Jihad vs. McWorld (20 page)

McWorld’s videology churns out an elusive rhetoric. The old masters were tyrants as visible as they were surly, tyrants about whose illegitimacy there could be no question; the new masters are invisible, and sing a siren song of markets in which the name of liberty is invoked in every chorus. Perhaps that is why the authorities in Serbia not only tolerate B-92 but give it a favorable broadcast slot on the official radio station. The station managers insist the station is left alone so the authorities can prove their “liberalism” to the West. But perhaps those authorities recognize how little damage rock music can do to their political policies and imperialist programs. MTV succors
liberty … of a kind. It is certainly good for the kind of choice entailed by consumption; but whether it is of any use to civic liberty is quite another question. It runs interviews with President Clinton, it sponsors a periodic “Rock the Vote” registration and voting campaign for young people, and like other hip advertisers, plays a game that cynics might mistake for an insincere version of political correctness.

Others argue that this debate takes MTV far too seriously: they dismiss the network as “empty-V”—the mindless music of a generation of preadolescents who will in time move on and up to the BBC, CNN, and NBC. Yet MTV not only shares but helps generate McWorld’s videology. A Russian producer, wondering whether cultural life in Hollywood is really an improvement on life under a repressive Stalinism, observes: “Before I had to deceive the censor; then I could shoot my film; now I am forced to look for all the money and materials myself Instead of being a revered and dominant influence in society, the writer or artist has become a mere creator of cultural values.”
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To create the cultural values necessary to material consumption is McWorld’s first operating imperative. Thirty years ago Disney’s little sales-creatures crooned to theme park visitors, “It’s a small world, after all.” The smalling world is being dumbed down by Beavis and Butt-head and heavy metal music. Cop killer rap is hissing to restive teenage audiences around the globe that to “off” (kill) policemen is necessary, to despise women is cool, and to grow up is unnecessary—even as P.C. recording executives assure us nobody really means any of it. To be sure, MTV is a complex medium with a variety of messages: subliminally, it offers blips savoring freedom and disdaining authority (thus the appeal to resistance movements), it catalyzes consumption (thus the attraction to advertisers), it reinforces identity (we
are
the world!) even as it underscores differences (the Dis-United Colors of Benetton), flirts with violence and makes a (sometimes brutal) sport of sex (women are “ho’s and bitches” and men are fucking machines). It celebrates youth, encouraging a forever-infantile obliviousness that defines life in the default mode as passive consumerism. More liminally, it engages in shallow but pervasive political campaigns that are vaguely liberal and empowering though often countercultural and sometimes even scandalizing (as with black rap and
hip-hop), but finally as vapid as the vacuously tendentious lyrics of its most scandalous songs.
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“Rock the vote,” it shouts, wrapping Madonna in a flag and urging youth to register. Live Aid, Free Your Mind, Choose or Lose—rock musicians flexing underdeveloped political muscles in the name of causes so safe and universal that the campaigns can do little harm though scarcely much good either.

Political content, to be sure, is hardly a matter of carefully deliberated principle on MTV; more a question of aesthetics, taste—call it hip-hop whimsy. When in the summer of 1993, unruly New York youngsters started sexually harassing girls in the city’s overcrowded pools, Mayor David Dinkins talked rap groups into mouthing namby-pamby lyrics like “Don’t dis your sis.”
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The lyrics can sell love or hate, can preach neighborliness or urge slaughter, can call for one world, which “we are,” and can instigate paranoid fear of foreigners or cops or blacks or whites or even (the old favorite) Jews. At the very moment Madonna was wearing a flag to rock the vote, a well-known Caribbean rapper was urging listeners to off homosexuals while German skinhead groups were swaying to the rhythms of a syncopated xenophobia. The popular rapper Dr. Dre sings to rapt listeners: “Rat-a-tat-tat and a tat like that/Never hesitate to put a nigga on his back.” Just-Ice, as popular as Dr. Dre, chants about “faggots” and “bitches,” and how when they see “Just-Ice” approach “they move before they get stitches … A bullet or a bat,/Just pick it.”

