http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php Drugs-forum, the international drugs community. Information about Drugs forum, shrooms, magic mushrooms, kratom, mescaline, salvia divinorum, ecstasy, magic mushrooms, lsd, ketamine, ethnobotanicals, herbal highs, research chemicals, amphetamine, meth, speed, drugs, cannabis, marijuana, hashish en Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:23:30 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/images/misc/rss.jpg http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=441 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:15:37 GMT Some links based from a (rather exaggerated, albeit interesting) documentary recently mentioned on the forum:

Benjamin Rush, the so-called "father of psychiatry". Believed that mental illness was a result of too much blood in the brain hence performed bloodletting acts frequently. Supposed to be revered for some reason: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Rush

Henry Cotton, an early 20th century quack who thought that removing body parts, especially teeth, was the key to curing mental problems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Andrews_Cotton

Hitler's hobby: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

One of Hitler's great influences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Rüdin

A rather scary drug formerly used for "shock" therapy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentylenetetrazol

Walter J. Freeman, quite possibly the craziest brain butcher of them all. Famed for turning JFK's little sister into a vegetable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Freeman_(surgeon)

The Diagnostic and "Statistical" Manual of Mental Disorders, the pseudo-scientific fantasy novel that prescibes Ritalin to your kiddies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-V

Got schizophrenia? How about a nice daily coma to sort you out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_shock_therapy

Something of a side note. An early historical character thought to have inherited a great memory by getting his skull flogged by a sword: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenn_Fáelad_mac_Aillila

The original US medical marvel, Phineas Gage. A huge metal rod impaled his skull during an explosion. Miraculously survived only to adapt a new personality apparently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage

A few selected persons who experienced a lobotomy, history's most gruesome medical butchery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy#Cases

Better known as Thorazine and recognised for its bizarre side effects, try some of this when a lobotomy becomes unethical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorazine

There's some interesting reading in there if you have a bit of time on your hands. It's fascinating to read up about some of the insane experiments that have been used through history in order to treat the supposedly insane. ]]> Nature Boy http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=441 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=440 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:49:07 GMT If the evidence allows for several explanations to a given problem then the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is most probably correct. This principle is called Occam’s Razor, after the... If the evidence allows for several explanations to a given problem then the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is most probably correct. This principle is called Occam’s Razor, after the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham. There is not the slightest need to postulate pre-placed explosive charges to explain why the towers collapsed at near free-fall speeds. Practical aspects of explosive demolitions make the explosive charge hypothesis improbable to the point of absurdity (see “Conspiracy disproved”).

There are plenty of real conspiracies in the US. Why make up fake ones? Every few years, property tsars and the city government in New York conspire to withhold fire company responses so that enough of a neighbourhood burns down for the poor to quit and profitable gentrification to ensue. That is a conspiracy to commit ethnic cleansing, and also murder. It is happening today in Brooklyn, even as similar ethnic cleansing and gentrification is scheduled in San Francisco, where Bayview Hunters Point is the last large black community in the Bay Area, sitting on beautiful waterfront property: so now is the time to move the black folks out.

The conspiracy virus is not new. Let me recall. The Russians couldn’t possibly have built an A-bomb without Commie traitors. Hitler was a victim of treachery, otherwise he couldn’t have been defeated by the Red Army marching across eastern Europe and half Germany. JFK couldn’t have been shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, it had to be the CIA. There is no end to examples seeking to prove that Russians, Arabs, Viet Cong, Japanese, whoever, couldn’t possibly match the brilliance and cunning of secret cabals of white Christians.

Some discover a silver lining in 9/11 conspiracism. A politically sophisticated leftist in Washington DC wrote to me agreeing with my ridicule of the inside job scenarios but adding: “To me the most interesting thing (in the US) is how many people are willing to believe that Bush either masterminded it [the 9/11 attacks] or knew in advance and let it happen. If that number or anything close to that is true, that’s a huge base of people that are more than deeply cynical about their elected officials. That would be the real news story that the media is missing, and it’s a big one.”

“I’m not sure I see the silver lining about cynicism re government,” I answered. “It seems to demobilise people from useful political activity.” For the conspiracism stems from despair and political infantilism. There’s no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery.

Richard Aldrich’s book on British intelligence (4) describes how a report for the Pentagon on declassification recommended that “interesting declassified material” such as information about the JFK assassination “could be released and even posted on the internet, as a diversion” and used to “reduce the unrestrained public appetite for secrets by providing good faith distraction material”. He added: “If investigative journalists and contemporary historians were absorbed with the vexatious, but rather tired, debates over the grassy knoll, they would not be busy probing into areas where they were unwelcome.”

I am therefore sure that the Bush gang, and all the real conspirators of Washington, are delighted at the obsessions of the 9/11 conspiracists. It’s a distraction from the 1,001 real plots of capitalism that demand exposure and political challenge. As Theodore Adorno wrote: “The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness” (5)

—————-

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor of the political newsletter and website ‘CounterPunch’ and co-author of ‘End Times: the Decline and Fall of the Fourth Estate’ (CounterPunch, forthcoming 2007)

(1) In a 1987 television series the Russians, disguised as UN forces, were to occupy the US within 10 years.

(2) Bohemian Grove, name of the select club close to San Francisco where Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton and Tony Blair all met; the annual Bilderburg group meeting, from the name of its first venue in 1954 in the Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands; Ditchley, an Anglo-American foundation named after its original English country house home; and Davos, home of the annual World Economic Forum.

(3) David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, Olive Branch Press, Northampton, Mass. 2004.

(4) Richard J Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, Overlook Press, New York, 2002.

