The Image (35 page)

This helps us explain, too, why we seem “materialist” to all the world. To future historians it may seem bizarre that in our age Communism, a historical movement which most explicitly based itself on materialism, should have been called “idealistic.” And that the United States, a nation explicitly built on ideals, should have had a reputation for being materialist. Any prosperous country will, of course, be blamed
(and envied) for its materialism by its less prosperous neighbors. Discovering we cannot have another people’s virtues, we call them vices. They similarly reproach us. But in addition we especially suffer in the eyes of the world because our prosperity and our technological success have doomed us to present ourselves to the world in images.

Although we may suffer from idolatry, we do not, I think, suffer from materialism—from the overvaluing of material objects for their own sake. Of this the world accuses us. Yet our very wealth itself has somehow made us immune to materialism—the characteristic vice of impoverished peoples. Instead, our peculiar idolatry is one with which the world till now has been unfamiliar. Others have not been rich enough nor had the technology to flood their consciousness with shadows. Nor to flood the world with images of themselves. It is to these images and not to material objects that we are devoted. No wonder that the puzzled world finds this unattractive and calls it by the name of its own old-fashioned vices.

The multiplication of images, by stimulating our economy and arousing extravagant expectations, has, of course, helped make us the richest country in the world. Despite some flagrant injustices and inequalities, we have diffused opportunity more equally and more widely than ever before. Yet by no image-magic can we extend the American continent, nor can we include others in American history. If we must speak to other peoples, we might do better to speak more simply. Not with the devices by which we sell ourselves on images of things we are not sure we want, nor in the new rhetoric of the neither-true-nor-false.

Of all nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us. Perhaps, instead of
announcing ourselves by our shadows and our idols, we would do better to try to share with others the quest which has been America.

T
O DO THIS
has never been easy. It is doubly difficult since the Graphic Revolution and the rise of images have transformed our thinking. A great obstacle, itself a product of the Graphic Revolution, is our belief in “prestige.”

It is on this very quest for prestige that we now spend our efforts. Formerly our statesmen—Washington or Adams or Jefferson or Jackson or Lincoln—would have said they wished others to admire, love, or fear the United States. They sought respect for America and for American ideals. Today we no longer speak so directly. Instead we hope America will have a “favorable image” abroad. We hope our nation will have “prestige.” What does this mean?

It means we hope the world will be attracted to, or dazzled by, our image! Formerly, when we worried about our reputation, we worried about what the world would think of us or our way of striving. Now we worry about what the world will think of our image.

Although the word “prestige” in its dominant twentieth-century American usage is novel, it has not strayed too far from its etymological origins. It is probably not unrelated to the word “prestidigitate”—to perform a juggler’s trick or magic. “Prestige,” which came into English through the French language, came ultimately from the Latin
praestigium
, which meant an illusion or a delusion, and was usually employed in the plural,
praestigiae
, to signify jugglers’ tricks. This in turn had come from
praestringere
, which meant to bind fast, or to blindfold—hence to dazzle. In English, too, the word “prestige” originally meant deceit or illusion; “prestigious” (an adjective especially closely related to the noun “prestidigitation”) until recently meant deceitful, cheating, or illusory. For a long time “prestige” had only an unfavorable
sense. The new favorable sense is probably an American invention. In our common American parlance, the merest hint of the old unfavorable sense still remains. A person who has prestige has a kind of glamor: he momentarily blinds or dazzles by his image.

While the word “prestige” is, of course, common enough in our talk about people and things here at home, its significance for all our thought is clearest when we look abroad. There the indirectness of our thinking becomes most obvious. When we talk of prestige abroad we are talking not of ourselves, but of the shadows of ourselves which we can somehow project. To compare prestige, then, is to compare the appeal of images. To insist on our prestige is to insist on the appeal of our image.

In addressing the Republican National Convention in Chicago on July 26, 1960, President Eisenhower remarked:

This proposal called for a world-wide market research project by the United Nations to see whether the United States or the Soviet Union offered the world a more attractive package. One did not need to be oversubtle to suspect that the proposal itself was meant to be a piece of skillful
packaging. A “bold proposal” like this (of course there was not the slightest chance it would be adopted) would supposedly improve the image of America abroad. In our world of pseudo-events the dramatic gesture of American openness and honesty was as contrived, as devious, and as disingenuous as could be imagined.

The very notion of “high” or “low” prestige, of people “accepting” or “rejecting” the “Russian Way” or the “American Way,” itself betrays unconcern for the complex, inwardly conflicting reactions of real people to other real people. It reveals a naive take-it-or-leave-it mentality that is at one with the oversubtlety and indirectness of all our thinking about our relations to other peoples. In our popularity game we ask the world not, “Do you like me?” but, “Do you like my shadow?”

During the Presidential campaign of 1960 there was much discussion over whether the Eisenhower Administration would or should publish the results of a “prestige” poll conducted by the United States Information Agency under the auspices of the Department of State. Candidate Kennedy bitterly attacked the Administration for failing to publish the figures (the data, it was assumed, must have been simple and statistical, with an obvious, damaging moral). Supposedly in the national interest, the figures were not revealed. If people did not like our image, it was not good public relations to announce it, or to reveal why. Better deftly repair the image for better results.

