THE TRUTH WE SEE

When I can find a few minutes to do some reading that is not directly related to the academic projects I'm working on, I'm reading Kalle Lasn's brilliantly subversive book Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge - And Why We Must (Lasn is also the founder of ADBUSTERS Magazine). I came to the conclusion of his chapter "The Manchurian Consumer" and found the following selection that sounded both chilling and all too familiar:

Richard Condon’s 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate – which was turned into a movie Pauline Kael called ‘the most sophisticated political satire ever to come out of Hollywood’ – tells the story of an American soldier who is captured during the Korean War, shipped to Manchuria and groomed, via brainwashing, to become a robotic assassin programmed to kill the U.S. president upon a predetermined verbal command.

The subtext of the movie is that Americans are being depatterned by propaganda systems they may not understand or even be aware of. The modern consumer is indeed a Manchurian Candidate living in a trance. He has a vague notion that at some point early in his life, experiments were carried out on him, but he can’t remember much about them. While he was drugged, or too young to remember, ideas were implanted into his subconscious with a view to changing his behavior. The Manchurian Consumer has been programmed not to kill the president, but to go out and purchase things on one of a number of predetermined commands.

Slogans now come easily to his lips. He has warm feelings toward many products. Even his most intimate drives and emotions trigger immediate connections with consumer goods. Hunger equals Big Mac. Drowsiness equals Starbucks. Depression equals Prozac.

And what about that burning anxiety, that deep, almost forgotten feeling of alarm at his lost independence and sense of self? To the Manchurian Consumer, that’s the signal to turn on the TV.

The latest Mars Hill Audio Addenda came to my email inbox last week. The following quote by the late British theologian Colin Gunton was the header for the email:

"Why is it that a world dedicated to the pursuit of leisure and of machines that save labour is chiefly marked by its levels of rush, frenetic busyness and stress? . . . The paradox of modernity... is that however successful the understanding of time and space, the modern is less at home in the actual time and space of daily living than peoples less touched by [modern] changes. . . . Whatever the integration of space and time in science, in modern life there is at once cultural stagnation and febrile change, a restless movement from place to place, experience to experience, revealing little evidence of a serene dwelling in the body and on the good earth."

Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity