced by a computer which hovers over
panels and punch cards. The hexameters of the oracle have given way to
sixteen-bit codes of instruction. Man the helmsman has turned the power
over to the cybernetic machine. The ultimate machine emerges to direct our
destinies. Children phantasize flying their spacecrafts away from a crepuscular
Earth.--Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
. . . the emphasis on surface; the blankness of the protagonist; his striving
toward self-sufficiency, to the point of displacement from the recognizable
world. . . . Does the icy quality of an artificial outer space, the self-conscious
displacement and blankness of car commercials, MTV, and "Miami Vice,"
correspond to a glacial inner space?--Todd Gitlin, "We Build Excitement"
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Space Boosters
Space Boosters
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In a late 1980s issue of Marketing Week, a columnist laments the postJetsons lack of real Space Age advertising and calls for campaigns more
in keeping with an era of Star Wars and SDI (Myers 12).
Surely he cannot read magazines or watch television. Advertisements
could not be spacier than they are now. Never slow to capitalize on the
tacit tendencies of the cultural psyche, advertisments, "soak . . . up
certain ideals in circulation at the moment, and squeeze . . . a version of
them back at us." According to Todd Gitlin, ads present "the incarnation
of a popular ideal--or rather, the ideas of that ideal held by the
marketer." An advertisement is thus, in a sense, a "tiny utopia." The
commercial "conveys what we are supposed to think is the magic of
things; those things which, if we buy them, are supposed to work
miraculous transformations in our lives" ("We Build Excitement" 141). In
the Space Age, it seems, the advertising industry has realized that
virtually anything can now be sold to us through appeals to our
otherworldliness.
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
In their 1953 novel The Space Merchants, Frederik Pohl
and C. M. Kornbluth imagined a Madison Avenue
advertising agency given the task of convincing the
human race that it should migrate to an uninhabitable
Venus. In Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, we see
an early twenty first century Los Angeles cityscape in
which huge, floating video billboards beam promises
that "a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies."
Neither of these science fiction prophecies has come
true (though Sony has now developed multistory video
billboards), but they now hardly seem fantastic to us, for
though we are not yet being sold Venusian real estate,
we are being sold unearthliness.
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
In 1981, I lived and taught in Shanghai, People's Republic of China.
When I left with my family on a long Pan Am flight to an alien world, the
space shuttle Columbia, then on its maiden voyage, orbited the Earth. It
touched down soon after our arrival in Asia. In the Far East edition of
Time, I read that the successful mission had given post-Vietnam, postWatergate America a "mighty lift"; and President Reagan, convalescing
from an assassination attempt, waxed eloquently to the Columbia's
heroes, telling them (I learned), "Through you, we feel as giants once
again.”
On my return to the United States later that summer, badly cultureshocked from my time in the People's Republic, I struggled to acclimate
myself again to the frenetic, spacy American way of life. More than
ordinarily attuned to its peculiarities and absurdities, I began to notice a
new kind of advertisement appearing with surprising frequency on
television (and, I might note, I watched television with open-eyed
wonder after months without it in Shanghai). The image of space was,
throughout the decade, everywhere.
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw Space Age microphotography--designed, we are
told, to view the Earth from space--reveal the epidermis of
a woman's skin in order to convince us of the positive
effects of an antiaging cream.
--I saw the three-ply lamination of Glad garbage bags fuse
together, set against the backdrop of interstellar space.
--I saw Maybelline Dial-a-Lash tubes shoot off from
launching pads.
--I saw a fashion model, standing on the lunar surface,
wear Revlon lipstick said to exhibit "out-of-this-world
colors.”
--I saw a Technics turntable orbit the Earth.
--I saw the Cincinnati Bell logo transformed into a space
station.
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Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw an ad for Always Plus Night Super Maxi Pads depict
the feminine hygiene product as a UFO.
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Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw a ready-toassemble "wall system"-labeled, of course, as a
"Space Age" product-offer "new heights in
organization" and
"infinite" possibilities for
creativity, solving storage
needs by allowing the
owner to "fill unlimited
space.”
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw a United Negro College Fund appeal, showing
African-American scholars in graduation robes and mortar
boards set against yet another cosmic backdrop. (For, after
all, this solicitation for contributions informs us that the
mind is as "vast as space.")