(5) Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Minima Moralia, Verso, London, 1978. ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=440 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=439 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:48:38 GMT http://mondediplo.com/2006/12/02conspiracy Distractions from awful reality US: the conspiracy that...]]> from http://mondediplo.com/2006/12/02conspiracy

Distractions from awful reality
US: the conspiracy that wasn’t

The left in the United States remains distracted by fantastic stories about conpiracies hatched by the Bush administration: in many of these, even the 9/11 attacks are believed to have been an inside job. Yet the chief, and most fearful, characteristic of the Bush administration has been its low level of practical management abroad and at home.

By Alexander Cockburn

Where was the American left in the recent campaign that ended in the recapture of both houses of Congress by the Democrats on 7 November? Was it in the streets fomenting opposition to the war in Iraq? No, the antiwar movement has been inert for months. When I was asked to give the keynote speech at a rare antiwar rally in my local town in October, three of my five fellow orators didn’t mention the war at all.

Instead they numbed the audience and sharply diminished its size with interminable dissections of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre towers and the Pentagon. Their aim was to argue that the attacks were an inside job organised by President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, or (a frequent variation on the theme) by darker powers for which Bush and Cheney are mere errand boys.

Five years after the attacks, 9/11 “conspiracism” has penetrated deep into the left in the US. It is also widespread on the libertarian and populist right, which is scarcely surprising since the United States populist right instinctively mistrusts government to a far greater degree than the left, and matches conspiracies to its demon of preference, whether the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the United Nations’ black helicopters (1) or the Jews.

These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political economy from Marx. Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a diffuse, peripatetic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, the falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale — the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos (2) — or supposedly “rogue” agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The 9/11 “conspiracy” is the summa of all this foolishness.

You trip over a fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists in the first paragraph of a book by one of their high priests, David Ray Griffin: “In many respects,” Griffin writes, “the strongest evidence provided by critics of the official account involves the events of 9/11 itself . . . In light of standard procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes . . . not one of these planes should have reached its target, let alone all three of them” (3).
A preposterous belief

The operative word here is “should”. A central characteristic of the conspiracists is that they have a devout, preposterous belief in US efficiency. Many of them start with the racist premise, frequently voiced in as many words in their writings, that “Arabs in caves” weren’t capable of the mission. They believe that military systems should work the way Pentagon press flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work. They believe that at 8.14am, when AA flight 11 switched off its radio and transponder, an FAA flight controller should have called the National Military Command centre and Norad. To quote Griffin, they believe, citing reverently “the US Air Force’s own website”, that an F-15 could have intercepted AA flight 11 “by 8.24, and certainly no later than 8.30”.

They appear to have read no military history, which is too bad because if they had they would know that minutely planned operations, let alone by-the-book responses to an unprecedented emergency, screw up with monotonous regularity by reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality and all the other failings, including sudden changes in the weather.

According to the minutely prepared plans of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), an impending Soviet attack would have prompted missile silos in north Dakota to open, and their ICBMs to arc towards Moscow and kindred targets. However, the four test launches attempted all failed, whereupon the SAC gave up testing. Was it badly designed equipment, human incompetence, defence contractor venality or . . . conspiracy?

Did President Jimmy Carter’s April 1980 effort to rescue hostages taken in the US embassy in Tehran fail because a sandstorm disabled three of the eight helicopters or because the helicopters were poorly made or because agents of Ronald Reagan and the Republican National Committee (seven months before the US presidential elections) poured sugar into their gas tanks in a conspiracy? Does Mr Cohen in his store at the end of the block hike his prices because he wants to make a buck or because his rent went up or because the Jews want to take over the world?

Some photos of the impact of the “object” — the Boeing 757, flight 77, which hit the Pentagon — seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make. Ergo, 757 didn’t hit the Pentagon. A missile did. And in some photographs, that wasn’t smoke obscuring a larger rupture in the fortified Pentagon wall.

Chuck Spinney, now retired after years of brilliant government service exposing the Pentagon’s budgetary outrages, told me: “There are pictures taken of the plane hitting the Pentagon — they were taken by the surveillance cameras at Pentagon’s heliport, which was right next to impact point. I have seen them . . . both stills and moving pictures. I just missed seeing it personally, but the driver of the van I just got out of in South Parking saw it so closely that he could see the terrified faces of passengers in windows. I knew two people who were on the plane. One was ID’d by dental remains found in the Pentagon.”
Immune to reality checks

This won’t faze the conspiracists. They’re immune to any reality check: Spinney worked for the government, they switched the dental records, the Boeing 757 was flown to Nebraska for a rendezvous with Bush, who shot the passengers, burned the bodies on the tarmac and gave the teeth of Spinney’s friend to Dick Cheney to drop through a hole in his trousers amid the debris in the Pentagon.

Hundreds of people saw the plane, people who know the difference between a plane and a cruise missile. The wreckage of the plane was hauled from the site. Why does the obvious have to be proved? Would those who were wounded or who lost friends and colleagues that day assist in the cover up of a missile strike? Why risk using a missile, when you had a plane in the air and (to take the bizarre construct of the conspiracists) had successfully crashed by remote control into far more difficult targets, the WTC Towers?

What do we make of Osama bin Laden taking credit for the attacks? That he is still on the CIA payroll? And so it goes, on and on into the murk. But to what end? To prove that Bush and Cheney are capable of almost anything? Even though they haven’t shown the slightest degree of competence in anything? They couldn’t even manufacture “weapons of mass destruction” after US troops had invaded Iraq, when any box labelled WMD would have been happily photographed by the embedded press as conclusive testimony of the existence of WMDs.

