LUDIC LOG

It is one of the hallmarks of modern culture -- that culture shaped by what Debord called "le spectacle", what Blonsky calls "The United States of Capitalism" -- that we are constantly presented with everyday life as something to be done by proxy: life at its least and at its best, from the highs of cavorting on the beach or passing tender moments with loved ones to the lows of cleaning the oven or languishing in a traffic jam, is meant to be lived not by you but for you. Virtually every image we are presented with in our daily routine shows all tasks being carried out, all goals accomplished, and all obstacles confronted not by us (or the models and actors designed to simulate us), but by our things, our objects, our products. The endless text of mass culture becomes unintelligible and disjointed when its foci are removed: without the product in their hands, the actresses and models, the spokesmen and pitchmen (even the businessmen and politicians, whose job it is to sell the product of capital and its byproduct of money) hold no interest for us. They have nothing to say: the items that define their purpose do their living for them, and they do our living for us.

In any commercial (certainly the definitive form of art and communication in the 20th century), the narrative is displaced: we are faced not with a story of people who achieve goals of their own with the aid of a product, but rather the adventures of a product which (who?) via its passage through the lives of people supposedly "just like you", brings happiness and joy to those who wisely consume it. The message is not that we may live our lives in greater fullness if we utilize the product or idea, but rather that the product or idea will do our living for us. Would you like to have a clean house? Use our cleanser; for without it housecleaning is impossible. Would you like the tinge and slide of romantic kisses? Without our international coffees, madam, the image would never have even entered your mind. The conditions of an adventurous sporting expedition and the lack of Mountain Dew are incompatible. Here is the idea of escaping your boring job and gaining respect and immeasurable wealth: to make this image a reality one need only buy our brand of high-quality education. We have become a culture of product, not of people, the hypertext of global capitalism a play in which the props have stolen the stage from the actors. This is a terribly important point in the propaganda of advertising: it is not that the purchase of an item or an idea enhances our ability to live life, but rather makes it possible to live life to begin with. The culture presents us with the image as well as the means of acquiring it. Here is the good life, here the images of happiness, vitality, freedom. This is the first product to pitch, equally as important as the bauble that will allow us to achieve it.

In the public discourse the idea is much the same: our politicians do not argue what constitutes happiness or freedom. That is taken so much as read that a public figure questioning the form or nature of the American Dream is as rare as a blue moon. Indeed, the public man rarely even discusses what the means of achieving that end is to be: they have their product to sell, after all. The nature of the debate between parties can be compared to a upscale department store's competition with a factory-seconds discount warehouse. At Saks Fifth Avenue, the products are on display (and, beyond the word, the life they will allow us to live) for a high price; that is simply the price you will pay, if that is the life you would live. At K-Mart, there is a lesser product at a lesser price, a lesser life that the uneducated and unfortunate can be convinced is quite as good as the former, a gesture on the part of the merchandisers that perhaps just because you are not skilled enough at the game of capital to amass your fortune, you might still be allowed to buy your way into a life like you are sold on television.

And for those lesser lives, deferment is still an option: credit is available even for them. Sold the idea of good living, they must buy something to achieve it; sold the idea of money, they must do something to acquire it. And since good living is an image in which money is an unspoken, unseen, and unquestionable necessity, they have to get more money than work offers. Hence this placard on a city bus: accompanying a picture of a good-natured, matronly Hispanic woman, the legend: "IF YOU ARE A NICE PERSON AND NEED MONEY, CALL (name and number)." Smaller text: "All I ask is that you pay it back." Beneath the benevolent mama's hemline, the smallest, asterisk-adorned text, red on yellow making it even harder to see: "subject to our standard credit approval". Indeed. It is difficult to imagine this sort of advertisement in any other medium than on public transit except perhaps glued to a light post or telephone pole on the outskirts of the slums; even here, it jars. Try to imagine this sort of thing appearing on television, even on UHF in the morning's small hours; picture it on a large and colorful billboard, or glossy in the pages of a magazine: unthinkable. To the makers of capitalist culture, to those who write the text whereby we gain our myths about living, truth and comfort, credit is a blunt tool, a crowbar, a useful asset for the accumulation of capital. For them, bad credit can be turned into a distinct advantage: if their cash flow, through unchecked spending and liquid excess in the service of acquisition, gets out of control, their credit can be easily rearranged in a series of simply rearranged loan extensions never to be paid. And there's always bankruptcy, which can lead to such absurd sccenarios as H. Bunker Hunt, one of the wealthiest men in America, filing Chapter 11, claiming that a currency crisis (which he and his billionaire siblings had largely precipitated with wild speculation in silver) had left him unable to pay his bills. It is to the very poor, those whose characters are not written into the text of mass media except as props or distractions, that the bone of credit has been thrown, outfitted in the robes of a savior. Credit is a genie, a magical spirit from the sky who can solve one's problems if one is a decent and moral person who promises to lead a good life (to be purchased, of course, with the credit); Ms. Name and Number appears as a gracious dowager, no doubt possessed of old money and a philanthropic nature, who wants nothing more than to help the unlucky but virtuous enter the florid and fragrant gardens of the well-to-do. And if, through the remorseless pitches tossed to low-end credit card customers by their banks (five to ten mail-order ads in each statement, "easy billing options" designed to run up astronomical interest, your name and address sold to every catalog vendor, phone sales outfit and movie, book and music club in the county), they find themselves in credit trouble, there's bankruptcy that literally drives some to suicide, or the "credit counseling" services which, by doling out just enough to live on and distributing the remainder of their paychecks to ravenous collection hounds, return the working poor, as essayist Lewis Lapham puts it, "to the happy condition of children living on an allowance".