--I saw Taster’s Choice--like Tang before it--offered to us as
the choice of astronauts (the shuttle astronauts in this case).
--I saw a spot for Home Box Office show a family in its living
room flying through space, watching HBO
.--I saw an insurance company's famous "piece of the rock"
appear in a cosmic landscape resting on an Earth seemingly
without atmosphere (the moon appears only miles away),
orbited by a ranch-style, two-stall garage home, a sports car
approaching on a highway through space, and a floating
sailboat followed by frolicking dolphins--all in keeping with
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Survey of Popular Culture
the advertisement's promise that "With the Prudential, the
sky's the limit.”
--I saw cartoon children carried into space by Bubblicious
balloon bubbles. ("It tastes so unreal it'll blow you away.”)
--I saw, during a decade in which (inspired by Reagan-era
deregulation) it became increasingly difficult to distinguish
Saturday morning television programming from its
advertising, "kidvid" become more and more spacy. (A
television critic notes that producers--under the influence of
both George Lucas's and Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars"--came
to agree that "outer space, high tech and faraway enemies in
a distant future are a safer, tidier, less complicated way" to
capture an audience (Engelhardt 1986, 88-89).
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw a vacuous blonde, female astronaut in a lunar lander
proclaim to her companions, "Go ahead without me. I've got a
run!" ("She would have been the first woman on the moon if
only she'd worn Sheer Business Panty Hose.")
--I saw Timex watches link together to form Star Wars-type
spacefighters, accompanied by a montage of images of a man
and a woman in space suits on an alien world, while a voiceover tells us that "Timex performs with all the accuracy and
beauty of the cosmos.”
--I saw a special new antiplaque electric tooth-brush
("Interplak"), bearing a striking resemblence to the starship
Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, majestically dock into its
recharger on a bathroom sink --choreographed to a Strauss
waltz.
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw a man, traveling through a magically real yet alien
landscape (Earth visible on the horizon), have a "vision of the
future," not, we are told, of "space travel" or "time machines,"
but of the financial welfare of his family (through the assistance
of Equitable Insurance). Upon his arrival home, he then
witnesses his garage door open--like the entrance to the
mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind--to disclose a
blaze of white light out of which emerges a figure we take to be
an alien but which turns out in fact to be his daughter, excitedly
pronouncing, "Daddy!"
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw woofers and
tweeters of a DelcoGM Sound System
become a formation of
flying saucers
beckoning us to "Ride
into the Sound Set.”
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw a youth, dressed in Levi's jeans, launched toward
distant skies while a voice explains that in the famous jeans
"the mind knows no limits.”
--I saw an ad for a Chevrolet pickup truck instruct us not to
"leave Earth without it" and insist that a new model has
"brakes so good they're almost extraterrestrial.”
--I saw two female astronauts extol the benefits of a new rollon deodorant called "Real": "We have seen the future and it
is Real.”
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw "Almost Home"
chocolate-chip cookies
float in space in order to
optimally display their
"almost out of this
world" taste.
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw a man in a cumbersome space suit EVA into the
cockpit of a new Toyota compact and then--so impressed is
he with the car--leap in ecstasy out of the frame, beyond the
limits of gravity, never to come down. ("Oh what a feeling!")
--I saw the new Hyundai Sonata, introduced to us as a "space
vehicle," soar off into the cosmos at the commercial's close.
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw an image of a patch
of lawn, complete with a
house, shade trees, and
two family dogs, floating
in outer space, evidently
removed from the Earth
by cutting along a still
visible dotted line
surrounding the property,
advertising the Invisible
Fence "dog containment
system."
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw a solicitation for new members of the National Space
Society illustrate its motives and goals through two paintings:
The Ultimate Sandbox (by Michael Whelan) showing a little girl
in a "Miss Piggy" space suit building a sand castle on the moon;
and Leonardo's Finale (by David Brian), in which the great
Renaissance man, sitting in his study surrounded by drawings
and plans for future discovery, holds a prototype model of the
space shuttle in his hands.
--I saw three former Apollo astronauts ("Schirra, Apollo 7,"
"Bean, Apollo 12," "Gordon, Apollo 12"), looking for all the
world like has-been athletes, testify--in extreme, unflattering
close-ups--that Actifed relieved their snuffy noses in spaces.
--I saw an Always Ultra-Thin Panty Liner become an
unidentified flying object.