The Democrats’ victory in the midterm US elections may help to remind the left that Bush and Cheney are not that much different from the politicians and overlords of US foreign policy who preceded them or will follow them. There was already a bipartisan consensus about Israel and Iraq. What the 9/11 conspiracists want us to believe is that the Bush/Cheney gang represent a new breed of evil, which might be the most dangerous deception of all, for it fosters the fantasy that a new administration, a Hillary Clinton or Al Gore administration, would pursue more humane policies.

The Twin Towers didn’t fall down because they were badly built as a consequence of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority and because they had been struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No, shout the conspiracists, they pancaked because scores of Cheney’s agents methodically planted demolition charges in the days preceding 9/11: a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom have held their tongues ever since, despite being party to mass murder.
Occam’s razor ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=439 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=438 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:47:42 GMT This study is not concerned with the counterculture as a historical phenomenon as much as it is concerned with the genesis of counterculture as an enduring commercial myth, the titanic symbolic clash... This study is not concerned with the counterculture as a historical phenomenon as much as it is concerned with the genesis of counterculture as an enduring commercial myth, the titanic symbolic clash of hip and square that recurs throughout post-sixties culture. On occasion, the myth is phrased in the overt language of the historical counterculture (Woodstock II, for example); but for the most part the subject here is the rise of a general corporate style, phrased in terms of whatever the youth culture of the day happens to be, that celebrates both a kind of less-structured, faster-moving corporation and that also promotes consumer resistance to the by-now well-known horrors of conformist consumerism. Today hip is ubiquitous as a commercial style, a staple of advertising that promises to deliver the consumer from the dreary nightmare of square consumerism. Hip is also the vernacular of the much-hyped economic revolution of the 1990s, an economic shift whose heroes are written up by none other than the New York Times Magazine as maximum revolutionaries: artists rather than commanders, wearers of ponytails and dreamers of cowboy fantasies who proudly proclaim their ignorance of "rep ties."

The questions that surround the counterculture are enormous ones, and loaded as they are with such mythical importance to both countercultural participants and their foes, they are often difficult to consider dispassionately. Furthermore, the critique of mass society embraced by the counterculture still holds a profound appeal: young people during the 1960s were confronting the same problems that each of us continues to confront every day, and they did so with a language and style that still rings true for many. This study is, in some ways, as much a product of countercultural suspicion of consumerism as are the ads and fashions it evaluates. The story of the counterculture—and of insurgent youth culture generally—now resides somewhere near the center of our national self-understanding, both as the focus of endless new generations of collective youth-liberation fantasies and as the sort of cultural treason imagined by various reactionaries. And even though countercultural sympathizers are willing to recognize that co-optation is an essential aspect of youth culture, they remain reluctant to systematically evaluate business thinking on the subject, to ask how this most anticommercial youth movement of them all became the symbol for the accelerated capitalism of the sixties and the nineties, or to hold the beloved counterculture to the harsh light of historical and economic scrutiny. It is an intellectual task whose time has come. ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=438 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=437 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:47:24 GMT The counterculture may be more accurately understood as a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class. Placing the culture of the 1960s in this corporate context does... The counterculture may be more accurately understood as a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class.


Placing the culture of the 1960s in this corporate context does little to support any of the standard countercultural myths, nor does it affirm the consensual notion of the 1960s as a time of fundamental cultural confrontation. It suggests instead that the counterculture may be more accurately understood as a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class, a colorful installment in the twentieth century drama of consumer subjectivity. This is not, of course, a novel interpretation: in the 1960s and 1970s it was a frequent plaint among writers who insisted that the counterculture was apolitical and self-indulgent, or, when it did spill over into obviously political manifestations, confused and anarchistic. This critique of cultural liberation even extends back to the late 1950s, when Delmore Schwartz reacted to the rise of the Beats by pointing out that the attack of the "san francisco howlers" on "the conformism of the organization man, the advertising executive, the man in the grey flannel suit, or the man in the brooks brothers suit" was

a form of shadow boxing because the Man in the Brooks Brothers suit is himself, in his own home, very often what [Bertrand] Russell has called an upper Bohemian. His conformism is limited to the office day and business hours: in private life—and at heart—he is as Bohemian as anyone else.

Michael Harrington described the counterculture in 1972 as a massification of the bohemia in which he had spent his youth, an assumption of the values of Greenwich Village by the decidedly nonrevolutionary middle class. "i wonder if the mass counterculture may not be a reflection of the very hyped and video-taped world it professes to despise," he wrote.

Bohemia could not survive the passing of its polar opposite and precondition, middle-class morality. Free love and all-night drinking and art for art's sake were consequences of a single stern imperative: thou shalt not be bourgeois. But once the bourgeoisie itself became decadent—once businessmen started hanging nonobjective art in the boardroom—Bohemia was deprived of the stifling atmosphere without which it could not breathe.

Others understood the counterculture explicitly in terms of accelerating consumer culture and the crisis in corporate thought. "having professed their disdain for middle-class values," wrote novelist and adman Earl Shorris in 1967, "the hippies indulge in them without guilt." Shorris envisioned the counterculture not as a movement promising fundamental transformation but as an expression of a solidly middle-class dream:

The preponderance of hippies come from the middle class, because it is there even among adults that the illusion of the hippies' joy, free love, purity and drug excitement is strongest. A man grown weary of singing company songs at I.B.M. picnics, feeling guilty about the profits he has made on defense stocks, who hasn't really loved his wife for 10 years, must admire, envy and wish for a life of love and contemplation, a simple life leading to a beatific peace. He soothes his despair with the possibility that the hippies have found the answers to problems he does not dare to face.

In a famously cynical essay that appeared in Ramparts in 1967, Warren Hinckle pointed out that, for all the rhetoric of alienation, the inhabitants of the Haight-Ashbury were "brand name conscious" and "frantic consumers."

In this commercial sense, the hippies have not only accepted assimilation . . . , they have swallowed it whole. The hippie culture is in many ways a prototype of the most ephemeral aspects of the larger American society; if the people looking in from the suburbs want change, clothes, fun, and some lightheadedness from the new gypsies, the hippies are delivering—and some of them are becoming rich hippies because of it.

Looking back in 1974, Marshall Berman directly equated "cultural liberation" in the sixties sense with dynamic economic growth. Andrew Ross pointed out in 1989 that this curiously ambivalent relationship with consumerism has always been the defining characteristic of hip: an "essentially agnostic cult of style worship," hip is concerned more with "advanced knowledge about the illegitimate," and staying one step ahead of the consuming crowd than with any "ideology of good community faith." Nor did those who were the counterculture's putative enemies feel that it posed much of a threat to the core values of consumer capitalism. On the contrary, they found that it affirmed those values in certain crucial ways, providing American business with a system of easy symbols with which they could express their own needs and solve the intractable cultural problems they had encountered during the 1950s.

The counterculture has long since outlived the enthusiasm of its original participants and become a more or less permanent part of the American scene, a symbolic and musical language for the endless cycles of rebellion and transgression.


The counterculture has long since outlived the enthusiasm of its original participants and become a more or less permanent part of the American scene, a symbolic and musical language for the endless cycles of rebellion and transgression that make up so much of our mass culture. With leisure-time activities of consuming redefined as "rebellion," two of late capitalism's great problems could easily be met: obsolescence found a new and more convincing language, and citizens could symbolically resolve the contradiction between their role as consumers and their role as producers. The countercultural style has become a permanent fixture on the American scene, impervious to the angriest assaults of cultural and political conservatives, because it so conveniently and efficiently transforms the myriad petty tyrannies of economic life—all the complaints about conformity, oppression, bureaucracy, meaninglessness, and the disappearance of individualism that became virtually a national obsession during the 1950s—into rationales for consuming. No longer would Americans buy to fit in or impress the Joneses, but to demonstrate that they were wise to the game, to express their revulsion with the artifice and conformity of consumerism. The enthusiastic discovery of the counterculture by the branches of American business studied here marked the consolidation of a new species of hip consumerism, a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.

Both of the industries studied here are often written about in quasi-conspiratorial terms. Many Americans apparently believe advertising works because it contains magic "subliminals"; others sneer at fashion as an insidious plot orchestrated by a Paris-New York cabal. Both ideas are interesting popular variations on the mass society/consumerism-as-conformity critique. But this book makes no attempt to resolve the perennial question of exactly how much the garment industries control fashion trends. Obviously the Fairchild company is unable to trick the public into buying whatever look it chooses to launch in one of the myriad magazines it owns, but it is hardly conspiracy-mongering to study the company's attempts to do so. Nor does this book seek to settle the debate over whether advertising causes cultural change or reflects it: obviously it does a great deal of both. Business leaders are not dictators scheming to defraud the nation, but neither are they the mystic diviners of the public will that they claim (and that free-market theory holds them) to be. I am assuming here that the thoughts and worries and ecstasies of business leaders are worth studying regardless of the exact quantity of power they exert over the public mind. Whether the cultural revolution of the 1960s was the product of conspiracy, popular will, or the movement of market or dialectic, the thinking of corporate America is essential in judging its historical meaning. ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=437 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=436 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:43:27 GMT This is a study of business thought, but in its consequences it is necessarily a study of cultural dissent as well: its promise, its meaning, its possibilities, and, most important, its limitations.... This is a study of business thought, but in its consequences it is necessarily a study of cultural dissent as well: its promise, its meaning, its possibilities, and, most important, its limitations. And it is, above all, the story of the bohemian cultural style's trajectory from adversarial to hegemonic; the story of hip's mutation from native language of the alienated to that of advertising.

It is more than a little odd that, in this age of nuance and negotiated readings, we lack a serious history of co-optation, one that understands corporate thought as something other than a cartoon. Co-optation remains something we vilify almost automatically; the historical particulars which permit or discourage co-optation—or even the obvious fact that some things are co-opted while others are not—are simply not addressed. Regardless of whether the co-opters deserve our vilification or not, the process by which they make rebel subcultures their own is clearly an important element of contemporary life. And while the ways in which business anticipated and reacted to the youth culture of the 1960s may not reveal much about the individual experiences of countercultural participants, examining them closely does allow a more critical perspective on the phenomenon of co-optation, as well as on the value of certain strategies of cultural confrontation, and, ultimately, on the historical meaning of the counterculture.

Many in American business, particularly in the two industries studied here, imagined the counterculture not as an enemy to be undermined or a threat to consumer culture but as a hopeful sign, a symbolic ally in their own struggles.


To begin to take co-optation seriously is instantly to discard one of the basic shibboleths of sixties historiography. As it turns out, many in American business, particularly in the two industries studied here, imagined the counterculture not as an enemy to be undermined or a threat to consumer culture but as a hopeful sign, a symbolic ally in their own struggles against the mountains of dead-weight procedure and hierarchy that had accumulated over the years. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, leaders of the advertising and menswear businesses developed a critique of their own industries, of over-organization and creative dullness, that had much in common with the critique of mass society which gave rise to the counterculture. Like the young insurgents, people in more advanced reaches of the American corporate world deplored conformity, distrusted routine, and encouraged resistance to established power. They welcomed the youth-led cultural revolution not because they were secretly planning to subvert it or even because they believed it would allow them to tap a gigantic youth market (although this was, of course, a factor), but because they perceived in it a comrade in their own struggles to revitalize American business and the consumer order generally. If American capitalism can be said to have spent the 1950s dealing in conformity and consumer fakery, during the decade that followed, it would offer the public authenticity, individuality, difference, and rebellion.

