Jihad vs. McWorld (54 page)

  1.
For background on the role of television and advertising in American life see the older books by Marie Winn,
Plug-In Drug
(New York: Grossman Publishers, 1977); Frank Mankiewicz and Joel Swerdlow,
Remote Control: Television and the Manipulation of American Life
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1979); Jerry Mander,
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980); and Todd Gitlin,
Inside Prime Time
(New York: Pantheon, 1983).

  2.
Geraldine Fabrikant, “Bell Atlantic’s Acquisition,”
The New York Times
, October 14, 1993, p. C 7.

  3.
I will not try here to rehearse the thoughtful critique of television that has been offered by social critics such as Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, or Todd Gitlin. But, as an encapsulation of our themes here, John Berger’s comment that “publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy” is worth citing. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 149.

  4.
Steven Daly, “London Is Dead: Invasion of U.S. Pop Culture,”
The New Republic
, June 14, 1993, p. 12. Daly cites Morrisey’s lyric “We look to Los Angeles for the language we use/London is dead/London is dead.”

  5.
Miklos Vamos, “U.S. Cultural Invasion: Hungary for American Pop,”
The Nation
, March 25, 1991, pp. 11–12. This was more than three years ago: things have hardly improved.

  6.
Other fare includes a Steppes version of
The Dating Game
called
Love at First Sight
and two hundred episodes of the Mexican American-soap-rip-off
The Rich Also Cry
. Nadeshda Azhginkhina, “High Culture Meets Trash TV,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, January/February 1993, p. 42.

  7.
The Poles comprise the seventh largest number of cable viewers in Europe with 400,000 more than the French. Jane Perlez, “Poland Exercises the Right to Channel Surf,”
The New York Times
, November 14, 1993, p. E 18. These numbers have presumably grown considerably in the last several years. Poland’s first legally approved commercial channel Polsat initiated its “indigenous” programming in 1993 by broadcasting Hollywood director Michael Cimino’s Oscar-winning film
The Deer Hunter
(it has Central European ethnic pretensions) along with hard-core soap opera classics like
General Hospital
and
Dallas
.

  8.
Patrick E. Tyler, “CNN and MTV, Hangin’ by a Heavenly Thread,”
The New York Times
, November 22, 1993, p. A 4.

  9.
Philip Shenon, “Star TV extends Murdoch’s Reach,”
The New York Times
, August 23, 1993, p. C 1.

10.
Seabrook continues, “The promotions department is often said to be the core of MTV. Everything on MTV is a promotion for something, and the promo department’s mission, in a sense, is to promote that.” Says one of MTV’s employees, “You’re selling a feeling about what it means to be … God I don’t know.” John Seabrook, “Rocking in Shangri-La,”
The New Yorker
, October 10, 1994, pp. 64-78.

11.
In Prague high schools today, official reading materials for the high school graduation exam include the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” John Lennon’s “Woman,” Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and Pink Floyd’s “Happiest Days of Our Lives.”
Harper’s
, June 1994, p. 22. But then Eric Segal’s
Love Story
was once on France’s vaunted university examination!

12.
When MTV started, the average age of management was twenty-five; today, it is closer to twenty-nine. Redstone thinks guerrillas are kids: “By the way,” he adds, “this is also why freedom fighters all over the world associate themselves with MTV”! Cited by Seabrook, “Rocking,” p. 76.

13.
Steve Clarke, “Rock Conquers Continent,”
Variety
, November 16, 1992, p. 35.

14.
Helmut Fest, “MTV Europe Ignores Local Acts,”
Billboard
, March 7, 1992, p. 8.

15.
Uma de Cunha, “India,” in
Variety International Film Guide
(Hollywood: Samuel French Trade, 1993), pp. 205-210.

16.
In his
Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Peter Manuel thus describes how portable cassette players created cultural shock waves in Northern India, with traumatic effects on Indian popular culture. With cassette players, there was at least some listener choice: with satellites, the monopolies control taste, even while affecting to respond to local markets.

17.
Cited by Peter Waldman, “Iran Fights New Foe: Western Television,”
The Wall Street Journal
, August 8, 1994, p. A 10.

