Your Call Is Important To Us (3 page)

When did you last see an actor say his latest movie was lousy? Now, when did you last see a lousy movie? Suffice it to say the latter happens far more frequently than the former. Commercial speech insists that everything it speaks of is good, and when everything is good, nothing is good. There is also escalating hyperbole going on here, insofar as everything not only has to be good, but better than all the other billions of good things, which leads to a feedback loop of shills for an infinity of proliferating, ever-improved products. I’ll see your Diet Coke with Lemon and raise you a Pepsi Twist. I’ll see your Pepsi Twist and raise you a Vanilla Coke. And so on, until no corner goes cola-less, and there’s a worldwide vanilla shortage.

Another property of commercial speech that leads to bullshit production is that it is not written by the people who have to say or assume responsibility for it. This is also a big problem with most political speech. I am not insisting that everyone draft his own material, though the English teacher in me reckons that anyone who cannot string together a sentence probably shouldn’t lead a company or a country. But the number of people working from a script today encourages one to view every public statement as acting, an entire culture emoting like a dinner theater troupe. Hey, everyone—let’s put on a show! This division of rhetorical labor means that the brains who think up the words don’t have to say them, and the speakers who give voice to the words don’t have to think them. All the better to disconnect them from reality, my dear.

Better communications technology and the increased volume of commercial speech are two of the major material causes of bullshit’s growth, insofar as they have provided the means of distribution and the capital to produce and distribute more manure. Both these trends picked up speed during the period of postwar prosperity in North America, otherwise known as the long boom. The long boom stretched from the mid-forties to the mid-seventies. One of the reasons why Americans enjoyed such a long boom is that they never really demobbed. It took a great deal of propaganda to convince Americans to enter both World Wars, and a massive mobilization of the forces of production to sustain their participation in these wars. Once the wars were won, the forces of wartime production and persuasion were successfully redeployed in the service of domestic affluence, convenience, and progress. This is not to say that there were no wars, for copious dollars continued to flow into the military-industrial complex, but on the domestic front, peace and prosperity prevailed. Propagandists became PR men and advertisers and we cranked out the cars, televisions, and trinkets of the new consumer culture.

This period laid the infrastructure for the bullshit explosion, but it took a few more unfortunate events, like the fiscal crumminess and stagflation of the late seventies, to finally blow it up real good. The one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate left public trust in democratic institutions in tatters. The leaders of the eighties, folks like Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney, urged us to put our trust in markets instead. Reagan went so far as to claim that government itself was the problem, and markets the solution: “It’s time to get government off the backs of the people,” quoth the Gipper. The free market was presented as democracy in action, the public sphere vilified as inefficient, cumbersome, retrograde. In fact, the very idea of a public good was dismissed as some hippy-dippy liberal chimera. As Iron Maggie once decreed, there is no such thing as society, only individuals. This sort of individualistic, up-with-markets rhetoric has been the most consistent theme in politics for the past twenty years. Even alleged Democrats like Clinton cut the welfare rolls.

This kind of thinking has significant social side effects, ways of thinking that aid and abet bullshit production. First, saying “let the market decide” is kind of like saying “let the car drive.” It’s mystical, and it also implies that we should not blame whoever happens to be behind the wheel. Second, it has made us more self-interested, a natural consequence of being told twenty million times that individuals achieve amazing things and generate fabulous wealth, while collective endeavors or shared goals lead to committees, teamsters, and gulags. This is also a result of being informed that you will never be a beneficiary of all the Great Society safety-net fun, like cheap tuition, or free health care, or a pension. You know that it’s all up to you, and that you have to believe in you, to quote two of our most beloved inspirational truisms. You have to sell you, since nobody else will, and there is nobody to blame but you if you fail your way into poverty.

This emphasis on the self is by no means confined to politics and economics. Pop culture, from celebrity coverage to the memoir deluge, showcases individuals overcoming the customary impediments, like abuse and addiction and divorce and disease. The language of news broadcasts has shifted selfward, switching from the traditional collective pronouns of hard news to a more personal you-speak and increased coverage of the personal peccadillos of public figures. Pop psychology, otherwise known as self-help, is a publishing and daytime TV juggernaut worth billions. When you do an Amazon search for books about the self, the server spits out more than thirty thousand titles. For those who’d rather spruce up their outsides than their insides, there is the cavalcade of lifestyle porn: Think Martha, pre-slammer, and all the experts that have done Martha.

There is nothing inherently wrong with self-interest. The danger lies in the ego growing outsized, overfed on a steady diet of nothing. It is little wonder that we can be such selfish, shortsighted beings, considering the extent to which we are encouraged to think no further than our image, our comfort, our next snack. We are forever being wooed by new needs, and bombarded by freshly minted wants. This happy consumer plenitude goes beautifully with all the scary political straight talk about supporting yourself or eating dog food in a cardboard box. Self-reliance is the stick, and self-indulgence is the carrot, but the focus remains the same: Does this work for me? What’s in it for me? Enough about me—what do I think of me?

Conservative virtuecrats blame today’s chronic truth decay on relativism in its many pernicious forms. Some of them castigate the “if it feels good, do it” permissiveness of hippies and boomers. Others point a finger at the godlessness of modern life. Others point to academia, which erroneously assumes that liberal arts faculties have any sway over the culture. If we did, believe me, I would be the first to do a merry power-mad jig in the town square. Alas, we do not.

