A couple of decades
back, in conversation with an Italian architect friend and colleague,
he insisted to me that in the absence of exploitable resources
Italians had mastered the art of selling smoke. I was skeptical
about the concept that Italy lacked resources, given its long
coastline, extensive mountains, abundant supply of artists, artisans
and skilled workers, as well as having, according to a UN report,
something like 45% of the world’s acknowledged treasures of art and
architecture. Nevertheless, he cited concepts such as “Italian
Design” and “Made in Italy” in evidence of his theory. Had
“Slow Food “ been invented then, he might have
added it to the list of concepts which boost sales and add value to
products, despite having the consistency of smoke or incense. While
Italy does have forests, some geothermal facilities, abundant
sunshine and wind, it does not have a large supply of traditional
fossil fuels such as petroleum or coal.
My friend was right.
Italy is the land of smoke sellers. The art of convincing people
that the superfluous is the necessary is widely diffused throughout
the population, from shoe sellers to butchers, waiters to seamstresses. It’s only the politicians whose smoke nobody wants
to buy anymore.
Just as Italy’s
1987 ascent to being the world’s fifth largest economy ended
abruptly in 1997, its status as a leading seller of smoke has
succumbed to American leadership. Apparently Italy is not selling
enough smoke or anything else, since its GNP has fallen behind those
of the UK, India, France and Brazil. While the US population at
large does not have the Italian gift for selling smoke, at the top of
the heap there are major masters at work.
Edward Bernays, a
nephew of Sigmund Freud, and Albert Lasker were two
He argued that the
manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy.
His civic advocacy showed up in the promotion of the fear of
communism and the successful overthrow of the Arbenz government in
Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company.
Lasker was no slouch
either in the molding of public opinion. Besides promoting
Palmolive, Pepsodent, Kotex, Sunkist oranges and Lucky Strike
cigarettes, he helped engineer the 1920 landslide election of Warren
Harding. At the time of his Sunkist campaign, orange groves in
California were being uprooted due to lagging sales, a process he
succeeded in halting.
While Bernays and
Lasker were pioneers, they have had legions of effective disciples in
both commercial and political realms. Bernays had a big influence in
promoting the Cold War to assure the health of the military
industrial complex, but he did have help from the Soviet Union, which
flaunted its militarism.
Just who is the
architect of the current Cold War revival is harder to determine.
After all, following the collapse of the USSR, Russia stumbled into a
period of rapid demographic decline, Mafia-style oligarchy and
internal violence. NATO, i.e. the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, aggressively expanded its membership to Turkey and
several former Soviet states, moving troops to within a few hundred
miles of Moscow, despite assurances to the contrary by the first
President Bush. Putin rescued Russia from its downward spiral and
restored a degree of nationalistic pride, but the country remains a
superpower only in that it retains a sizable nuclear arsenal, along
with a lot of gas and petroleum. How then the current red scare, or
better, the red white and blue scare, given Russia’s current flag,
and why? Militaristic regimes, such as the USA, need enemies to
justify their arms budgets and while Islamic terrorists may instill
hatred and fear, they hardly constitute a credible military threat.
Cold War II is not
the only currently successful propaganda campaign. Bernays and
Lasker operated in the mid-twentieth century. In 1980 Ronald Reagan
came to power and he unleashed some campaigns which are still going
strong. He famously declared that the “government is not the
answer to our problem, government IS the problem”. Think about
that! This sentiment might be appropriate in much of the world.
Kings have first of all looked after themselves and their courts.
Dictators have always looked out for themselves, keeping Swiss banks
flush with cash in the process. But the USA? American flag-waving
patriotism is almost without precedent, unless you count Germany in
the 30’s, or today’s North Korea, but there has always been an
element of compulsion in those other places. The US has vast pride
in its democracy, the oldest surviving (?) democracy in the world.
If our democracy is a source of pride and this is the government of
the people, by the people and for the people, how does one explain
President Reagan’s proclamation that it is THE problem? If the
democratic government is the problem, what is the suggested
alternative? Sadly, we’re beginning to get a look at the option.