If we really want to understand American culture in the sixties, we must acknowledge at least the possibility that the co-opters had it right, that Madison Avenue's vision of the counterculture was in some ways correct.

hip consumerism

Advertising and menswear, the two industries with which this book are directly concerned, were deeply caught up in both the corporate and cultural changes that defined the sixties. The story in men's clothing is simple enough and is often cited as an indicator of changing times along with movies, novels, and popular music: the fifties are remembered, rather stereotypically, as a time of gray flannel dullness, while the sixties were an era of sartorial gaudiness. The change in the nation's advertising is less frequently remembered as one of the important turning points between the fifties and sixties, but the changes here were, if anything, even more remarkable, more significant, and took place slightly earlier than those in music and youth culture. Both industries were on the cutting edge of the shifts in corporate practice in the 1960s, and both were also conspicuous users of countercultural symbolism—they were, if you will, the leading lights of "co-optation."

But both industries' reaction to youth culture during the sixties was more complex than that envisioned by the co-optation theory. Both menswear and advertising were paralyzed by similar problems in the 1950s: they suffered from a species of creative doldrums, an inability to move beyond the conventions they had invented for themselves and to tap into that wellspring of American economic dynamism that Fortune called "the permanent revolution." Both industries underwent "revolutions" in their own right during the 1960s, with vast changes in corporate practice, in productive flexibility, and especially in that intangible phenomenon known as "creativity"—and in both cases well before the counterculture appeared on the mass-media scene. In the decade that followed, both industries found a similar solution to their problems: a commercial version of the mass society theory that made of alienation a motor for fashion. Seeking a single metaphor by which to characterize the accelerated obsolescence and enhanced consumer friendliness to change which were their goals, leaders in both fields had already settled on "youth" and "youthfulness" several years before saturation TV and print coverage of the "summer of love" introduced middle America to the fabulous new lifestyles of the young generation.

The counterculture's simultaneous craving for authenticity and suspicion of tradition seemed to make it an ideal vehicle for a vast sea-change in American consuming habits.


Then, in 1967 and 1968, advertising and menswear executives seized upon the counterculture as the preeminent symbol of the revolution in which they were engaged, embellishing both their trade literature and their products with images of rebellious, individualistic youth. While leaders of both industries appreciated the demographic bonanza that the baby boom represented, their concentration on the symbols of first youth and then culture-rebel owed more to new understandings of consumption and business culture than to a desire to sell the kids. The counterculture served corporate revolutionaries as a projection of the new ideology of business, a living embodiment of attitudes that reflected their own. In its hostility to established tastes, the counterculture seemed to be preparing young people to rebel against whatever they had patronized before and to view the cycles of the new without the suspicion of earlier eras. Its simultaneous craving for authenticity and suspicion of tradition seemed to make the counterculture an ideal vehicle for a vast sea-change in American consuming habits. Through its symbols and myths, leaders of the menswear and advertising industries imagined a consumerism markedly different from its 1950s permutation, a hip consumerism driven by disgust with mass society itself.

Capitalism was entering the space age in the sixties, and Organization Man was a drag not only as a parent, but as an executive. The old values of caution, deference, and hierarchy drowned creativity and denied flexibility; they enervated not only the human spirit but the consuming spirit and the entrepreneurial spirit as well. And when business leaders cast their gaze onto the youth culture bubbling around them, they saw both a reflection of their own struggle against the stifling bureaucracy of the past and an affirmation of a dynamic new consuming order that would replace the old. For these business thinkers, the cultural revolution that has come to be symbolized by the counterculture seemed an affirmation of their own revolutionary faiths, a reflection of their own struggles to call their corporate colleagues into step with the chaotic and frenetically changing economic universe.

The revolutions in menswear and advertising—as well as the larger revolution in corporate thought—ran out of steam when the great postwar prosperity collapsed in the early 1970s. In a larger sense, though, the corporate revolution of the 1960s never ended. In the early 1990s, while the nation was awakening to the realities of the hyperaccelerated global information economy, the language of the business revolution of the sixties (and even some of the individuals who led it) made a triumphant return. Although on the surface menswear seemed to have settled back into placidity, the reputation of the designers and creative rebels who made their first appearance during the decade of revolt were at their zenith in the 1990s; men's clothes were again being presented to the public as emblems of nonconformity; and the magazines which most prominently equated style with rebellion (Details and GQ, the latter of which had been founded at the opening of the earlier revolution in 1957) were enjoying great success. The hottest advertising agencies of the late 1980s and early 1990s were, again, the small creative firms; a new company of creative rebels came to dominate the profession; and advertising that offered to help consumers overcome their alienation, to facilitate their nonconformity, and which celebrated rule-breaking and insurrection became virtually ubiquitous. Most important, the corporate theory of the 1990s makes explicit references to sixties management theory and the experiences of the counterculture. Like the laid-back executives who personify it, the ideology of information capitalism is a child of the 1960s; the intervening years of the 1970s and 1980s may have delayed the revolution, but they hardly defused its urgency. ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=436 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=435 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:42:47 GMT However the conservatives may froth, this second myth comes much closer to what academics and responsible writers accept as the standard account of the decade. Mainstream culture was tepid,... However the conservatives may froth, this second myth comes much closer to what academics and responsible writers accept as the standard account of the decade. Mainstream culture was tepid, mechanical, and uniform; the revolt of the young against it was a joyous and even a glorious cultural flowering, though it quickly became mainstream itself. Rick Perlstein has summarized this standard version of what went on in the sixties as the "declension hypothesis," a tale in which, "as the Fifties grayly droned on, springs of contrarian sentiment began bubbling into the best minds of a generation raised in unprecedented prosperity but well versed in the existential subversions of the Beats and Mad magazine." The story ends with the noble idealism of the New Left in ruins and the counterculture sold out to Hollywood and the television networks.

