ENGLISH 1A

Out of Class Essay 3

 

Culture Cocoon: Why "Jam" the Metomorphosis?

 

American culture is caught between the forces of battling generations: a generation that forged the revolutionary cultural movements of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, and one whose only knowledge of the outside world lies within the occasional embedded news story in its citizens’ Facebook feed or Snapchat stories. Where once there was a culture of revolutionaries and innovators, today there is one of passive apathy and isolation.With evolving technological capabilities and little to no filtration as to quality of the information available, the information that becomes part of culture is no longer curated, and as a result a general dislike of nonconformist or intellectually challenging information ensues. American cultural values are evolving from those which embrace difficulty and change, to those which shy from personal responsibility and ingenuity. Culture finds itself at an impasse. It cannot return to the “Golden Days” of nuclear families or Hippie rebellion, and it cannot continue in the current state of individual isolationism and irresponsibility towards natural resources. Although it is impossible to predict the ways in which culture will evolve, the goals of a country are helpful indicators, and Americans must quickly adjust their cultural priorities in order to survive.

 

Historically, American culture has been based on three basic tenets, reinvention, tolerance, and rebelliousness. Michael Medved, a talk-show host on pop-culture and politics summarizes these traits and discusses how they play out in American culture in conjunction with their counterparts. Reinvention of the self is mediated by strong family ties, tolerance of the other is contrasted by a unified nationalistic pride, and rebellious disrespect for authority is balanced by traditional religious faith. Medved claims that “when these three countervailing forces, family, patriotism, and faith, are under attack and are undermined, the previously healthy American impulses become corrosive and dangerous.” Medved’s assessment of America’s culture problem (and his solution of finding once more the balance between these three and their opposites) is a sheltered, conservative view, one that does not take into account the new possibilities, challenges, or goals of the rising generation. A certain misunderstanding of how to “fix” our culture seems to shroud the discussion. Is it really wise to return a culture to the ways of its past in hopes that previous norms will jumpstart its future? Is there really a definite procedure for “fixing” a culture?

 

American culture does not need to be repaired, it needs to evolve, and evolve with the guidance of its citizens towards a set of new social goals.

 

The book Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn is a scathing critique of American cultural norms. Lasn is a Canadian documentarist and activist who claims that, “Under current [cultural] conditions, real debate is impossible. Real democracy is impossible. Real change is impossible,” (189). He expresses a long agreed upon notion–that American culture is dead and broken due to its self destructive tendencies and general lack of quality despite the overwhelming quantity of its content. He argues that media, particularly commercial advertising through television and other mediums, is the root cause of many of the maladies that plague modern Americans. According to Lasn, attention disorders, depression and loneliness, body image and eating disorders, problems with interpersonal relationships, and abuse of our natural environment all stem from manipulative and harmful commercial campaigns. His book elaborates upon the destructive effects of commercialism on American culture and proposes solutions to these cultural catastrophes. He highlights the importance of environmentalism, and the need to “demarket” culture by reducing commercial advertisement to the bare minimum and taking down corporations’ power over American institutions. Lasn wishes to inspire a movement of Culture Jammers; to revive Americans’ revolutionary spirit and channel it into a fight to “build a new [culture] with a non-commercial heart and soul,” (128).

 

While reading Lasn’s book, I found myself agreeing to his explanations of the problems plaguing American culture, yet disagreeing with nearly all of his solutions to these problems. Lasn’s thorough diagnosis of America’s cultural flaws is insightful. He evaluates social issues manifested within the consumerist culture, how embedded advertising is within our daily lives, and the need for more environmentally minded leaders and practices. However, the revolutionary fervor with which he presents his remedies seems to oversimplify the obstacle he faces. The vagueness of his culture-jamming methods and mission statement seems to contradict the certainty with which he presents his solutions. The overall narrow-mindedness with which he presents his case seems to breeze by other cultural forces at play, and villainizes a certain industry as the sole cause of an errant culture. Lasn’s view is a highly emotionally charged and evocative one, yet it does not approach the problem of America’s incontestable cultural devolution holistically or realistically.

