Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [42]
For America’s largest brand-name consumer goods corporations like Coca-Cola, Marlboro, KFC, Nike, Hershey, Levi’s, Pepsi, Wrigley, or McDonald’s, selling American products means selling America: its popular culture, its putative prosperity, its ubiquitous imagery and software, and thus its very soul. Merchandising is as much about symbols as about goods and sells not life’s necessities but life’s styles—which is the modern pathway that takes us from the body to the soul. AMERICAN CULTURE (AND GOODS) THRIVE IN SOUTH AFRICA, reads the New York Times headline about new investment possibilities in a nation where, as it prepared for its first interracial free elections, black South Africans were sitting around in “a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, sipping Coca-Cola and listening to a Whitney Houston tape” and where seven of the top ten television programs were American.1 Meanwhile, Marlboro announces Marlboro Gear, merchandising the style it has invented (“Marlboro Country”) to sustain tobacco sales in an anti-smoking era.
The style marketed is uniquely American yet potentially global since, for the corporations in a quite literal sense, we are the world. To the world, America offers an incoherent and contradictory but seductive style that is less “democratic” than physical culture: youthful, rich urban, austere cowboy, Hollywood glamorous, Garden of Eden unbounded, goodwilled to a fault, socially aware, politically correct, mall pervaded, and, ironically, often dominated by images of black ghetto life—black, however, as in hip and cool rather than in crime-ridden and squalid, “baaaad” but not bad. PepsiCo’s 1992 Annual Report features mostly black dancers from the Martha Graham Company and the School of American Ballet on its front and back covers, and the Pepsi Generation, multicolored and multicultured, is nothing if not American. The Michaels (Jordan and Jackson), the Jacksons (Michael, La Toya, and Jesse), the King (Martin Luther) and Prince too; and the Simpson (not the Simpsons): thus does white America use an indiscriminate selection of heroes from black America to capture heroically conceived global markets. Heroes fall—Michael Jackson and O. J. Simpson have tumbled—but living on the edge is part of what makes American ghetto culture thrilling to outside observers.
In the selling of America as a means to selling American goods, advertising has itself become big business on a global scale. Of the twenty-five largest advertising companies, fifteen are American. Total world advertising revenues are estimated to be anywhere from $150 billion to $250, nearly one half of which are American.2 The largest firm, Britain’s Saatchi & Saatchi, operates in over eighty countries and, according to media expert Ben Bagdikian, buys 20 percent of all commercial time in world television; its Pepsi-Cola account developed an advertisement to be placed in forty different national markets that could be seen by one-fifth of the human race.3 Coca-Cola’s new subsidiaries include China and, in a manner of speaking, Rutgers University. In China it must share its market with PepsiCo and other companies but at Rutgers University it has outbid the competition and, for $10 million, has secured a market monopoly for its products along with the right to advertise its association with the school. Late capitalism is no longer about either products or competition. Image is everything and the “it” that Coke is, is now education—as image rather than substance. Such recent victories, including its sponsorship of recent Olympic games,