The Revolution Will Not Be Advertized

Everybody I know mutes commercials, or watches recorded or streamed television precisely to skip or ignore commercials altogether. And to the extent that commercial content finds its way into occasional and ambient awareness, it inspires nothing but utter skepticism about its facile factual claims, complete contempt for its out-of-touch inanities, and ferocious resentment at its relentless harassment of an audience not one of whose members is there to spend their time watching commercial interruptions of programming.

The hysterical amplification and multiplication of commercials we are prey to at present is manifestly a dysfunctional compensation for these realities, and as such represents a conspicuous failure of imagination, intelligence, and nerve on the part of media corporation Suits (who never were the brightest bulbs, after all).

While I am among the many who are appalled by the recent suite of democracy-eroding decisions in the Citizens United epoch by the corporation-loving Supreme Court majority imposed on America by freedom-loathing Republican presidents and the authoritarian clown-college of the Federalist Society dismantling the already fragile and inadequate regulation of campaign financing and promotion, I do think it is important to remember the skepticism, contempt, and resentment of contemporary Americans for commercial messaging when we imagine an incomparable empowerment of corporations against democracy by the Supreme Court.

It is impossible to watch television today without noticing the delirious proliferation of ads touting the environmental consciousness and civic mindedness and cutting-edge science of the petroleum industry, and I am here to tell you that to the extent that this ever-amplifying ever-ramifying advertorial blitz is intended to render the petroleum industry more sympathetic, trustworthy, or credible in the eyes of everyday Americans it is hard to imagine a more epic-scaled waste of money (which I'm the first to admit they've got plenty to burn these days) and effort.

Again, I do not mean to diminish the disgusting and dangerous anti-democratizing turn the reactionary Supreme Court has taken -- one more reason to treat Obama's re-election as a priority even for the most disappointed and disgruntled Obama-bashers across the armchair-radical left blogipelago -- but I do think it is important to grasp that however profligate the flow of corporate cash enabled by the Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court there is no reason to feel hopeless about the capacity of advertizing discourse to shape election results in the service of plutocracy when the force of advertizing is transforming before our eyes, just as it is important to grasp that however brutalizing the disenfranchisement of everyday voting citizens by Republican-controlled State governments there is no reason to feel hopeless about the capacity of cynical shenanigans around the edges to choke off the overwhelming demographic democratization of a diversifying, secularizing, precarious population right before our eyes. Nobody knows enough to feel justified in hopelessness, things are changing and not only for the worse, the very magnitude of disaster may summon a will equal to the task in time, always push for more in a way that strengthens rather than diminishes such allies as you have and such forces as you can even when they are not enough, for, again, nobody knows enough to know for sure they are not enough.