 

Lasn is not alone in his critique of the American culture. A common evaluation, one which Lasn briefly discussed, is the violence that is shown in movies and TV shows as a source of a cultural dumbing-down process. Sean M. Quinlan, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Idaho, discusses this obsession with violence via a cultural trend, gunshots through the head.  Quinlan argues that since Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the execution of alleged Viet Cong terrorist Nguyeˆ ̃n Va ̆ n Lém (the Saigon Execution) on American television, the American psyche has sought to express itself through these headshots. Quinlan investigates the prevalence of headshots throughout cultural markers, such as in movies like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and literature like The Godfather. Quinlan suggests that headshots, while evocative of historical cultural trauma, are also symbolic of the shift in scientific understanding that the brain rather than the heart is the indicator of life or death.  He makes clear that headshots in TV, movies, and books (and by extension other media violence as well), “documents both the individual end of consciousness and a collective end of American innocence... [and] also serves, perhaps, as an apt metaphor for the self-destructive trends that have characterized post-1960s society,” (Quinlan).

 

Both Lasn and Quinlan show that media violence is a symptom of a broken system. Quinlan, however, claims that due to the three aforementioned tragic historical events and shifting understanding of the role of the brain, “American society suffered a systemic ‘nervous breakdown’...  [and] became increasingly fragmented and paranoid. This disaggregation caused Americans to lose traditional meanings of self and community and seek out new forms of meaning and identity, some of which were potentially self-absorbed and solipsistic,” (Quinlan). By attributing American’s cultural narcissism to a mass social “breakdown” as a result of tragedy (symbolized by the headshot), Quinlan contradicts Lasn’s assertion that consumerism is the poison, and suggests rather that we ourselves are.

When analyzing Lasn’s criticisms of the seemingly vapid content of American media, his insight seems accurate. Yes, Americans are addicted to TV and movies; Yes, the content of these TV shows and movies is often violent, sexual, or apocalyptic. But what if this content serves the opposite purpose Lasn attributes it? Lasn claims that “Even the tiniest of gestures–opening a door, holding a teacup, a facial expression–and the most private and individual actions–coming home, making tea, arguing with a lover–have always been shown to us within the spectacle,” (104). It is seemingly true that due to the breadth of TV content, much of our lives have been stereotyped, and we have been conditioned to behave with characters as role models.

 

However, American TV is quite polarized. Another type of content, the “apocalyptic” genre, starkly contrasts the idealistic or utopian relationships we see in the American soap operas or chick-flicks. Rather than viewing this type of content as harmful, Paul A. Cantor, a professor at the University of Virginia, concludes that through the apocalyptic genre “The dream of material prosperity and security is shattered, but a different ideal comes back to life--the all-American ideal of rugged individualism, the spirit of freedom, independence, and self-reliance,” (Cantor). Cantor’s analysis reveals that perhaps our culture is not simply devolving into the pointlessly grotesque and impossible, but fulfilling a deep urge to rebel and reinvent. Perhaps American culture, through its media, is attempting to find a direction for its anger with the system, and channel that anger towards appropriate targets.

Lasn’s book aims to inspire a revolution, to “beat them at their own game...seize control of the roles and functions that corporations play...jam the pop-culture marketeers, and build a new [culture],” (128). What entitles one interest group to rebuild the culture of an entire nation? In what way can one man’s organization express the diversity of interests and values of a country such as America? How can one organization re-prioritize a country’s national interests and values, and still retain a democracy rather than a dictatorship? Lasn’s approach to social change is so absurd, it almost seems fictional, causing it be reminiscent of a Broadway musical Urinetown.

 

In the musical Urinetown, a depiction of our future world, water has become so scarce and valuable a resource that all private toilets have been eradicated and everyone must pay a fee to pee in public amenities, controlled by one corporation. Those who pee anywhere else but the public amenities are sent to the dreaded Urinetown. The poor rebel, claiming their rights to pee without paying, and kill the owner of the corporation that controls the public bathrooms. They take charge of the city with a new dogma, ruling with the principles of love, freedom, and personal choice– and of course empowerment to pee freely. Although they are no longer oppressed by a corporation and are led by a people-first movement, the rebellion does not take proper stock of the resources at hand or the underlying issues the water corporation was keeping at bay, and soon everyone dies of water contamination or dehydration. Although an absurdist play, Urinetown is an apt metaphor for the lack of realistic economic knowledge or solutions Lasn employs when calling for his institutional revolution and the overthrow of corporate power within society. Urinetown is also an appropriate artifact for the possibility of an extinguished culture, and the care with which we must proceed when attempting to revitalize it.

