Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [75]
To be sure, suspense and mystery novels geared to movie adaptation have topped best-seller lists for a long time. Media incest has been spreading, however, and now dominates the nonfiction list as well. The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for November 28, 1993, listed five media-linked best-sellers in the top fifteen, with “books” by TV conservative Rush Limbaugh, trash-radio star Howard Stern, and comedian Jerry Seinfeld in first, second, and fourth place. William Shatner’s Star Trek Memories followed in ninth place with Michael Jordan’s NBA memoir Rare Air in fifteenth on the hardback lists and simultaneously in second place on the nonfiction softcover list, right behind an earlier book by Limbaugh that was first among paperbacks—giving Limbaugh the top place on both lists. During the same week, MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head, a cartoon book based on the MTV series (whose banal cruelty and teenage knownothingness had forced producers to move it out of prime time to a later time slot), was fourth on the “Advice and How-To” list. The fastidious New York Times not only reported on but contributed to this dazzling mediocratic spectacle, offering both daily and Sunday reviews of Howard Stern’s exercise in confessional porn (over a million books in print within a few weeks of publication and possibly the fastest selling book in publishing history) by reviewers who were astonishingly polite and respectful, as if they had before them a slightly puzzling but not unpleasing work of postmodern skepticism from a delightful cultural eccentric—an FM Oscar Wilde for our own radio times.6 Howard Stern himself recognized how pusillanimous the “literary” marketplace was. On the air, he confided to listeners that he was already the master of radio, and everything he knew about books and publishers persuaded him that they were an easy mark. So they proved to be. When literature becomes an outpost of McWorld, laying siege to it presents little challenge to commercial hustlers of Stern’s audacity or Limbaugh’s hubris.
The chief importance of writers and celebrities in McWorld (and of course the point here is precisely that the distinction between the two is fading),7 is as food for the endless appetite of television and film for “story” and “story lines,” for plot and character, and for perverse personalities and salably scandalous “real-life” happenings. This is why the pursuit of Paramount by Viacom and QVC was also a hunt for Simon & Schuster and why the German publishing colossus Bertelsmann bought itself a new skyscraper in New York’s image and entertainment center, Times Square. It is why political films starring not just elected officials but the backroom operators who spin their careers—films like The War Room (about colorful James Carville’s role in Clinton’s presidential election victory)—become establishment cult hits. Norman Ornstein, a careful and moderate conservative Washington political analyst, comments: “Recently, there’s been a real blurring of the lines between Hollywood, New York and Washington about who the celebrities are. We have actors playing public-policy figures and public-policy figures playing actors, and I can’t believe that any of this is particularly healthy for the republic.”8
American books are making inroads on global book publishing that parallel the story of films and television. Best-selling books in Russia, Switzerland, Brazil, England, and Holland nowadays mimic best-selling films: they are strictly American. Der Boekerij, a leading Dutch publisher, carries a list on which 90 percent of the books are foreign translations and almost all of those translations are of American books. They have made the long journey from Anne Frank to Amy Fisher without a hint of embarrassment, scoring at the end of 1993