The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [69]
As for Javier, Ursula now sees him only when their check-ins at the office happen to coincide. They tend to pass each other in silence. In the periphery of her vision she now sees him seated on the opposite side of the conference hall. She makes sure not to look his way. Doubtless he’s doing the same.
The room darkens, and the audience falls silent. A moment later the door at the front of the hall swings open, and the man of the hour strides in, broad-shouldered and sharkskinned. She hasn’t seen him since the trendbook was couriered to her apartment a week ago. He sequestered himself for the week to prepare for the lecture and also, apparently, to grow a goatee, perhaps the same one he used to wear as an academician. Unlike the hair on his head, the little beard has yet to go gray: it remains fine and reddish brown, as though he’d kept it in a Baggie in the back of his freezer all these years. The goatee doesn’t exactly make him look younger—his skin is too creased, his eyes too recessed—but it does throw off death just a little, in a creepy, vampiric kind of way.
He takes his place behind the podium.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he says. “Comrades. I am speaking to you at the dawn of a new age.”
He pauses to regard the group, each person in turn.
“A new Dark Age!” he bellows, bringing his palms down hard against the lectern.
No one breathes. The only sound comes from Chas’s fingertips, slowly and evenly drumming the lectern. Through slitted eyes he scans the faces in the audience, slowly, one by one, as though mentally picking his listeners up out of their chairs, turning them around, and vigorously kicking them in the ass.
“All right,” he says at last, softly. “So what am I talking about?” He nods to himself and leans back from the podium, pulling the audience members forward in response.
“To answer this question I have to back up a bit. To the height of the Preironic Era of consumerism. The late nineteen-fifties. The days of the gray flannel suit, when your typical American ad agency was as bureaucratized as the Department of Defense. The days of the Cold War, which we Americans fought by consuming products, big-ticket items, cars growing longer and heavier and gaudier by the year, tail fins designed to go out of style, engines built to roll over and die when the odometer rolled over a hundred thousand miles. The salad days of consumer-motivation research, when the great theorist Ernest Dichter, in the introduction to his seminal work The Strategy of Desire, could pose the question of whether or not it was ethical to wade into the human mind and implant never-before-existent desires for unneeded products—only to respond wholeheartedly in the affirmative by wrapping himself in the flag.
“In the Soviet Union, Dichter argued, advertising was every bit as prevalent as it was in America. The only difference was that the Soviets’ advertising campaigns were run by the government and were called propaganda, whereas ours were called marketing and were run by private business. The purpose of propaganda, he went on to say, was to manipulate people into believing that all was as it should be; that the citizens had everything they could want; that they lived in a great country founded upon a great ideal; that their work was important; that their lives were meaningful. In short, propaganda strove to create contentment. The purpose of American-style marketing, in contrast, was precisely the opposite. It existed to create discontent, to ensure that citizens were never happy with their lot, inciting them to crave more money, more property, newer cars, better clothing, better bodies, younger and more beautiful spouses. Thanks to marketing, American citizens were