 

Lasn’s text is riddled with economic and business “facts” meant to support his revolutionary calls. While I understand the very real abuses of corporate power within American culture, Lasn’s assessment of the probable economic solutions and his suggestions for de-marketization  are faulty at best and wholly inaccurate at worst. Lasn’s assessment of economics is that economic theory is not grounded in reality, and that “the economic profession won’t admit that its models are flawed,” (202). This is an inherently untrue statement– in even the most basic of economics courses it is expressed that economic models are imperfect; they do not exactly measure the real world. While there is a greater need to incorporate environmental impact into economic measurement, economics is not the enemy of environmentalism, but rather even a tool for environmentalists. Truth in Lasn’s economic and environmental argument begins and ends with one statement “constant growth within finite terrain is the ideology of the cancer cell. Its madness,” (201).

 

For example of Lasn’s economic misunderstanding, he argues that in order to hold organizations more accountable for their environmental impact or criminal actions, “each shareholder [must be] deemed personally responsible and liable for collateral damage to bystanders or harms to the environment...Fewer shares [will be] traded. Instead of simply choosing the biggest cash cows, potential shareholders... [will] carefully investigate the backgrounds of the companies they [are] about to sink their money into,” (158). While this proposal sounds reasonable and fair at first read, it reveals a misunderstanding of basic economics and how industries are run.

 

Stocks in companies are sold to millions of people, people who do not have power in influencing the company’s decision making process, and whose stock purchases do not transfer money directly to the company. Rather than suggesting that we hold board members (those who often hold significantly larger shares, and have direct influence over the company) responsible for criminal liabilities, Lasn suggests that the millions of insignificantly minor shareholders be held responsible for illegalities that they cannot control nor predict.  Further, Lasn’s assumption that companies do not face penalties, nor will they feel the impact of their wrongdoing as a result of the current economic model is false. When a company such as BP is responsible for causing a devastating oil spill, the value of its stocks plummets, and thus the value the board members’ shares follows, penalising the company and its leaders for wrongdoing. While there is a great need to embed minimization of environmental impact more deeply into economics (in theory and practice), Lasn’s suggestions reveal that he does not possess an understanding of how to do that, or of basic economic systems.

 

Lasn’s assessment of the causes of American culture’s downfall is a narrow-minded one. Culture is not only a function of consumerist commercial media, but also current events, movies, art, music, dance, and cultural priorities. American culture used to generate first-class artists, musicians, and writers–exploring the timeless questions of life, love, death, happiness, and meaning. These foundations of what is and has historically been considered a “cultured” society are not present in modern day America. Our music and movies are predominantly based upon sex and violence, our books and TV are seemingly obsessed with apocalyptic futures and a wide array of monsters such as zombies and vampires, influential artistic movements have all but disappeared from popular culture, and dance has been reduced to structureless dry-humping. It seems that all the building blocks of culture are present in America, yet distorted so completely that they no longer behave as they should in advancing culture.

 

Our culture is not only affected by these more historic building blocks, but also by newer ones such as social media and the internet. America is one of the most developed countries in the world, where almost everyone is connected to social media almost all the time. As such, the vast quantity of information that is floating within the American “cloud-consciousness” is accessible to all, regardless of its merit and with little to no curation of valuable media. According to Steve Wasserman, former literary editor of the Los Angeles Times, and current editor-at-large for Yale University Press “the digital tsunami now engulfing us may even signal... the enterprise of making distinctions between bad, good, and best was a mug's game that had no place in a democracy that worships at the altar of mass appeal and counts its receipts at the almighty box office,” (Wasserman). Therefore, not only do our most foundational cultural building blocks seem to be corrupted, but the newest toys in our block collection don’t even seem to be serving a function.

 

Americans must re-prioritize their values, and apply them not only through advertising or in corporate law, but throughout all institutions. Americans must stop shying away from intelligence and difficulty, but rather learn to embrace challenge. This can be done by altering the education system to teach problem solving, and rewarding companies for finding solutions to challenging global, national, or community issues. Americans must live sustainably, this can be done by making it cheaper to eat healthy, nutritious, whole foods rather than a Happy Meal, by teaching sustainability and environmentalism in schools, by subsidising electric vehicles and creating more infrastructure for them. American cultural building blocks such as music must de-popularize and devalue the concept of zero work for infinite reward. Wasserman discusses this entitlement in his essay, writing, “A culture filled with smooth and familiar consumptions produces in people rigid mental habits and stultified conceptions. They know what they know, and they expect to find it reinforced when they turn a page or click on a screen. Difficulty annoys them, and, having become accustomed to so much pabulum served up by a pandering and invertebrate media, they experience difficulty not just as "difficult," but as insult.”