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw a small, evidently sick
young girl lying in bed, a
thermometer in her mouth,
securely wrapped in sheets
with a sky and cloud pattern
(which, because they fill the
frame of the advertisement,
make her appear to be
floating), reassuringly touch a
space helmet--all beneath a
headline that reads: "When
your little space traveler has a
fever . . ."
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw both Motorcraft spark plugs and oil filters blast off, as
if from launching pad, from the hoods of Ford automobiles
toward distant skies.
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw the Chevrolet Astro minivan circle in orbit about
the Earth and yet (we are promised) still remain small
enough to "fit right in your garage!”
--I saw--in yet another image plagiarized from Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (promoting McDonald's
"Spaceship Happy Meals")--children look up at the sky
with true cosmic yearning (fantasizing, no doubt, about
"flying their spaceships away from a crepuscular Earth").
--I saw a poster in a McDonald's restaurant (advertising a
"Space Age Calendar") instruct parents to "help your child
into outer space.”
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw the traditional Jewish child's toy top, the dreidel, no
longer satisfactory, undergo a Space Age sea change into an
"Outer Space Dreidel" (made in Taiwan)--a battery-powered
model that not only lights up but "makes outer space sounds!”
--I saw, prior to the feature presentation, a short subject,
sponsored by theater owners and intended to discourage
littering, depict an interstellar cloud of snack bar-debris-popcorn, Raisinettes, straws, nachos, Milk Duds--out of which
an exemplary soft-drink cup/rocket speeds toward the brightly
lit landing dock of a trash receptacle/space station.
--I saw a cartoon Albert Einstein plug the "genius" of Betamax
while ensconced in an armchair in a living room floating in the
cosmos.
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw a Canon Typestar
typewriter blast into orbit ("A
new Typestar lifts off"), its
"lift-off" correction key in turn
lifting off from it, like a
communications satellite out
of the cargo bay of the space
shuttle.
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw the "baby of today" in
the "diaper of the future"
(actually old-fashioned 100
percent cotton!) orbit about
the Earth in the arms of a
New Age father whose legs-evidently his means of cosmic
propulsion--dissolve into
beams of light.
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw Concept Custom Length
electric guitar strings ("The Final
Frontier" in guitar strings)
advertised by an image of a
spaceman strolling the lunar
landscape, an American flag planted
in the moon to his left, the Earth
visible in the background; and I saw
Kahler guitar strings, in comparable
"far-out" imagery, become in effect
the orbital path of a space vehicle
made of tuning pegs.
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw the Nady Systems Lightning
Guitar and Thunder Bass-instruments with "the right stuff"-billed as the first electronic guitars
of the Space Age and advertised in
copy divided into sections entitled
"Countdown," "Liftoff," "All
Systems Go," "Ground Control,"
and "Link Up" and in the usual
"product in orbit" imagery; and I
saw the Carvin V220 guitar blast
off from Earth in an ad whose
headline proclaims the instrument
to be "One Step Beyond."
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw an ad for a Kenwood stereo
satellite receiver announce the
company's proud claim that "after
conquering Earth, we headed into
space." (An image from the
Japanese science fiction film The
Mysterians [1959] appears at the
top.) "We've been a force in home
and car audio on this planet for
over 25 years. But now we're
aiming even higher." "Get on
board now," we are warned in a
class Space Age threat. "Or get left
behind.”
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw a space colonist, showered by the spores of a huge,
menacing flower on an alien planet, plagued by allergies ("No
matter where you go, there's going to be pollen"), at least until
he uses Contac.
--I saw us encouraged to give to the college of our choice
through an image of a young boy in a Day the Earth Stood Still
space suit and his dog standing beside a space capsule /
doghouse accompanied by the following text:
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Survey of Popular Culture
Today he's off exploring the back
yard. Tomorrow, he may be off
exploring new galaxies.
But before kids of today can conquer
the frontiers of outerspace, they'll
have to conquer the complexities of
mathematics, physics and chemistry.
That's where you come in. For only
with your help can they be assured of
the first-rate college education they'll
need. . . .
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
So please invest in the future. Give
generously to the college of your
choice.
You'll be helping launch America to a
successful future."Help him get
America's future off the ground," the
public service advertisment's
headline pleads.
