Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [68]
McWorld’s videology churns out an elusive rhetoric. The old masters were tyrants as visible as they were surly, tyrants about whose illegitimacy there could be no question; the new masters are invisible, and sing a siren song of markets in which the name of liberty is invoked in every chorus. Perhaps that is why the authorities in Serbia not only tolerate B-92 but give it a favorable broadcast slot on the official radio station. The station managers insist the station is left alone so the authorities can prove their “liberalism” to the West. But perhaps those authorities recognize how little damage rock music can do to their political policies and imperialist programs. MTV succors liberty … of a kind. It is certainly good for the kind of choice entailed by consumption; but whether it is of any use to civic liberty is quite another question. It runs interviews with President Clinton, it sponsors a periodic “Rock the Vote” registration and voting campaign for young people, and like other hip advertisers, plays a game that cynics might mistake for an insincere version of political correctness.
Others argue that this debate takes MTV far too seriously: they dismiss the network as “empty-V”—the mindless music of a generation of preadolescents who will in time move on and up to the BBC, CNN, and NBC. Yet MTV not only shares but helps generate McWorld’s videology. A Russian producer, wondering whether cultural life in Hollywood is really an improvement on life under a repressive Stalinism, observes: “Before I had to deceive the censor; then I could shoot my film; now I am forced to look for all the money and materials myself Instead of being a revered and dominant influence in society, the writer or artist has become a mere creator of cultural values.”21
To create the cultural values necessary to material consumption is McWorld’s first operating imperative. Thirty years ago Disney’s little sales-creatures crooned to theme park visitors, “It’s a small world, after all.” The smalling world is being dumbed down by Beavis and Butt-head and heavy metal music. Cop killer rap is hissing to restive teenage audiences around the globe that to “off” (kill) policemen is necessary, to despise women is cool, and to grow up is unnecessary—even as P.C. recording executives assure us nobody really means any of it. To be sure, MTV is a complex medium with a variety of messages: subliminally, it offers blips savoring freedom and disdaining authority (thus the appeal to resistance movements), it catalyzes consumption (thus the attraction to advertisers), it reinforces identity (we are the world!) even as it underscores differences (the Dis-United Colors of Benetton), flirts with violence and makes a (sometimes brutal) sport of sex (women are “ho’s and bitches” and men are fucking machines). It celebrates youth, encouraging a forever-infantile obliviousness that defines life in the default mode as passive consumerism. More liminally, it engages in shallow but pervasive political campaigns that are vaguely liberal and empowering though often countercultural and sometimes even scandalizing (as with black rap and hip-hop), but finally as vapid as the vacuously tendentious lyrics of its most scandalous songs.22 “Rock the vote,” it shouts, wrapping Madonna in a flag and urging youth to register. Live Aid, Free Your Mind, Choose or Lose—rock musicians flexing underdeveloped political muscles in the name of causes so safe and universal that the campaigns can do little harm though scarcely much good either.
Political content, to be sure, is hardly a matter of carefully deliberated principle on MTV; more a question of aesthetics, taste—call it hip-hop whimsy. When in the summer of 1993, unruly New York youngsters started sexually harassing girls in the city’s overcrowded pools, Mayor