So natural has this standard version of the countercultural myth come to seem that it required little explanation when, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the historical counterculture's greatest triumph, a group of cultural speculators and commercial backers (Pepsi-Cola prominent among them) joined forces to put on a second Woodstock. But this time the commercial overtones were just a little too pronounced, and journalists rained down abuse on the venture—not because it threatened "traditional values" but because it defiled the memory of the apotheosized original. Woodstock II was said to be a simple act of exploitation, a degraded carnival of corporate logos, endorsements, and product-placement while the 1969 festival was sentimentally recalled as an event of youthful innocence and idealistic glory.

Conflicting though they may seem, the two stories of sixties culture agree on a number of basic points. Both assume quite naturally that the counterculture was what it said it was; that is, a fundamental opponent of the capitalist order. Both foes and partisans assume, further, that the counterculture is the appropriate symbol—if not the actual historical cause—for the big cultural shifts that transformed the United States and that permanently rearranged Americans' cultural priorities. They also agree that these changes constituted a radical break or rupture with existing American mores, that they were just as transgressive and as menacing and as revolutionary as countercultural participants believed them to be. More crucial for our purposes here, all sixties narratives place the stories of the groups that are believed to have been so transgressive and revolutionary at their center; American business culture is thought to have been peripheral, if it's mentioned at all. Other than the occasional purveyor of stereotype and conspiracy theory, virtually nobody has shown much interest in telling the story of the executives or suburbanites who awoke one day to find their authority challenged and paradigms problematized. And whether the narrators of the sixties story are conservatives or radicals, they tend to assume that business represented a static, unchanging body of faiths, goals, and practices, a background of muted, uniform gray against which the counterculture went through its colorful chapters.

Postwar American capitalism was hardly the unchanging and soulless machine imagined by countercultural leaders; it was as dynamic a force in its own way as the revolutionary youth movements of the period.


But the actual story is quite a bit messier. The cultural changes that would become identified as "counterculture" began well before 1960, with roots deep in bohemian and romantic thought, and the era of upheaval persisted long after 1970 rolled around. And while nearly every account of the decade's youth culture describes it as a reaction to the stultifying economic and cultural environment of the postwar years, almost none have noted how that context—the world of business and of middle-class mores—was itself changing during the 1960s. The 1960s was the era of Vietnam, but it was also the high watermark of American prosperity and a time of fantastic ferment in managerial thought and corporate practice. Postwar American capitalism was hardly the unchanging and soulless machine imagined by countercultural leaders; it was as dynamic a force in its own way as the revolutionary youth movements of the period, undertaking dramatic transformations of both the way it operated and the way it imagined itself.

But business history has been largely ignored in accounts of the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. This is unfortunate, because at the heart of every interpretation of the counterculture is a very particular—and very questionable—understanding of corporate ideology and of business practice. According to the standard story, business was the monolithic bad guy who had caused America to become a place of puritanical conformity and empty consumerism; business was the great symbolic foil against which the young rebels defined themselves; business was the force of irredeemable evil lurking behind the orderly lawns of suburbia and the nefarious deeds of the Pentagon. Although there are a few accounts of the sixties in which the two are thought to be synchronized in a cosmic sense (Jerry Rubin often wrote about the joys of watching television and expressed an interest in making commercials; Tom Wolfe believes that Ken Kesey's countercultural aesthetic derived from the consumer boom of the fifties), for the vast majority of countercultural sympathizers, the only relationship between the two was one of hostility.

And from its very beginnings down to the present, business dogged the counterculture with a fake counterculture, a commercial replica that seemed to ape its every move for the titillation of the TV-watching millions and the nation's corporate sponsors. Every rock band with a substantial following was immediately honored with a host of imitators; the 1967 "summer of love" was as much a product of lascivious television specials and Life magazine stories as it was an expression of youthful disaffection; Hearst launched a psychedelic magazine in 1968; and even hostility to co-optation had a desperately "authentic" shadow, documented by a famous 1968 print ad for Columbia Records titled "But The Man Can't Bust Our Music." So oppressive was the climate of national voyeurism that, as early as the fall of 1967, the San Francisco Diggers had held a funeral for "Hippie, devoted son of mass media."

