Witty, Edgy Title

Texts in mind: "The Conquest of Cool," "The Culture of the Cold War," "BoBos in Paradise," "Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 2 (Issues 21-40)," various environmental lifestyle tales of the present day ("100 Mile Diet," "No Impact"), standard 50s culture and business texts, lots and lots of ads, and "No Logo."

So: anti-consumerism is arch-consumerism.

That's probably not the key point of Thomas Frank's "The Conquest of Cool," but that's the one that's staying with me right now. The joy of writing this as a blog rather than an essay is that I can occasionally get my reminiscence on (which I'll generally try to avoid - I'm sure that's ad copy for something) and harken back to "No Logo" and that whole late 90s undergrad feel. Naturally, all that is tatters now, too. I've almost got to wonder if the only option left for non-consumerist mentality (short of swearing off purchases) is to just go blindly into the store and buy the first thing I see.

In brief: Frank argues that the broad counterculture of the 1960s (not the focused one which Roszak discusses) was never that far removed from being co-opted - indeed, may well have been pre-packaged. The desire to get beyond the organization man, grey flannel suit, other-directed ethos of the 1950s was readily present in the business mentality of the day, particularly in the advertising companies which sold things. People wanted to shake things up, wanted to sell in a different manner, wanted to get beyond the pseudo-scientific strictures of the industry at that time - but the advertising establishment was against them. "The Man," if you will.

So: it takes something different and unlikely which achieves extraordinary success to change things, and it's offbeat ads that deconstruct advertising claims and tricks which manage it (to some degree). Volkswagens get beyond their Nazi-mobile heritage by presenting themselves as solidly engineered vehicles unconcerned with style (and therefore never fall out of style). Avis admits that it needs to work harder because it's number two, and even highlights small failures that they needed to fix. And menswear changes rapidly.

All well and good, all apt and appropriate to our modern, can't-fool-us sensibility. The trick is that it's a trick, too, which we may recognize, smile at, and then buy - or merely accept without reflection and buy anyhow. A savvy consumer is an ultra-consumer. "Consumer Reports" may get you a better product, but it also makes you aware of more products. (I'd always believed that "CR" was a 1960s product, but wikipedia tells me that it started publication in 1930.) And the "Whole Earth Catalogue" is still a catalogue.

The rigours of hipness means that you're constantly buying to stay ahead of the curve, too. Eventually, it's not even necessary to get young people to buy your products - you just need to convince elder young-at-hearts that you're selling youthfulness and you're set. The Globe and Mail had a great article on this problem for the Gap over the last decade - as they moved towards marketing themselves to first-wave Gen-Xers and later Boomers, they stopped endorsing the youthful vibe that was de rigeur for everyone in the early oughts. (Even further back, I recall an endorsement of Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood as the locus of youthful vitality. I did a lot of my grocery shopping there and I usually found it filled with people in their middle ages. But if 60 is the old 30, then it's all okay - if kinda odd.)

Anyway, this endorsement of diversity by tastemakers for the broad marketplace (which suggests that the notion of conformity in diversity is not at all recent) is a nice contrast piece with Whitfield's "The Culture of the Cold War." Save for the epilogue of the second edition, most of the book is directed towards a discussion of the postwar era up to the end of the Eisenhower administration. Most of it's a review of almost every lecture or discussion on the 1950s during my undergrad years (the benefit of some good literature courses which looked at American drama in particular and my wife's paper on the controversy around Elia Kazan's lifetime achievement Oscar in 1999), but its presentation of the fear and paranoia that typified so much of the early years of the Cold War is effective. Furthermore, its argument about the demise of its mindset may not be conclusive, but the point made that the assassination of JFK did not lead to reprisals or vigilantism against pinkos and traitors (which it certainly would have 10 years before) certainly indicates that it had dissipated somewhat.

Precious little is made of youth culture at the time, of course, in Whitfield's book. Television and film are given significant mention, but the terror of comic books in the mid-50s is left undisturbed. The contradicitons of the era are neatly encompassed in this panic, of course - capitalism equals profit from competition through the presentation of choices to the consumer and the recognition of underserved markets versus the need to control and limit the choices available to young people (even if it means that they don't get to choose) for their own protection. Whitfield mentions that Edward R. Murrow's program suffered for want of endorsement in the late 1950s, but the troubling comics of the age always offered plenty of ads. (Though once "Mad" became a magazine it stopped offering advertising... but that's for a later discussion on the canon of marginal, underground comics versus the exclusion of the mainstream.)

The lack of advertisements is the most curious adaptation that I had to make while reading the "Fantastic Four" anthology. These black-and-white reproductions offer only the 21 to 22 pages of story from each issue (plus the occasional filler pic and the covers) without any of the features I've expected from comics - ads, a checklist for other titles from the publisher with some in-house gossip, and the letters page. Regardless, there's plenty to be made from these collections. Unsurprisingly, there's plenty of science-y patter and boosterism from Reed Richards, but there's also lots of other details thrown in.

(My favorite was at the end of #21 - after defeating Adolf Hitler, disguised as the Hate-Monger and armed with the H-Ray which drives people into a rage, someone off-panel notes that "The Hate Ray must have been one of the last achievements of his enslaved Nazi scientists!" I couldn't help but think of the poor enslaved scientists - thank goodness most of them have been freed to work for the United States now, except those still enslaved by the Soviets....)

A lot of FF stuff so far hasn't been particularly countercultural - but there's been plenty of military-industrial complex paraphenalia to go around. Really, the only way to fly is with one's own ICBM - once one gets the necessary clearance for launching it in New York, of course.

So: what do these add up to for this week? Well, one is that "the establishment" is always looking for ways to identify markets and to sell to them. (Cross makes the point in one of his studies of children's culture that it's toy makers who are most concerned with the direction of family structures, since these determine what and how they will sell.) Another is that more reading's going to be needed on the direction of "silent majority"-type cultures as the McCarthyite impulse fades and before Nixon endorses it.

And for further reading, I'll have to dig up my old copy of David Brooks' "BoBos in Paradise" later this summer. After reading "The Conquest of Cool," I'll have to see how well it fits in with Brooks' book. I'm not entirely sure if it does. Still, this notion of arch-consumption as part of the 60s and a natural precursor to a Pottery Barn'd life makes a lot of sense. I'd just like to see how Brooks deliniates its development.