"Consume"

American Newspeak Word Collisions by Wayne Grytting

After the tragedy of September 11th, a tiny window opened in America’s cultural landscape. Besides feeling vulnerable and outraged, many people paused to engage in an activity quite foreign to our customs, an activity that required journeying into the most infrequently visited regions of the cerebral cortex, an activity known as æ reflection. And what we reflected about were the complaints that flooded in from around the world that Americans are shallow, self-centered, and materialistic.

Let’s be open about this. We are. And we’re doing a damn good job of selling it to the rest of the world. So there. But critics of America’s superficiality leave unanswered a lot of really nifty questions, like, just how shallow is America? How shallow can you get if you really try? Can you make advances in narcissism? Can spiritual aspirations be met with a new toaster oven? Can a society be united by shared memories of advertising jingles? How long can a TV news anchor smile? How much of yourself can you sell and still have brain cells left to tie your shoes? These are the issues you are about to see cracked wide open as we explore the cutting-edge advances being made in one of our nation’s leading industries: Newspeak.
 
Newspeak and Doublethink were the brain children of George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell may have missed the boat with his prediction of a totalitarian leader with a moustache ruling every aspect of our lives, but he hit the mark with his picture of how our language could be dumbed down and the mind turned into a bureaucratic morass. Newspeak, for Orwell, was language after it had been run over by semi-trucks, leaving the road littered with nicely flattened out concepts like "downsizing," "networking," "interfacing," and those nice, friendly monosyllables we get to hear strung together on TV newscasts. Doublethink, or Doublespeak, refers to the delightful contradictions those smashed words could be twisted into by practitioners who just didn’t let their minds in on the fact. This mental gridlock produces scenes like former President Bill Clinton condemning campaign contributions on his way to a fundraising dinner in Chicago. Or President George W. Bush telling school children, "One way to fight evil is to fight it with kindness and love and compassion" æ on the 36th day of our bombing of Afghanistan.
 
The fact that our "best and brightest" politicians and corporate PR types are regularly spouting Doublespeak is not exactly a new discovery (as my dear mother was kind enough to inform me). What your average crusty cynic fails to appreciate is the pace of innovation in the field. Newspeak does not stand still. It’s dynamic. Each year it’s new and improved. Every month countless individuals are not only making advances, but cutting-edge advances. America has been leaving Orwell’s 1984 in the dust. Without the benefit of a Big Brother, America’s practitioners have been showing what teamwork can do, raising Orwell’s standards of Doublethink to new heights, making it rightly one of our most important export products. And receiving so little recognition for their efforts ...

The scope of the advances in the Newspeak industry hit me after I’d seen a particularly intriguing ad on television. It featured a woman at a grocery check-out counter unloading products with very familiar names as a Voice from on high explained: "A friend is someone you know about, someone you can trust. A brand’s a bit like that. You meet this friend through advertising ... Without advertising, how would you recognize your friends?" This fine commercial was sponsored by the International Advertising Association and was part of a series of ads appearing in more than 200 countries. After watching it I was left with warm fuzzy feelings for all my friends æ Nabisco, General Mills, Nestle’s. Yes, I love you, Big Brother.
 
"Without advertising, how would you recognize your friends?" Despite appearances, this question was not written by a total airhead. It represents probably one of the finer literary products of a highly educated mind, undoubtedly trained in some of our nation’s elite schools before advancing to Madison Avenue, a person exposed to a minimum of 17 years of public or private school tutoring (for a possible total of 19,440 hours of education). Assuming the ad text was not written by a committee (how could it?), it had to pass muster with a minimum of, let’s say, a dozen ad executives representing a possible grand total of 233,280 hours of instruction by some of our nation’s leading educators. This, I suggest, is the real crisis of our education system.
 
Nature abhors a vacuum, and the absence of Hitler-style dictators and herds of official Thought Police has brought forth worthy replacements. This became clear to me one day at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in an upscale shopping mall in Seattle. I had barely settled into browsing through the remainders rack when a voice came on the public address system announcing that He would be appearing in only 15 minutes. I’m sure you’ve guessed it already. If you haven’t you will need to read further. Yes, none other than Ronald McDonald was coming to make a guest appearance at the store.

I quickly looked around at my fellow customers. No one was gagging, no one even blinked or shook their head in disbelief. They simply went about grazing through the shelves. But there I was, having a religious experience right in the middle of the remainders rack, a virtual epiphany (I think that’s what the word is). Ronald McDonald at such a fine upstanding bookstore, as if to finally welcome the literary world into the realm of hamburgers and soft drinks. It was like everything had come full circle. McDonald’s, Walt Disney, Pepsi, Chevron, Chrysler, Wal-Mart, Denny’s, the U.S. Senate æ we were all one big happy corporate clan. We were all fellow commodities. Big Brother by committee. And now fully out of the closet.

(Continued in the Book)