Written out of the script: these people, those who through necessity must fuel the engines of production which still exist despite the glad-handed pronouncements of management consultants and technocratic pundits who have issued in the Age of Information and sold the management of the culture the idea that "workers" and "production" are outmoded and obsolete, simply do not appear in the text of everyday communications. Politicians speak of them in an abstract, statistical way, damning them as if they were a troublesome gopher in the yard or fretting over them as if they were a bird with an injured wing, requiring just a bit of help before they can be set off, free and healthy, and then forgotten except for a round of self-congratulation. The makers of popular entertainments use them as furniture, as the butt of jokes, or as dangerous villains who are unpredictable, vicious, and again, easily forgotten once eliminated. The "poor" on television sitcoms or dramas are not poor: they are simply not rich. There was not much difference between Bill Cosby and Roseanne: both had fairly spacious, clean homes, several children who were never without food or clothing, steady work, and enough material comforts that they are not driven to crime or madness. In fact, Roseanne's ballyhooed "working-class" tone was little more than a gimmick, a hook. The main differences between the shows were that Cos joked about meaningless trivia about his children and Roseanne complained about not having enough money for the kind of life she saw on TV. Roseanne successfully confronted and overcame such problems as police brutality, crime, and drugs, whereas in Cos' world those things simply did not exist. Indeed, as the interesting cultural study Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences and the American Dream by Sut Jhally and Scott McCaughey shows, it was largely by appealing to a level-playing-field, anyone-can-be-upper-middle-class-if-they-work-hard mentality that the show's producers and creators were able to break a still-strong color barrier. The show's was an unrepentantly classist universalism that black, white, Asian, or vivid and colorful Hispanic, one could achieve equality with wealthy whites by the mere means of unrelentingly aping their culture and trappings. Race was as invisible on Cosby as were alien abductions, and sexism was merely a subject for drawing-room family comedy. But no character is allowed to be poor, working-class, or even the frequently depressing and class-conscious middle-class. Even schoolteachers appear as urbane, witty, filled with noblesse oblige, happy and unburdened by the insultingly low pay, stress, lack of respect, and terrible class antagonism that marks the lives of real schoolteachers in the gratefully non-televised world.

There is no recurring character in all of television who is without a place to live (or, for that matter, a fairly nice place to live), who skims money from the till to get walking-around money, who is buried in an ocean of insurmountable debt, who does not know where their next meal will surface, who clothes their children in unmatched shoes and the same pair of pants 3 days in a row. The true poor of this country, the unending millions of them, have no presence in mass culture; they are without their own myths, and must try as best they can to purchase those of the middle class that are the next best thing. This is a historically unprecedented phenomenon; in the past, distant to recent, controllers of culture and rulers of men have recognized that the brute backs on which they built their kingdoms demanded, if they were given nothing else, their myths and tales. What a dangerous situation it is, then, that today's serfs have no priests, no fables: only a life they are told that they may buy, and then denied the means to do so. For despite their near-total invisibility in mass culture, they still dream; denied any psychological outlet for that dream, the Culture Trust must ask themselves the question that Langston Hughes urgently asked 60 years ago: what happens to a dream deferred?

Does it explode?