This book is a study of co-optation rather than counterculture, an analysis of the forces and logic that made rebel youth cultures so attractive to corporate decision-makers rather than a study of those cultures themselves. In doing so, it risks running afoul of what I will call the co-optation theory: faith in the revolutionary potential of "authentic" counterculture combined with the notion that business mimics and mass-produces fake counterculture in order to cash in on a particular demographic and to subvert the great threat that "real" counterculture represents. Who Built America?, the textbook produced by the American Social History project, includes a reproduction of the now-infamous "Man Can't Bust Our Music" ad and this caption summary of co-optation theory: "If you can't beat 'em, absorb 'em." The text below explains the phenomenon as a question of demographics and savvy marketing, as a marker of the moment when "Record companies, clothing manufacturers, and other purveyors of consumer goods quickly recognized a new market." The ill-fated ad is also reproduced as an object of mockery in underground journalist Abe Peck's book on the decade and mentioned in countless other sixties narratives. Unfortunately, though, the weaknesses of this historical faith are many and critical, and the argument made in these pages tends more to stress these inadequacies than to uphold the myths of authenticity and co-optation. Apart from certain obvious exceptions at either end of the spectrum of commodification (represented, say, by the MC-5 at one end and the Monkees at the other) it was and remains difficult to distinguish precisely between authentic counterculture and fake: by almost every account, the counterculture, as a mass movement distinct from the bohemias that preceded it, was triggered at least as much by developments in mass culture (particularly the arrival of The Beatles in 1964) as changes at the grass roots. Its heroes were rock stars and rebel celebrities, millionaire performers and employees of the culture industry; its greatest moments occurred on television, on the radio, at rock concerts, and in movies. From a distance of thirty years, its language and music seem anything but the authentic populist culture they yearned so desperately to be: from contrived cursing to saintly communalism to the embarrassingly faked Woody Guthrie accents of Bob Dylan and to the astoundingly pretentious works of groups like Iron Butterfly and The Doors, the relics of the counterculture reek of affectation and phoniness, the leisure-dreams of white suburban children like those who made up so much of the Grateful Dead's audience throughout the 1970s and 1980s. ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=435 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=434 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:42:06 GMT Despite its shortcomings, the conservatives' vision of sixties-as-catastrophe has achieved a certain popular success. Both Bloom's and Bork's books were best-sellers. And a mere mention of hippies or "the sixties" is capable of arousing in some quarters an astonishing amount of rage against what many still imagine to have been an era of cultural treason. In the white suburban Midwest, one happens so frequently across declarations of sixties- and hippie-hatred that the posture begins to seem a sort of historiographical prerequisite to being middle class and of a certain age; in the nation's politics, sixties- and hippie-bashing remains a trump card only slightly less effective than red-baiting was in earlier times. One bit of political ephemera that darkened a 1996 congressional race in south Chicago managed to appeal to both hatreds at once, tarring a Democratic candidate as the nephew of a bona fide communist and the choice of the still-hated California hippies, representatives of whom (including one photograph of Ken Kesey's famous bus, "Further") are pictured protesting, tripping, dancing, and carrying signs for the Democrat in question.

In mass culture, dark images of the treason and excess of the 1960s are not difficult to find. The fable of the doubly-victimized soldiers in Vietnam, betrayed first by liberals and doves in government and then spat upon by members of the indistinguishable New Left/Counterculture has been elevated to cultural archetype by the Rambo movies and has since become such a routine trope that its invocation—and the resulting outrage—requires only the mouthing of a few standard references. The exceedingly successful 1994 movie Forrest Gump transformed into archetype the rest of the conservatives' understanding of the decade, depicting youth movements of the sixties in a particularly malevolent light and their leaders (a demagogue modeled on Abbie Hoffman, a sinister group of Black Panthers, and an SDS commissar who is attired, after Bloom's interpretation, in a Nazi tunic) as diabolical charlatans, architects of a national madness from which the movie's characters only recover under the benevolent presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Regardless of the tastes of Republican leaders, rebel youth culture remains the cultural mode of the corporate moment.


But stay tuned for just a moment longer and a different myth of the counterculture and its meaning crosses the screen. Regardless of the tastes of Republican leaders, rebel youth culture remains the cultural mode of the corporate moment, used to promote not only specific products but the general idea of life in the cyber-revolution. Commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright "revolution" against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming. For some, Ken Kesey's parti-colored bus may be a hideous reminder of national unraveling, but for Coca-Cola it seemed a perfect promotional instrument for its "Fruitopia" line, and the company has proceeded to send replicas of the bus around the country to generate interest in the counterculturally themed beverage. Nike shoes are sold to the accompaniment of words delivered by William S. Burroughs and songs by The Beatles, Iggy Pop, and Gil Scott Heron ("the revolution will not be televised"); peace symbols decorate a line of cigarettes manufactured by R. J. Reynolds and the walls and windows of Starbucks coffee shops nationwide; the products of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft are touted as devices of liberation; and advertising across the product category sprectrum calls upon consumers to break rules and find themselves. The music industry continues to rejuvenate itself with the periodic discovery of new and evermore subversive youth movements and our televisual marketplace is a 24-hour carnival, a showplace of transgression and inversion of values, of humiliated patriarchs and shocked puritans, of screaming guitars and concupiscent youth, of fashions that are uniformly defiant, of cars that violate convention and shoes that let us be us. A host of self-designated "corporate revolutionaries," outlining the accelerated new capitalist order in magazines like Wired and Fast Company, gravitate naturally to the imagery of rebel youth culture to dramatize their own insurgent vision. This version of the countercultural myth is so pervasive that it appears even in the very places where the historical counterculture is being maligned. Just as Newt Gingrich hails an individualistic "revolution" while tirading against the counterculture, Forrest Gump features a soundtrack of rock 'n' roll music, John Lennon and Elvis Presley appearing in their usual roles as folk heroes, and two carnivalesque episodes in which Gump meets heads of state, avails himself grotesquely of their official generosity (consuming fifteen bottles of White House soda in one scene), and confides to them the tribulations of his nether regions. He even bares his ass to Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the ultimate countercultural gesture. ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=434 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=433 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:38:25 GMT An excerpt from “The Conquest of Cool”
Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
by Thomas Frank

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/259919.html

Why do this kind of advertising if not to incite people to riot?—Nike copywriter, 1996

of commerce and counterculture

For as long as America is torn by culture wars, the 1960s will remain the historical terrain of conflict. Although popular memories of that era are increasingly vague and generalized—the stuff of classic rock radio and commemorative television replayings of the 1968 Chicago riot footage—we understand “the sixties” almost instinctively as the decade of the big change, the birthplace of our own culture, the homeland of hip, an era of which the tastes and discoveries and passions, however obscure their origins, have somehow determined the world in which we are condemned to live.