Going hand in hand
with the rejection of democracy, has been the religious embrace of
privatization and the deification of “the market”. Many
sophisticated people are skeptical about an omnipotent God, not to
mention the infallibility of the Pope, but a surprising number of
them are susceptible to a blind and absolute faith in the
infallibility of “the market”. Who sold this bill of goods?
More important, will it have the same disastrous consequences as the
Lucky Strike campaign? Once all public resources are sold off to
cronies of the people in power, what will become of the public? We
can see some clues in the Russia of Yeltsin and now in the American
rust belt. It has taken a dictator (strong man is the currently
preferred term) Putin, to bring back Russia from terminal decline.
Will that be the fate of the US? Many now fear Trump is that figure,
but what brought us to this point?
After Flint, how
many other cities will be fed poisoned water to increase profits?
Many of the past and present propaganda campaigns have been the work
of Republicans. Remember that 1920 campaign which gave us Harding
and the Teapot Dome scandals! Guatemala was not the only country run
by United Fruit. Arguably, ALEC is the most subversive organization
in the US, and while some turncoat Democrats show up there, it is a
largely Republican enterprise.
However, Democrats
have played a major role in our current travails. Selling the
inevitability of globalization with its attendant race to the bottom,
was a bi-partisan effort. Democrats bear the brunt of the blame for
the predominance of identity politics, hawking the idea that soon the
assembled minorities would constitute a majority. Of course, if you
include women in the list of minorities, they already do, even if
some of the people involved don’t see themselves as part of a
minority.
Concerns for the
rights of homosexuals were reasonable enough, but then homosexual
became gay and lesbian, the coalition kept gaining letters and turned
into LBGTQ, leading an unsuspecting reader to figure that all these
combined groups were just short of forming a majority. Add another B
for bigamists, a P for pederasts and an I for the incestuously
inclined and we’re practically there. Perversely, this is being
informally proposed, in a nod to furthering the anti-regulation agenda, by Milo Yiannopoulos, formerly of Breitbart News, President
Trump’s favorite news source.
In a time of
infrastructure collapse and a growing neo-feudal gap between rich and
poor, the principle concern of the establishment wing of the
Democratic Party has seemed to be the the toilet access rights of
transgendered children. I’m too old to be up to date on this but I
tended to think of pre-pubescent children as being essentially
neuter. I’m not sure what a transgendered child even is, much less
what’s to be done about it. Is this really affecting more people
than the lack of healthcare, homelessness, climate change, the
obesity epidemic, gun violence, student loan debt, poisoned water,
decreasing life expectancy, racial violence or herbicide laced food?
Democrats are
electing a new chairman of the Democratic National Committee this
week. The main contenders are, in the populist corner, the only
Muslim in the US Congress, while in the establishment corner is a
Wall Street, big Agro and bank friendly, TPP boosting, Latino former Secretary of
Labor in the Obama Administration. The dark horse, in case the two
main factions can’t compromise, is the gay mayor of South Bend who
was a Harvard educated, highly regarded officer in the US military.
He advises a love-in with all factions setting aside their
differences. The other five in the race have little chance of being
considered. Democrats may have been nurtured on identity politics
but Trump has played every sort of dark, minority vilifying card in
his deck to get to his unlikely election. Whatever the outcome of
the DNC election, we can count on him and his GOP cohort to twist the
knife of identity politics back into the Democrats’ innards.
Many of us are eager
to see a radical change of course charted by the 2020 congressional
elections but if the Democratic establishment, which gave us
Republican control of the presidency, both Houses of Congress and
full legislative control of twenty-five of the fifty states, is not
removed from power in the party, our hopes for 2020 are just fatuous
dreams. Things can get worse and there are plenty of clever GOP
smoke sellers who will see to it that they will. Depending on the
outcome of this election, we may bear witness to the birth a new
major political party.
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