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw a woman, once "in the dark about blinds,"
open her Levelors --blinds "enlightened by Space Age
technology"--to watch, as if from the Archimedean
point, an Earthrise.
--I saw a woman in Sheer Energy slippers blast off
from the Earth's surface--finally able, with their
support, to overcome the harsh demands gravity has
placed on her feet and distance herself from its
draining effect on her energy.
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw a new breakfast
cereal from Ralston-Purina
called Freakies--marketed
as "multigrain . . . crunchy
honey-tasting spaceships
with marshmallow"--offer
"out of this world fun with
earthly nutrition.”
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
--I saw the legendary Barbie herself enter into space.
"Barbie's on the Moon," proclaimed the cover of an
issue of Barbie magazine, and there she was, in her
"Astronaut Barbie" manifestation. (Later, in the
"Barbie Drama" section, I learned that being the first
woman on the moon was all a dream, though a spacy
date with Ken at the "Lunar Lounge" made it all come
true!)
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw in a Space Age toy store a new line of dolls called
the Shimmerons, a species of alien Barbie clones. "LacySpacy--Out of this World . . . Space Cadets" with spindly
bodies and sparkling wardrobes, they have come to
Earth--according to their back-of-the package
mythology --because our planet offers not only the
cosmos' best shopping but also the most awesome
parties! ("What on Earth are they doing here? Well the
Shimmerons wanted to discover why the Planet Earth is
number one for teenage fun, and show you how fun is
done on the Planet Shimmeron." "Here on Earth, the
Shimmerons are discovering skateboards, hot dogs,
rock music, and shopping malls!")
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
--I saw us encouraged to
"Expect the World of ABC
News," for, as their
advertisement--showing the
Earth from space, coupled
with a cosmic telephoto lens
and an extraterrestrial Peter
Jennings—made clear, the
network evidently covers the
planet from the Archimedean
point.
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Survey of Popular Culture
--And I saw that entrepeneurial plans are afoot (I cite but three examples) (1)
to bury people in space (several companies have marketed such schemes,
one of which involves a three-hundred-pound spacecraft containing no
fewer than fifteen thousand "cremains" launched into polar orbit ["Ashes of
the Stars"]); (2) to offer extraterrestrial vacations (Davies; "Orbital Jaunts"
32-33); and (3) to develop robotic "space pets" (Liversidge).
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
Space has, no doubt, been sold to us along with our meat and potatoes for
some time now. As early as the 1960s, space ads--like those represented
here--exhibited most of the ascensionistic cliche 's we find in later ones. Nor
is the cosmic exaggeration of such advertising really new. It can be
understood as an extension of what Daniel Boorstin describes as "Booster
Talk: The Language of Anticipation," a way of speaking about things in which
"what may be is contemplated as though it were in actual existence"
(Boorstin is quoting an early nineteenth-century British observer of
American ways). Booster Talk is not misrepresentation--or at least it does not
seem that way to Americans--but rather a kind of clairvoyance, "not
exaggerating but only anticipating--describing things which had not yet 'gone
through the formality of taking place'" (Americans 296-98). But why, in the
decade of the space shuttle, did the pace and intensity of the pitch increase
so prominently?
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
Interestingly enough, in 1965 the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci found
the possibility that space might be marketable beyond belief. In If the
Sun Dies 135-37), she contemplated the possibility that the astronauts
might be commercialized but is told by a NASA spokesman that the idea
is ludicrous: "Can you imagine a billboard in Times Square with a
photograph of [Gordon] Cooper [one of the original Apollo 7 astronauts]
smoking a certain brand of cigarette? The cigarette of space! Up in space
Gordon Cooper smokes only . . . Inconceivable! None of them. . . ." This
was, of course, years before an astronaut became head of a major
airline, and famed test-pilot (and hero of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff)
Chuck Yeager lent his image in support of his favorite spark plugs.
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
Even as she wrote, Fallaci herself was already helping to
advertise space. She confesses, "When I returned to Milan I
stuck up in my study a huge map of the moon that had been
sent to me by the advertising office of Nestle's Powdered Milk.
On the Mare Copernicum was printed: Feed Your Babies on
Nestle's Powdered Milk, but it looked beautiful to me." Only
two years later Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey demonstrated
conclusively, with its open display of brand names in
extraterrestrial settings, that "space was finally going to be
conquered by Coca-Cola and AT & T."2 And by 1970, when
Norman Mailer published Of a Fire on the Moon, it had already
become apparent that "a new kind of commercial was being
evolved. NASA was vending space" (45).