 

We know our culture is in trouble when high school graduates’ future plans are to “make money, f---k bitches,” and when asked how they plan to do this they respond, “by being a baller.” Our culture needs a serious reality check; there is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no room for such arrogance from the future leaders of one of the world’s leading countries. In a world where natural resources are being so quickly depleted, where polarized cultures are becoming more extremist in their views and violent in action– in a world where ingenuity is needed to solve problems such as genocide, disease, hunger, and education, there is no room for a first-world nation to abandon self-improvement for complacency.

 

Despite Kalle Lasn’s powerful rhetoric urging citizens to action, (“You can roll over and squeal like a pig–i.e. act the way corporations want you to act–or you can seize control of the situation...and start acting like an empowered sovereign citizen,”(146)) the action to which he is inciting his audience does not necessarily liberate them, but rather would create a complete collapse of society as we know it–much in the same way as Urinetown. We may be empowered sovereign citizens, but would we have a society? Lasn’s call to action is well timed, and there is indeed a need for action. However, it seems that the action needed is not to destroy the current culture, but rather explore and highlight its most basic interests, (which may be obscured by genres such as apocalyptic TV, movies, and books, or exploited by commercial advertisement) and discover new ways to bring them to the forefront of collective culture using the media and technology we have at hand.

 

American culture is evolving between eras. As citizens of this culture we must make it a priority to think ahead– direct our cultural evolution towards realistic and sustainable goals, and reformat our institutions to serve with these goals as priority. Throwing one’s support behind a cultural movement without analyzing the possible effects is dangerous, and not necessarily productive. American culture is a little lost right now, and like every teenager (for American culture is only a few hundred years old as opposed to the thousand year old “adult” cultures of Europe, China, India, etc.) it must blunder its way through adolescence.  An inspirational American culture will emerge once more, reinvented, yet still imperfect and ever improving; and as members of this adolescent culture, it is our duty to help it on its way to becoming a globally minded and fully rounded adult, rather than attempting to derail it during its metamorphosis.

 

WORKS CITED

 

Cantor, Paul A. "The apocalyptic strain in popular culture: the American nightmare becomes the

American dream." The Hedgehog Review 15.2 (2013): 23+. Academic OneFile. Web. 21 June 2015.

 

Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge, and Why We

Must. New York: Quill, 2000. Print.

 

Medved, Michael. "You must remember this; what's right with American culture." Policy Review

71 (1995): 45+. Academic OneFile. Web. 21 June 2015.

 

Quinlan, Sean M. "Shots to the Mind: Violence, the Brain and Biomedicine in Popular Novels

and Film in Post-1960s America." Ebsco Host. N.p., 1 Sept. 2013. Web. 21 June 2015.

 

Wasserman, Steve. "In defense of difficulty: a phony populism is denying Americans the joys of

serious thought." The American Conservative 14.2 (2015): 24+. Academic OneFile. Web. 22 June 2015.

 

Reflection

 

I found that this essay helped me synthesize my opinions about Lasn’s book and American popular culture. While reading his novel and during my research I found myself getting swept up in the cultural failures– the problems at hand, their effects, the possible origins. However, I was not convinced by nearly all of the solutions proposed by Lasn, or the author authors I researched. I thought they were too simplistic, too vague, too ineffectual, or simply wrong. As I continued reading, the narrative style and rhetoric used further weakened the message for me. The book began to seem ironic. As if it was pandering to the same audience that would be so easily seduced by the quick-fix consumerist culture it was attacking. As if the book wanted to replace one tyranny with another. As Lasn continued his argument, I began arguing with him. My book is filled with annotations questioning the validity of his statements, naming the persuasive styles he employs to convince me, arguing with his economic and political theories.

While I appreciate the intent of Lasn’s novel, I don’t think I learned the way to cause a cultural revolution. Rather, I think I gained perspective on our culture, what is happening to it, and how it is shaping us. I learned that the issues engulfing our culture are deeper and wider than I had previously imagined, and that there is a lot that can and needs to be done in order to bring our culture to a healthy place. I learned to maintain perspective, and not be swept up by one quick-fix in lieu of another, and to continue to critically analyze an ideology that is being presented to me. I think that Culture Jam is an important read, mostly because it brings awareness to the issues in American culture, and prompts thought about ways to solve them.