18.
See Elisabeth A. Brown, “Music Television Turns 10,”
The Christian Science Monitor
, August 6, 1991, pp. 10-11.

19.
Clarke, “Rock,” p. 199.

20.
Celestine Bohlen, “Russia Parties Subdued by Early Vote Returns,”
The New York Times
, December 13, 1993, p. A 6.

21.
Cited by Azhginkhina, “High Culture,” p. 193.

22.
Nor is MTV really to be taken seriously when it plays bad boy, as the group Public Enemy does. The mischief starts with the group’s name (so too with N.W.A. [Niggers With Attitude]) and continues in song titles such as “Fight the Power,” which black filmmaker Spike Lee used in his
Do the Right Thing
. A good deal of rapper rage is all posture: impotence as porn with the volume turned up so that hard decibels and fierce scatology cover the softness underneath. Most viewers around the world do not understand English anyway, and for them the point is the sound, the style, and the feel, not the words.

23.
The Nobody Beats the Wiz chain thus runs a major advertising campaign featuring the schlock-shock MTV cartoon figures Beavis and Butt-head wearing MTV T-shirts while selling their
Death Rock
album. This anthology album assembles a morbid collection of death songs aimed at self-destructive youths who are killing themselves and each other at record rates. The ad ran in major media markets before Thanksgiving of 1993 under the headline “Huh, huh, huh, This ad is cool!” with large cartoon figures of the two MTV cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-head. These blatant morons had just a month earlier been relegated to a late-night hour, after children watching the popular MTV series in prime time had set fire to their rooms in imitation of their cartoon pranks. Songs on the Beavis and Butt-head
Experience
album include “I Hate Myself and Want to Die” (Nirvana); “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” (Anthrax); “99 Ways to Die” (Megadeth); “Search and Destroy” (Red Hot Chili Peppers); and “I Am Hell” (White Zombie).

24.
Seabrook, “Rocking,” p. 75.

25.
Citation from Seabrook, ibid., p. 69. A number of rap artists have had run-ins with the law, including Tupac Shakur whose 1991 album “2pacalypse Now” raps about “droppin’ the cop!” He allegedly did just that in October 1993, and was himself the victim of a shooting in late 1994; the rapper Flavor Flav of Public Enemy was arrested around the same time for attempted murder after reportedly shooting at a neighbor. But the real profiteers here are not the rappers who have found in the glamorization of ghetto life a paying hustle, but the record companies and the corporations that own and quietly earn considerable profits from them. For background see, for example, Toure, “Snoop Dogg’s Gentle Hip-Hop Growl,”
The New York Times
, November 21, 1993, Section 2, p. 32.

26.
Lyrics and reality get all mixed up in MTV’s savage version of McWorld. “Gangsta rap” often is the work of authentic gangsters. In 1993 alone, in addition to the Tupac Shakur arrest for allegedly shooting two cops noted above, Flavor Flav allegedly shot at his girlfriend’s lover; Snoop Doggy Dogg was charged for carrying two guns and has a murder charge pending; and assault and rape charges have been brought against sundry other denizens of MTV. For one report see Nathan McCall, “The Rap Against Rap,”
The Washington Post
, National Weekly Edition, November 14, 1993, p. C 1; and the
Newsweek
cover story “Rap and Race,”
Newsweek
, June 29, 1992, pp. 46-52.

27.
Robert Scheer remarks that the handlers and profiteers who lived off Michael Jackson never seemed to notice that “there was something profoundly wrong with elevating someone so maladjusted to the status of universal spokesman for children in the sacred precincts of Disneyland and Pepsi commercials.” “Mega-Michael,”
The Nation
, October 11, 1993, pp. 376-377.

28.
Michael J. O’Neill,
The Roar of the Crowd: How Television and People Power Are Changing the World
(New York: Times Books, 1993), p. 110.