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Survey of Popular Culture
But only in the 1980s did the vending become blatant: a prominent
feature of our cultural landscape. (As Andre' Marchand's Advertising
the American Dream shows, advertising "paved the way" for all that we
think of as modern; now it paves the way for the postmodernism of the
extraterrestrial.) "The master fantasy of the Reagan era," which informs
the "little utopias" of the Space Age advertising chronicled here, may
now be, as Todd Gitlin suggests, "the fantasy of thrusting, self-sufficient
man, cutting loose, free of gravity, free of attachments" ("We Build
Excitement" 143).
Implicit in most advertising, according to John Berger, is the following
hidden transaction: "The spectator-buyer is meant to envy the person
he will become if he buys the product. He is meant to imagine himself
transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy
which will then justify his loving himself." Thus, Berger concludes, the
"publicity image" of an advertisment "steals love of oneself as one is,
and offers it back for the price of the product" (134).
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
Is it too much to say that the Space Age advertisements
catalogued here--which sell, in a package deal, not just mascara,
or a Betamax, or Big Macs, but a hyperreal longing for spacesteal--or seek to steal, not just our love of ourselves, but our
very earthliness? But it does not, as in the normal marketing
dialectic, then offer it back. In a "bait and switch" duplicity, it
would rob us of it permanently.
And we seem so ready and willing to have it stolen. As Boorstin
observed (in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America) at
the very beginning of the Space Age, Americans are ruled by a
powerful will-to-illusion.
Survey of Popular Culture
Space Boosters
When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect-we even demand--that it bring us momentous events since
the night before. We turn on our car radio as we drive to
work and expect "news" to have occurred since the morning
paper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect
our house not only to shelter us, to keep us warm in the
winter and cool in the summer, but to relax us, to dignify us,
to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to
be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two
week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless.
We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place;
and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and
Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new
heroes every month, a new literary masterpiece every
week, a rare sensation every night. . . .
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Survey of Popular Culture
We expect everything and anything. We expect the
contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars
which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. . . .
We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the
move and ever more neighborly . . . to revere God and to be
God.
Never have people been more the masters of their
environment. Yet never has a people been more deceived
and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much
more than the world could possibly offer. (3-4; my
emphasis)
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
When Boorstin wrote these words in the early 1960s, he thought he was
speaking figuratively.
In 1983, I went to see E.T.: The Extraterrestrial in a movie theater in
Huntsville, Alabama (a city which, because it is home to NASA's Marshall
Space Flight Center, takes pride in its nickname: "The Rocket City"). At
this, my second viewing of Steven Spielberg's touching story of the
triumph of the values of the heart, I watched with interest a preliminary
commercial for Atari (screened before the film, I surmised, because
producers and distributors had convinced the game company the
demographics of a typical E.T. audience indicated openness to such a
sales pitch). In the ad--which exhibited special effects not unlike Tron's-a young man sits, back to the camera, dreaming up ideas for video
games, and the games he invents miraculously materialize around him,
filling the screen. As his dreams become wilder and wilder, as he
imagines "Asteroids" and "Space Invaders," he finds himself floating--as
does the audience--in interstellar space.
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture
The image is a common one now, of course; I'd seen it all before. But it struck
me that day in that context that it presented an ironic counterpoint to the
evocative tale of homesickness I was about to watch. Here, during a single
Space Age afternoon's entertainment, I was being asked to imagine myself as
unearthly, and then to feel the pathos of a poor alien creature trapped far
from home. I suspect that, against its own better wisdom, E.T. has promoted in
many of its viewers not that supreme value which E.T. himself cannot live
without--the need for a place, for a home--but rather extraterrestrial urges.
The desire to become precisely that which tortures E.T., robbing him
eventually of his very life (at least momentarily), extinguishing his heart-light,
the longing to become homeless and displaced ourselves, is so prominent
now, so much an everyday search image, that it would not surprise me if many
viewers of the film--if they could trade places with Elliott--might reply
affirmatively to E.T.'s petition at the movie's close to "Come."
Space Boosters
Survey of Popular Culture