MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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The malls, Taco Bells, boomboxes, extreme athletic shoes, 64-bit computer games, blockbuster flicks on video and cable, Java-script chat-rooms, e-commerce, etc., etc., have made America the consumer miracle admired 'round the networked world. Even as Asian tigers such as Indonesia and Japan are reduced to scrawny pussycats, America's jobless rate plummets to historical lows and Americans buy even more VCR's, PC's, DVD's, SUV's, CD's, tattoos, and body piercings. Wall Street suffers periodic fits of paranoia, expecting the sky to finally fall. But the sky remains sky-high here in Y2K, and the national economy kicks global ass.
So much for those hand-wringing whiners who fear American kids won't "compete in the global economy", and our mammoth economy will therefore sink like a mastodon into muck. It seems we might face a paradox: an economy on steroids and an ever more dumbed-down America. What gives?
American public education is largely a condescending charade of inflated grades and self-esteem baby talk, and it's helpless before the awesome power of our consumer culture. American education is largely an occasion for patronized young people to socialize, strike adolescent poses, and--most importantly--to talk about what CD they just bought or what DVD they just bought or what fuckin' awesome movie! they just saw or...in short, schools are the training grounds for American consumerism, for future hordes of Wall Street Cum Laude¼s who internalize, right down to their marrow, the cultural equation of consumption = citizenship.
Our TV culture, urging the citizenry to CONSUME! CONSUME! CONSUME! has produced several generations whose emotional health rests upon what product they purchased last weekend. Contemporary American culture combines two incessant messages:
Young America's embrace of the corporate worldview starts younger and younger; even witless Newsweek--always three steps behindãis fascinated by the youngest class of fevered consumers: 8-14 year old "Tweens". As a recent (10-18-99) Newsweek cover story urgently asks American adults: "Are they growing up too fast?" The story helpfully reveals "What Parents Can Do." What parents can "do", it turns out, is what competent parents have always done: talk to their children, keep an eye on them, be sensitive to their hormonally-inspired mood swings, learn to say "No" to fits of young consumer hysteria, and take their childrens' aspirations seriously.
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For many of today's elite opinion makers and pundits, the triumph of business culture is a cause for celebration--after all, the argument goes, free trade defeated the Reds and brought down the Berlin Wall! And so what if Johnny's cognitive powers, pulverized by TV and a patronizing education, render him unfit to remember what he tried to read last week? Not to worry! There are plenty of jobs at the mall and fast food joints, and--hey man, can you believe it!?--some burger joints are paying eight bucks an hour. Is this a great time or what?
It's indeed a great time for the muscle-bound Fortune 500, which pumps out rad new products for Johnny on a quarterly basis. And Johnny--well trained during his "tween" years--will serve the Fortune 500 admirably. His atrophied attention span will demand more and more instant stimulation and gratification; his 'net-nurtured synapses will demand more and more sensation, ever more extreme amusements and consumer commodities. So what if Johnny and his friends can't really afford the rad products? Run up the credit card all through your twenties and into your thirties...it's easy! In fact, most of the nation has been on a credit-fueled spending spree that shows no sign of slowing.
Johnny and his fellow American students are taught not merely to be good consumers, craving amusement and expecting ever more "convenience", such as earning 3.5 grade point averages for doing virtually nothing. They're also told how superbly they're performing in school. Johnny, your writing assignment was so imaginative! In fact, the "writing assignment" required only about two paragraphs of barely grammatical incoherence. But logical coherence is irrelevant, perhaps even oppressive. What counts is "self-esteem" and keeping the parents happy, even if teachers must take acting lessons to "reach" their numbed, snoring, or sneering students.
The results of this patronizing education: almost 30% of Americans now graduate from high school with 4.0 grade point averages, and the average grade on college campuses is between a "B" and a "B+". Some campuses have cum laude graduation rates of 70%. Meanwhile, standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT continue to reveal low levels of comparative achievement.
In our rad new millennium, young Americans will feel great about themselves; their hyper-brief attention spans, reduced to id-like ragings for new stimulation, will feel entitled to ever newer, ever cooler consumer goods; and most wages will rise only marginally even in a booming economy--Alan Greenspan and his successors will certainly act quickly to loosen up the "dangerously tight" labor market. All in all, Johnny will mature into the Fortune 500's sloppy wet dream: by his mid 20's, he'll already be a seasoned consumer. His "leisure hours" will be defined by TV and shopping, and his work hours will be defined by isolation in a tiny cubical or rotating temp. jobs...all the while, he'll be unable to imagine life without corporate sponsorship.
