Obama: a Corporate Marketing Creation

John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker. He has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US. You can see the rest of the speech here; remember to rate it up.



Please go rate this up on YouTube (click on the picture above). We cannot begin to hold them accountable, until we understand what they need to be held accountable for.

Komfort Thru Kool-Aid

Dunno know 'bout you, but I'm keeping a close watch on Obama; and so far, his picks aren't totally reassuring.

When I was 10, I was best friends with Donna Drvaric, who, like me, liked to read.

My parents did a good thing when they chose to buy a tract home on a lot that backed onto Whitnall Park. The park is still there, in a suburb of Milwaukee, which had had a socialist government for many years and thus had stellar infrastructure (many socialists were, far as I can tell, and still are, about serving people – they created a great public school system {my highschool had everything from auto shop to 4th-year Latin, plus a calculus course that made my subsequent East Coast college calculus seem aimed at retards}, the best-designed freeway and other infrastructure in any city I've ever lived in, plus great public parks, among other things {I wish they'd taken a shot at health care}).

So anyway, on the border of my parents' yard and this really great park, I and my sis had located/enhanced what we called a fort but what I also thought of as a refuge. Boulders, trees, and a flat spot.

So during this one summer, Donna Drvaric and I regularly mixed up whatever combination of available Kool-Aid flavors we imagined might be most ambrosial (we had to complicate things); assembled selected fruit (we'd gotten the idea that fruit amp'd the luxury factor); gathered up our current reads and some comfy quilts; spread out in the leafy half-shade of our fort; and spent a decent number of summer days there, reading, eating fruit, and drinking Kool-Aid.

It was Donna's slightly older bro who intro'd me, in one afternoon, to both Love Potion No. 9 and Do Wah Diddy:



Check that drummer. Sorry, they f'd up the end; here are more versions, all enjoyable; but mysteriously, they all kinda f' the endings up:









Four decades later, when my mom was on her last cancer, I shot the pic below as she walked through our "fort" into the park.

"The Century of the Self" by Adam Curtis

Below is Part 4 of an excellent BBC series documenting how, beginning in the 1920's, Freudian theories gave rise to public relations techniques that have been used to uncover irrational, often self-centered or petty motivations of whole populations, so as to either cater to or manipulate them.

(Note, this video is nearly an hour long -- wish it moved a bit more quickly -- but the info is fascinating and important, and the visuals and audio are terrific -- well-edited, with lots of cool archival stuff. If you can't spare the time, I'm providing a cursory summary of some of the main ideas below.)



These psychoanalytically-derived techniques have been used not only by businesses in designing or selling products but also by politicians (and, I might add, by religious leaders -- see, e.g., Brands of Faith) in marketing themselves.

Some using these techniques believed they were helping to bring about a more democratic system in which the consumer or voter was "king." But the point of a "focus group" is not to hear our considered opinions on any given topic but rather to discern the more primitive desires and fears we might not admit to if asked but that often, with or without our awareness, drive our behavior.

After decades of immersion in the P.R. resulting from these techniques, we've gone from seeing ourselves as exploited by business interests to -- rightly or benightedly -- viewing the marketplace as a main source of identity support and fulfillment.

But our democracy has to some extent been reduced from an electorate actively undertaking organized action to make the world better for others as well as ourselves to a relatively atomized, passive agglomeration of consumers who secretly feel entitled to prioritize gratification of their every self-centered whim.

We feel we are free, but in reality, we've been enslaved through our unconscious fears and desires. We all kinda knew that, but the documentary provides fascinating details about how it was done, which can help arm us against such efforts in the present, as well as providing insight into the implications for our future.

You can see the other parts of the series on the Internet Archive or Google Video.

On a somewhat related subject, I'd like to recommend the recent New Yorker article, "Twilight of the Books," on the effects of the rise in TV watching and relative decline in reading. Among other things, it describes studies suggesting that proficient readers may think differently than people who rely more on visual communication. While both kinds of thinking are probably valuable, it appears that, generally, visual communication involves thinking oriented toward graphic, functional-narrative or emotional content, while reading facilitates abstract reasoning and an ability to compare and contrast subject-matter based on a wider array of kinds of logic.

Interesting to think about in connection with other studies about TV. As I wrote in a previous post (analyzing the Smith/Cohen cover video of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), "We all live in an ever more fully-saturated mass-media environment that continually urges us to consume and invites us to flee consciousness above all. Studies have shown how much TV has in common with both addiction and brainwashing – see here, here, and here. TV is unusual in that on the one hand, the brains of people watching it appear much more inert than usual, with their critical faculties turned almost completely off, while on the other hand, they are nonetheless uncritically absorbing the commercial and other messages being transmitted."