If we have become a more relativist culture, less inclined to believe in absolutes like God and truth, more inclined to subjective judgments, it is largely due to the millions of choices presented by the market. One of the main articles of postmodern criticism is that there is no capital-T truth, merely competing truth claims. This is the kind of talk that makes conservatives accuse po-mo thought of being politically correct gobbledygook. But this formula does describe their beloved free market very nicely, as every product or service makes a competing claim of sorts, and no one, ideal, holy, true soda prevails. All sales pitches may strain to reach the absolute, à la Coke Is It, but they only have value in relation to one another. Or, to paraphrase philosopher Gilles Deleuze, we have shifted from moral existence to aesthetic existence, where questions of taste engage us more frequently than questions about the good. Ironically, many of the people who, through their policies and their ideologies, have pushed us into this world of constant consumption castigate the decadence that invariably accompanies the very affluence they seek as the greatest of all goods.

This is not to claim that the old dogmas do not persist. This is merely to note that in most North American cities the Christian store, with its Left Behind books and saint decor and Jesus fish for the car, is never more than a drive away from the place that sells the Che T-shirts, face jewelry, and bongs. The free market is powerful and lucrative and fun precisely because it is the great Relativizer, leveler of all values, equally glad to crank out the trappings of kink or conformity, ready to cater to the lewd or the prude. Money does not care whether you are using it to buy a gross of Bibles or of nipple clamps.

One of the great paradoxes of modern life is that money is our major good, since money is equally glad to pal around with the honest dealer and the flimflam artist. Money is me-minded, as well. There’s nothing money loves more than hanging around with other money. Money can’t get enough of money. It’s like a Zen koan: It takes it to make it.

The free market has provided unparalleled levels of affluence, comfort, and peace for North Americans. I am enjoying the blandishments of glorious capitalism even as I type this sentence. Mmmm, comfy couch, big-screen TV, effervescent beverages, mmmm. But, and it is a great big but, it would be a mistake to consider the current setup of the global economy a meritocracy, democracy in action, or a final moral arbiter. The free market ain’t that free. You have to pay to get in. The global economy is a crazy patchwork quilt of mixed economies. Every major North American industry is propped up by public infrastructure, like government subsidies, tax entitlements, and protectionist trade regulations. Many North American industries are dominated by a few huge colluding concerns, which hardly squares with classical economic visions of independence, competition, efficiency, and transparency. Some North American concerns have entirely abandoned old-school notions like providing services or products people are willing to pay for, and instead make their profits via book cooking, numbers juggling, speculation, liquidation, outsourcing, and downsizing. The latter practices are not just the mark of corrupt concerns like Enron, WorldCom, or Global Crossing; most leading CEOs have presided over layoffs in the thousands, and General Electric has divested itself of almost half of its workers over the past decade.

Moreover, it is what the free market sets people to doing that really matters. The last long boom was the result of a vibrant manufacturing sector. The gilded notion of mid-century family values has everything to do with the fact that Mom could stay home with the kids and Jesus, baking pies, because Dad made enough dough to provide for the whole brood. One of the great Republican conundrums is that their aggressively pro-rich economic policies have made it virtually impossible for anyone to live in the kind of good old-fashioned family that their social policies strive to create. The great Democratic conundrum is that they have become New High-Fashion Republicans for Girls.

Now more of us work, we spend more time at work, and more of us work in the service sector, the fastest-growing in North America. The service sector is not as well paid, has a lower economic multiplier effect, and involves tons of phony cheer. The growth of the service sector is certainly implicated in the production of bullshit, insofar as customer service involves repeating lickspittle mantras. And since you are what you soak in, a long, hard day of making things is bound to produce a different sort of person than a long, hard day of greeting folks in the foyer of the Wal-Mart, asking if they want fries with their burger, or conducting phone surveys.

There are several other reasons why there is so much bullshit, not the least of which is that we continue to tolerate it. We might grumble about bullshit, but few of us are inclined to ask for the manager or boycott the offender. This is partly due to a sense that resistance is futile. You, as a lone consumer, can hardly put a dent in any of the reigning oligopolies with your singular refusal, no matter how cruddy their service or product may be. You, as a single voter, can hardly influence matters of state to the same degree that industry concerns and special interest lobbies can. These feelings of impotence, insignificance, and isolation represent the bummer underside of all that self-interest speak, for you are but a superfluous drop in the mighty churning sea that will wash on with or without you. It’s the triple-A of apathy, alienation, and atomization.

The business of ordinary life involves speaking to loads of different people we do not know and who do not know us. I realize this is a Well, Duh proposition, but it is an important part of why we continue to produce and perpetuate bullshit. Relative anonymity, or lack of direct contact, lowers the truth stakes. Lying guides emphasize that it is always easier to slide a fib past someone you do not know; someone who knows you well is more likely to notice your tells. More important, you probably wouldn’t want to abuse their trust to begin with. We may be connected to many more people, but not enough to develop a sense of trust. It is far easier to fib on the phone than it is in person. It is far easier to fib on the TV or the Web than on the phone.

It is a banal example of a larger phenomenon, but when you hear the familiar words, “your call is important to us,” are you, personally, being lied to? Yes and no. The nice people who put you on hold are not out to deceive you. They are merely doing their jobs, which they more likely than not dislike, and with good reason. Employees at call centers are trained to develop a phoniness that is deeply demeaning, for workers and customers both. They have to act like you are King or Queen Customer, because their company has doubtless adopted some Service Quality Excellence Formula, even though your call is but one of the thousands that the cubicle farm will field today. Even when you get past the recording, many phone jockeys aren’t really talking to you at all. They, like so many little Gwyneth Paltrows, are simply giving voice to a script, a protocol of politesse expressly designed to defuse a screwed consumer’s outrage without actually solving anything.

You, the indignant consumer, probably picked up the phone because this company has your lovely money and you have nothing to show for it. No tickets, no credit card, no dial tone, no reservation, no service, no power, none of the things they promised you in the pretty ads. And hey, what are you going to do, now that you’ve been waiting on hold this long, chump? Hang up? Get bumped down the priority-sequence queue?