Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [56]
McWorld’s culture speaks English first but it possesses an even more elementary Esperanto to which it can turn when English fails. Is there a locale so remote in today’s world that a traveler will fail to be understood if he resorts to the brand name—trademark lexicon? “Marlboro? Adidas … Madonna … Coca-Cola … Big Mac … CNN … BBC … MTV … IBM!” he will say, and Babel recedes. Not too long ago, asked about what had turned him into a random killer, a sniper overlooking Sarajevo replied: “I am protecting you against Islamic fundamentalism, someone has to do the dirty work. And by the way, how is Michael Jordan doing?” McWorld’s integrating Esperanto trumps the divisive hatred of Jihad’s killing fields.
The soft hegemony of American pop culture is not just anecdotal. It is everywhere visible in hard data about four key elements of that culture: film, television, books, and theme parks. But it is not limited to such elements, for they are but pieces of a mesmerizing global mediology that suffuses consciousness everywhere. This mediology uses advertorials and infomercials, faction as well as fiction, myth-making and myth-making’s modern cousin image-mongering, to make over life into consumption, consumption into meaning, meaning into fantasy, fantasy into reality, reality into virtual reality, and, completing the circle, virtual reality back into actual life again so that the distinction between reality and virtual reality vanishes. Indeed, distinctions of every kind are fudged: ABC places its news and sports departments under a single corporate division; television newsmagazines blend into entertainment programs, creating new teletabloids that (in the new parlance) are reality-challenged; films parade corporate logos (for a price), presidents play themselves in films (President Ford in a television special), while dethroned governors (Cuomo and Richards) do Super Bowl commercials for snack food in which they joke about their electoral defeat, Hollywood stars run for office (Sonny Bono, no Ronald Reagan, was elected to Congress in 1994), and television pundits become practicing politicians (David Gergen and Pat Buchanan have crossed and recrossed the street to only mild chastisement from peers). Politicians can do no right, celebrities can do no wrong—homocide included. Nothing is quite what it seems.
Recognizing the power inherent in these forces, corporations from the parallel worlds of publishing, of telecommunication hardware, transmission and software, and of entertainment are fighting for the right to swallow one another up, converging, merging, and buying each other out as fast as financing can be found and stockholders bribed. The courts step in not to preserve a public good nor to impede a developing monopoly but only to assure that stockholder profitability will be the only criterion of a deal (as happened when the Delaware high court insisted Paramount reject a lower “friendly” bid from Viacom and entertain a higher unfriendly bid from QVC). Under the banner of synergy, which is how Mickey Mouse strong-arms the competition, they are doing and spending whatever it takes to secure monopolistic control over what they now see as a single, integrated high-tech mediological package that can dominate the global economy and all of its once diversified markets. While the megacorporations fight, governments (including the government of the United States) sit it out making small clucking noises about free markets, as if no public interests were involved or as