Yet the lyrics are not finally the point (just try following them): gangsta rappers think they are using rock to take on the official culture. But of course the official culture owns them rock, stock, and barrel and it is they who are being used. The point is neither the words nor even the music, but the pictures as they image the music and the big sell that goes with the pictures. MTV is about the sound of American hot and American cool, about style and affect where nothing is quite as it seems, where “bad” is good and lovers are bitches and killing is enlivening and where politics doesn’t count but pictures are politics. Frank Biondi, the CEO of Viacom, Redstone’s company that won the battle for Paramount in 1994 and that owns MTV, tries to explain: “There will be MTV movies, MTV products. Why not? You see Disney going into the cruise business. Maybe there will be MTV cruises and MTV special events. MTV’s mission is connecting to the audience, to the MTV Generation…. We want to
provide a point of view for the MTV Generation. Why do you read the
Times
when you can get almost all the same information on-line? Because you want a point of view, a sensibility. That is what we are selling.”
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It is hard to know exactly what, beyond simple consumption, the impact of selling ambience by promoting rock music will be either in America or on the hundred cultures whose youth are now tuned in to it. It is easy to condemn lyrics weighted with hate, but while plenty of musicians end up with assault, rape, and even murder charges on their rap sheets (rep sheets!), such lyrics are hardly the cause of the brutal realities they mirror or caricature, and breeding anarchy and brutality is clearly not what MTV executives who talk about promoting “freedom, liberation, personal creativity, unbridled fun and hope for a radically better future” think they are doing.
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Sharp musicological investigations are desperately needed, for though we cannot perhaps guess what the ultimate impact will be, it is clear that there
will
be an impact unconnected to specific lyrics; and that it is likely to play havoc with the conscious wishes and willed public policies of traditional nation-states trying to secure the common welfare or to conserve their national cultures. MTV wears neither lederhosen nor peasant blouses, and speaks neither Serbo-Croat nor Chinese, and worships neither Buddha nor Jesus, and cares neither for the family nor the state. Finally it trades in dollars, and profit is its only judge. The rockers and rappers may end up in jail, but the record companies and cable stations keep raking in the dough.
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As Robert Scheer has said in discussing Michael Jackson’s recent agon, “what is clear is that (Jackson) is neither a boy nor a man but rather a product. Throughout all but five of his thirty-five years he has been marketed energetically by avaricious adults who condoned his weirdness as long as it was marketable.”
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Some observers have expressed a naïve confidence in the essentially populist character of television. Michael J. O’Neill is fairly ardent in his belief that television is a form of “people power.” He is persuaded that “It is no longer statesmen who control the theater of politics but the theater which controls the statesmen,” and in that he is right.
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But to think that because states have lost control of television, the “people” have acquired it is a dangerous illusion. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi came to power through control of a media monopoly through which he could sell “dreams and miracles” and pretend to be
a populist.
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But the lines were clear: the people did not control Berlusconi, Berlusconi controlled the people; and Berlusconi did not control television, television controlled Berlusconi. Indeed, it finally brought him down as disinterestedly as it had raised him up. In America, it is often television that makes policy. A single picture of the abused body of an American soldier in Somalia provoked American withdrawal there, and the Pentagon is loath to take casualties nowadays not only because of the ongoing trauma of Vietnam but because of fear of the media. There is no abstract doctrine, not containment, not democracy, not anticommunism, not even imperialism, that can hold out against a video snapshot of a dying American boy.

Some might argue this is a good thing for peace or at least for ordinary people since it is
their
perspective that television purveys. Television, however, purveys no images but its own. If, as Gore Vidal wrote in his brilliant odyssey through film, “he who screens the history makes the history,” it is not those whose history is up on the screen but those screening it who will be in the drivers’ seat.
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The medium has its own program driven by Hollyworld’s videology and McWorld’s corporate balance sheets and it displays American corpses neither in order to influence history nor to condition American foreign policy but to sell advertising and keep viewers glued to their sofas. “TV’s basic purpose,” writes media critic Mark Crispin Miller, “is to keep you watching,” and so the medium moves to “box in” viewers, in and out of the home, displacing their reality with its own.
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Television spreads a modest flood tide on a flat plain: its waters are everywhere, and though it makes a shallow-bedded sea, and though there are traditional landmarks—newspaper trees and book steeples and many a beckoning print rooftop—millions lose their way and slip under the shimmering images without anyone quite noticing, least of all they themselves. Children have been known to drown in just a few inches of water: television’s shallows are more perilous still.

