Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [126]
Consumer actions and protests have been a time-honored tradition since the Boston Tea Party. Patriotic consumption has been a hallmark of the American auto industry (“See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet”), as well as the union movement (“Look for the union label”). Twentieth-century economics posits consumers as empowered actors whose buying habits have a meaningful and measurable impact on the economy. But being a consumer has also carried connotations of inactivity, parasitism and lack of agency. No less a personage than Adam Smith expressed ambivalence about profuse consumption, and took it as axiomatic that humankind was hardwired for frugality because of the innate desire to “better one’s own condition.”204 “Freedom without the do” actually hearkens back to—and even celebrates—these old stigmas about consumer profusion and passivity, particularly associated with the consumption of mass culture like novels and popular entertainment, whose anxiety-provoking properties arguably have been transferred in our time to television shows, video games, iPods and a host of disposable, ephemeral products that constantly need recharging, upgrading or replacing. While patriotic consumption offers the illusion of freedom and agency, freem exposes that illusion for what it is by celebrating consumers who’d rather do nothing and get credit for it. Doing nothing for freedom is exactly what we consumers want to do.
Keeping America Freem
Okay, so freedom isn’t free but freem is. But how does that square with the universal truth that there’s no such thing as a free lunch? Easily, once you realize that the lunch, too, is not free but freem. Here’s how it works:
We, as patriotic Americans, have not slowed down our spending one bit. If anything, we are taking our economic stimulus checks and spending them to keep the dreaded recession at bay. The trick is that we don’t notice this spending much, because we’re all always buying something. The protectors of our freem merely have to direct our spending towards the right ends to keep America freem. How do they do this? By controlling the marketplace.
I know we all get told we live in a free market, but hey, we were told that Saddam had a nuke zeroed in on each our home-towns, too. The market is free to the extent that there is no overt control over what gets designed, produced and sold, but the access to the market and to advertising is limited to those capable of meeting the rules set by the media outlets. Advertising plays a tremendous role in shaping our desires which are then responded to by the market. If you don’t believe it, just think back to the day not too long ago when we neither had nor had to have iPods. But the access to advertising is limited to those capable of meeting the rules set by the media outlets. As we will see, this means only the wealthiest corporations can advertise, and they predictably shape our desires so that we want what they can most profitably produce and sell.
Thanks to the tireless work of the FCC in overturning longstanding protections barring single companies from owning large shares of the media in this country, the major media are currently owned by six companies: Viacom-CBS-MTV, Murdoch-FoxTV-HarperCollins-WeeklyStandard-NewYorkPost-LondonTimes- DirecTV, G.E.-NBC-Universal-Vivendi, Time-Warner-CNN-AOL, Disney-ABC-ESPN, and Comcast. These companies are constantly circling each other and looking for mergers that would be profitable. No less liberal a person than long-time New York Times columnist William Safire has predicted that before too long, the number will be at three or possibly two companies in charge of essentially all media in the freem world.
Now it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to see that these publicly-traded corporations and their owners have an overwhelming interest in seeing the stock market stay healthy and continue to grow. The best way to do this is to stimulate one of two types of economic