29.
Adrian Lyttelton, “Italy: The Triumph of TV,”
The New York Review of Books
, August 11, 1994, pp. 25–29.

30.
Gore Vidal,
Screening History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 81.

31.
Mark Crispin Miller,
Boxed In: The Culture of TV
(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 19.

32.
Kenichi Ohmae,
The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy
(New York: Harper Business, 1990), p. xiv.

33.
Moisi is deputy director of the French Institute for International Relations; cited in Roger Cohen, “The French, Disneyed and Jurassick, Fear Erosion,”
The New York Times
, November 21, 1993, p. E 2. Moisi links Jihad and McWorld (without calling them that), noting that “one minute it’s dinosaurs [
Jurassic Park]
, the next North African immigrants, but it’s the same basic anxiety.”

34.
The object is to send great quantities of data, pictures, and sounds to every home on an interactive basis. The old “new” technology required fiber optics that carry thousands of signals and permit broadcasting centers to send information to everyone. Integrated Services Digital Network’s new switching technology permits a particular home to get only those data it requires (just the way each home receives only the calls placed to it by phone rather than every phone conversation in America). It is this switching capacity that makes the new mergers between phone and cable broadcasting companies so potentially profitable. To rewire American homes with fiber optics would cost upwards of $400 billion; by using the ISDN system, existing wires can be employed at a fraction of the cost.

35.
Formerly owned by Whittle Communications, and now in the hands of K-III, a firm specializing in education and publishing for profit whose chairman H. Kravis is also a key player in public broadcasting.

36.
Colgate-Palmolive has test-marketed a teen perfume called Maniac, while Randy Pernini of Miami has created a designer fragrance for “discriminating” (not) boys between three and ten. See
Chapter 4
, note 34, above.

  1.
I speak here as someone who has been engaged in a number of major educational projects for television—for example, with Patrick Watson, the ten-part series
The Struggle for Democracy
(the book accompanying the series is from Little, Brown and Company, 1988). As we achieved television success, we risked educational failure.

  2.
Robert Lynch, a McGraw-Hill director, quoted by Meg Cox, “Electronic Campus,”
The Wall Street Journal
, June 1, 1993, p. A 5.

  3.
The Authors Guild,
Electronic Publishing Rights: A Publishing Statement
, October 18, 1993.

  4.
User’s Guide for Great Literature
, Personal Library Series, Bureau Development, Inc., 1992. English-language originals are cut but otherwise
untouched, but translations from foreign classics are ancient and the principle of selection obviously has more to do with what was available free than with scholarly or editorial judgment.

  5.
Cox, “Electronic Campus.”

  6.
Stern’s
Private Parts
passed the million mark in sales in its first several weeks in print.

  7.
See John Lahr’s telling essay on celebrity, “The Voodoo of Glamour” (with Richard Avedon),
The New Yorker
, March 21, 1994, pp. 113-122.

  8.
Ornstein is cited in an article by Jennifer Senior, “Hollywood on the Potomac,” placed ever so appropriately in the “Style” section of the Sunday
New York Times
, December 12, 1993, Section 9, p. 1.

  9.
English publishers buy far more books from the Americans than American publishers buy from the English. Ditto more or less every other country in the world. Japanese writers are emulating hot (cool) Americans writers like Jay McInerny, which compels them to incorporate McWorld into the fabric of their characters’ nominally Japanese lives. Haruki Murakami’s protagonists in
The Elephant Vanishes
smoke Marlboros and get high to Bruce Springsteen or Woody Allen while playing out story lines in high-tension rendezvouses at McDonald’s—I mean the actual Honshu burger franchise, not just the metaphoric world it embodies. Murakami quotes American films like
The Wizard of Oz
as if they were pillow books of Japanese civilization on the doorstep of the twenty-first century.

10.
Nadeshda Azhginkhina, “High Culture Meets Trash TV,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, January/February 1993, p. 42.

11.
German Information Service,
The Week in Germany
, November 26, 1993.

12.
Bagdikian tracks media monopoly but also follows an equally alarming development, “the subtle but profound impact of mass advertising on the form and content of the advertising-subsidized media.” Ben H. Bagdikian,
The Media Monopoly
, fourth edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. xxx.