Now, some tedious old-timers may have told Johnny once or twice about another era when workers had a measure of control over their working lives, and when working-class issues were discussed in the mainstream press. But this goes back several decades, and to Johnny this is beyond ancient history. VCR's didn't even exist back then!
In the 1930's, labor unions and co-ops--the real predecessors to the 60's civil rights era--were forged by common sacrifice and clear-eyed realpolitik. For a few brief decades, labor unions brought not only growing wages, the 40 hour work week, and a growing middle class: they brought a sense that ordinary people had contributed to a better country and a better life, where job security and functioning public education were more than rumors or urban legends. But those days will be, for Johnny, an impossibly remote idea when he gets laid off the day before yet another stock market boom.
A resurgent union movement is one response to business's cultural slam-dunk, but Johnny probably won't get organized because Johnny can't remember: he can't remember what the old-timers told him, he can't remember much from his history class (little history was taught anyway), and he can't remember how to do the math that demonstrates the economic sense of unionism. He's not sure what "unionism" even means; he's probably more familiar with unionism's demonized caricature, courtesy of propagandizing think tanks and their flunky pundits who appear in all of today's media, from low-tech newsprint to high-tech e-zines.
Even if Johnny thinks about organizing, he might be incapable of doing so. The legal hoops through which an aspiring unionist must leap are formidable. Furthermore, unionism's requisite solidarity has been diluted by phony "leftist" multi-culturalism, which sneers at the idea of a broad common good and urges us to celebrate our uniqueness, our individuality, in a solipsistic flow of identity-politics navel-gazing. So much for the contemporary left's pathetic contribution to working class solidarity.
In a wonderful clincher, the Fortune 500 will joyfully celebrate our "cultural diversity", our bold individuality, by selling us something: authentic Thai or Chinese dinners perhaps, or authentic Third World clothing made in nations plundered by authentic Third World dictators. Or some shoes assembled in China by roughed-up peasant women. At the newest strip mall, one of Johnny's "socially conscious" friends might mutter between sips of Starbucks about all the stuff made by kids and women locked inside stifling, tinder-box factories.
Uh, what country was that place in...?
Johnny won't remember...but as a Wall Street cum laude, he sure will buy.
Condemnations of America's lousy schools are so common as to elicit yawns--especially from the students, and even from many parents. America has pretty much shrugged and accepted the fact that most American kids don't measure up academically to kids in comparable nations, or even to kids from poor nations. Sure, kids from India or Ireland or South Korea might study harder and learn more. But here in the USA, we've got hipper malls, far more and far cooler cable channels, and infinitely more Taco Bells.
Actually, this paradox is no paradox at all. Here's why:
Consequently, our TV nation produces the perfect consumer--that is, the perfect American: a person who can't endure life without dozens of corporate sponsors.
Business culture claws and coos, shouts and schmoozes its way into nearly every realm of American life. Children have birthday parties at the Golden Arches rather than at home; many kids would rather celebrate their births with Ronald McDonald than with Uncle Ron. Parents drive their kids to distant strip mall play centers because fewer kids want to play in their own neighborhood. No wonder, then, that these young Americans will turn to the soothing bosom of business for even the most private concerns, such as identity and self-worth. For instance, Mary Meehan of Iconoculture predicts that young Americans will hire "personal quest consultants" to help "stoke their spiritual fires as well as their entrepreneurial ones." For much of the nation--and increasingly, much of the world--spiritual and entrepreneurial fires roar from the same source: entrepreneurship is spirituality.
Not surprisingly, tweens fascinate corporate America.
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Event # 199: A MOTHERLESS CHILD
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As James McNeal, professor of marketing at Texas A & M observes, tweens are the "powerhouse" of the booming kid market; tweens spend about $14 billion a year on such essentials as Backstreet Boys records, South Park videos, Will Smith movies, and video games. To the understandable glee of Wall Street, 49% of tweens say they learn "a lot" from TV and movies...substantially more than those who learn "a lot" from Mom (38%) or from Dad (31%).
Of course, what tweens--and Americans generally--learn "a lot" from TV is to crave the latest corporate products. There's no unrequited love here...tweens love Kid Rock and Puff Daddy and Dawson's Creek, and Wall Street loves the tween-driven profits. As "cutting edge" business consultants like to shriek: "Synergy!"
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