States once did recognize the significance of television as an instrument of propaganda, socialization, and civic education. (The Berlusconis and Murdochs and Turners of McWorld still do.) In the early days, legislators spoke about the “public airwaves” and essayed to regulate “public broadcasting.” Television was a state monopoly not only in Communist countries, but in many Western democracies as well, where its potential influence, educational or corrupting, was
deemed too important to leave to the private sector—which has displayed little other than a monomaniacal concern for profits and an abysmally bad taste that it passes off as responsiveness to popular will. In the United States, a Federal Communications Act was passed in 1934 establishing the Federal Communications Commission and developing doctrines of fairness, access, and social responsibility (mandatory news programming, for example). The legislation called for the F.C.C. to “study new uses for radio, provide for experimental uses of frequencies, and generally encourage the larger and more effective uses of radio in the public interest.”

Today there are few signs that anyone, least of all the federal government, is looking to encourage the larger and more effective civic uses of cable, satellites, fiber optics, computers, and data banks in the public interest. The supposed explosion of media outlets via cable and fiber optics has created an incentive for government to excuse itself from the messy business of regulation. Although Vice President Gore has tried to focus civic attention on the new technologies, new media monopolies (described below) are coming into existence without so much as a glance from federal authorities who once upon a time would have been screaming for antitrust action. Since earlier regulation depended on “spectrum scarcity” (the seemingly finite character of available broadcast wavelengths and delivery conduits), the explosion of media outlets and delivery vehicles—fiber optic communications that can carry millions of digitalized information and picture bytes, cable systems with a five-hundred-plus channel capacity, and satellites—coupled with our current passion for markets and for privatization have delegitimized the very idea of public regulation. They make it impossible for us to use McWorld’s chief invention—television—to preserve our public goods and identity against McWorld’s values. We cannot even use the public airwaves for public political purpose (elections) without paying the private companies to whom we have licensed those airwaves millions and millions of dollars. Kenichi Ohmae, Japan’s most celebrated management guru, captures the spirit of videology perfectly when he puts his faith in the power of “customers to triumph over man as regulator,” since “it’s the regulators we have to fear.”
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A few countries still try to maintain some control, if not monopoly control, over the traditional broadcast media, but with diminishing
success against the diversifying technologies that undergird new media. As communication shifts from broadcast spectra and cable to computer faxes, telephone lines, and satellites the very idea of governmental regulation—let alone “totalitarian” control—loses its credibility. Congress is currently threatening to privatize or abolish public broadcasting. In theory, this might seem to be a good thing: in dismantling state monopolies, the market puts an end to monopoly altogether. In practice it merely eliminates public monopolies and with them accountability and civic responsibility and leaves the field to new, relatively invisible, private monopolies that, unlike government, are not even accountable in theory, let alone in practice. These monopolies are today becoming ever more visible as companies from the once distinct realms of program creation (software), program distribution (networks and broadcast companies), delivery systems (cable, telephone, satellite), and hardware (the people who make the television receivers and computers) gobble one another up. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, but it owns a global array of media-interlinked companies and services including, in the United States: Fox Television; Fox Video;
New York
magazine;
TV Guide;
HarperCollins Publishers; Delphi Internet Services; Scott Foresman educational publishers; News and Electronic Data information services; Kesmai video game development corporation; Etak, Inc., the Digital map data company;
Mirabella
, the fashion magazine; and literally dozens of newspapers and independent television stations; and elsewhere,
The Times
of London along with the tabloid
The Sun;
Ansett Transport, an air cargo carrier; B Sky B, the English satellite broadcaster; Star TV, which is the Asian satellite network described above; Geographia Ltd., the cartography company; and Fox Video companies in Spain, Japan, France, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia. Murdoch’s News Corporation is a one-company, one-man infotainment telesector unto itself.