Our thinking has become so blurred, we have so mixed our image and our reality, that we assume our place in the world is determined by our prestige—that is, by others’ respect for our image. “Not least of all,” Walter Lippmann warned in December, 1960, “our prestige in the world has diminished. We have ceased to look like a vigorous and confident nation.”

In competition for prestige it seems only sensible to try to perfect our image rather than ourselves. That seems the most economical, direct way to produce the desired result. Accustomed
to live in a world of pseudo-events, celebrities, dissolving forms, and shadowy but overshadowing images, we mistake our shadows for ourselves. To us they seem more real than the reality. Why should they not seem so to others? Our technique seems direct only because in our own daily lives the pseudo-event seems always destined to dominate the natural facts. We no longer even recognize that our technique is indirect, that we have committed ourselves to managing shadows.
We
can live in our world of illusions. Although we find it hard to imagine, other peoples still live in the world of dreams. We live in a world of our making. Can we conjure others to live there too? We love the image, and believe it. But will they?

A
BROAD
the making of credible images seems a problem. It is hard to persuade others to fit themselves into our molds, to be at home among our illusions, and to mistake these for their own reality. At home our problem is the opposite. What to do when everybody accepts the images, when these images have pushed reality out of sight?

Here, in the United States, the making of images is everyday business. The image has reached out from commerce to the worlds of education and politics, and into every corner of our daily lives. Our churches, our charities, our schools, our universities, all now seek favorable images. Their way of saying they want people to think well of them is to say they want people to have favorable images of them. Our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals. The domination of campaigning by television simply dramatizes this fact. An effective President must be every year more concerned with projecting images of himself. We suffer more every day from the blurriness and the rigidity of our image-thinking.

Examples are everywhere. Life becomes more and more
illusory. We have become so accustomed to our illusions, they have become so routine, that they seem no longer produced by any special magic. The forces I have described in this book converge on our everyday experience. They are revealed in almost everything we do, in almost everything we see, in the very words we use.

One example is especially significant to me. I came upon it casually, but it focuses many of the problems I have discussed in this book.

Early in the fall of 1960, I received an elaborate color brochure advertising the Chevrolet for 1961. Inside, the only full-page illustration is a brilliant portrait of a man in the front seat of a de luxe new model. His hard-top convertible (advertised for its unobstructed view) is parked near the edge of what seems to be the Grand Canyon, a background of indescribable natural beauty. The man is not, however, peering out of the car window at the scenery. Instead he is preoccupied with a contraption in his hand; he is preparing to look into his “Viewmaster,” a portable slide viewer using cardboard disks holding tiny color transparencies of scenic beauty. On the seat beside him are several extra disks. Standing outside the car are his wife and three small children. The eldest of them, a little girl about ten years old, at whom his wife is looking, is herself preoccupied with a small box camera with which she is preparing to take a picture of her father seated in the car.

Here, if ever, is a parable of twentieth-century America. All the ingenuity of General Motors, Eastman Kodak, generations of Fords, Firestones, and Edisons, the accumulated skills of fifty years of automotive engineering, of production know-how and industrial design, all the imagination and techniques of full-color printing, of junior and senior executives, and the whole gargantuan paraphernalia of the American economy have brought us to this. An opportunity for me to be impressed by the image of a man (with the Grand Canyon at his elbow) looking at an image, and being photographed as he does it!

While this example is beautifully symbolic, others are all around us. Almost any evening on television I can watch in my own home a celebrity performing in a skit which is the television version of a movie (made from a novel), to the accompaniment of dubbed-in laughter and applause—the whole performance sponsored by a steel manufacturer or an oil company, by a manufacturer of cosmetics to cure imaginary ailments, or by a brewer or cigarette manufacturer of products indistinguishable from those of his competitor—all put on in order to create a more favorable corporate image.

I well remember my disappointment when the Democratic National Convention was being held in Chicago in the summer of 1956 and I finally secured some tickets to the visitors’ galleries at the International Livestock Amphitheatre. It was the first time I had ever attended a National Party Convention, and I took my young sons along. Finally admitted to our seats, we found ourselves confused by the floor events. Along with the other “actual spectators,” we spent our time watching the television screens which the arrangements committee had considerately placed there. These sets showed us precisely the same programs we would have seen from our living room. The unlucky delegates on the floor below (those were the days before portable television) without the aid of a television screen must have been more confused than we were about what was going on.

Not long ago I met a public relations counsel who held a responsible position in a large and influential firm. His specialty was writing—speeches, articles, letters—for public figures. I asked him how much he consulted with his clients. He explained that of course he had to meet and know the men for whom he wrote in order to be able to write like them. But, he said, a difficulty in working for the same clients over an extended period was that, if you were successful in writing for them, it became harder and harder to know what they were really like. His clients, he said, had an incurable tendency to forget that they had not written their own speeches. When he asked them in briefing sessions what they
thought of this or that, they were increasingly inclined to quote to the public relations counsel the very speech which the counsel had supplied them a few weeks before. It was disturbing, he said, to hear yourself quoted to yourself by somebody else who thought it was himself speaking: you began to wonder whether it was your language after all.