For many, the world with which “the sixties” left us is a distinctly unhappy one. While acknowledging the successes of the civil rights and antiwar movements, scholarly accounts of the decade, bearing titles like Coming Apart and The Unraveling of America, generally depict the sixties as a ten-year fall from grace, the loss of a golden age of consensus, the end of an edenic epoch of shared values and safe centrism. This vision of social decline, though, is positively rosy compared with the fire-breathing historical accusations of more recent years. For Allan Bloom, recounting with still-raw bitterness in his best-selling The Closing of the American Mind the student uprising and the faculty capitulation at Cornell in 1969, the misdeeds of the campus New Left were an intellectual catastrophe comparable only with the experiences of German professors under the Nazis. “So far as universities are concerned,” he writes in his chapter entitled, “The Sixties,” “I know of nothing positive coming from that period; it was an unmitigated disaster for them.” Lines like “Whether it be Nuremberg or Woodstock, the principle is the same,” and Bloom’s characterization of Cornell’s then-president as “of the moral stamp of those who were angry with Poland for resisting Hitler because this precipitated the war,” constituted for several years the high watermark of anti-sixties bluster. But later texts topped even this.

By 1996 it had become fashionable to extend the blame for unhappy events in the academy that Bloom heaped on “the sixties” to the demise of “civility” and, taking off from there, for virtually everything that could be said to be wrong about America generally. For Robert Bork, “the sixties” accomplished nothing less than sending America Slouching Towards Gomorrah: thanks to the decade’s “revolutionary nihilism” and the craven “Establishment’s surrender,” cultural radicals “and their ideology are all around us now” (a fantasy of defeat which, although Bork doesn’t seem to realize it, rephrases Jerry Rubin’s 1971 fantasy of revolution, We Are Everywhere). Political figures on the right, waxing triumphal in the aftermath of the 1994 elections, also identify “the sixties,” a term which they use interchangeably with “the counterculture,” as the source of every imaginable species of the social blight from which they have undertaken to rescue the nation. Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan puts the fall from grace directly, exhorting readers of a recent volume of conservative writing to “remember your boomer childhood in the towns and suburbs” when “you were safe” and “the cities were better,” back before “society strained and cracked,” in the storms of sixties selfishness. Former history professor Newt Gingrich is the most assiduous and prominent antagonist of “the sixties,” imagining it as a time of “countercultural McGoverniks,” whom he holds responsible not only for the demise of traditional values and the various deeds of the New Left, but (illogically and anachronistically) for the hated policies of the Great Society as well. Journalist Fred Barnes outlines a “theory of American history” related to him by Gingrich

in which the 1960s represent a crucial break, “a discontinuity.” From 1607 down till 1965, “there is a core pattern to American history. Here’s how we did it until the Great Society messed everything up: don’t work, don’t eat; your salvation is spiritual; the government by definition can’t save you; governments are into maintenance and all good reforms are into transformation.” Then, “from 1965 to 1994, we did strange and weird things as a country. Now we’re done with that and we have to recover. The counterculture is a momentary aberration in American history that will be looked back upon as a quaint period of Bohemianism brought to the national elite.”

The conservatives’ version of “the sixties” is not without interest, particularly when it is an account of a given person’s revulsion from the culture of an era. Their usefulness as history, however, is undermined by their insistence on understanding “the sixties” as a causal force in and of itself and their curious blurring of the lines between various historical actors: counterculture equals Great Society equals New Left equals “the sixties generation,” all of them driven by some mysterious impulse to tear down Western Civilization. Bork is particularly given to such slipshod historiography, imagining at one point that the sixties won’t even stay put in the 1960s. “It was a malignant decade,” he writes, “that, after a fifteen-year remission, returned in the 1980s to metastasize more devastatingly throughout our culture than it had in the Sixties, not with tumult but quietly, in the moral and political assumptions of those who now control and guide our major cultural institutions.” The closest Bork, Bloom, Gingrich, and their colleagues will come to explanations is to revive one of several creaking devices: the sixties as a moral drama of millennialist utopians attempting to work their starry-eyed will in the real world, the sixties as a time of excessive affluence, the sixties as a time of imbalance in the eternal war between the generations, or the sixties as the fault of Dr. Spock, who persuaded American parents in the lost fifties to pamper their children excessively. ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=433 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=432 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:37:11 GMT The new businessman quite naturally gravitates to the slogans and sensibility of the rebel sixties to express his understanding of the new Information World. He is led in what one magazine calls “the... The new businessman quite naturally gravitates to the slogans and sensibility of the rebel sixties to express his understanding of the new Information World. He is led in what one magazine calls “the business revolution” by the office-park subversives it hails as “business activists,” “change agents,” and “corporate radicals.” He speaks to his comrades through commercials like the one for “Warp,” a type of IBM computer operating system, in which an electric guitar soundtrack and psychedelic video effects surround hip executives with earrings and hairdos who are visibly stunned by the product’s gnarly ‘tude (It’s a “totally cool way to run your computer,” read the product’s print ads). He understands the world through Fast Company, a successful new magazine whose editors take their inspiration from Hunter S. Thompson and whose stories describe such things as a “dis-organization” that inhabits an “anti-office” where “all vestiges of hierarchy have disappeared” or a computer scientist who is also “a rabble rouser, an agent provocateur, a product of the 1960s who never lost his activist fire or democratic values.” He is what sociologists Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker have called “The New Individualist,” the new and improved manager whose arty worldview and creative hip derive directly from his formative sixties days. The one thing this new executive is definitely not is Organization Man, the hyper-rational counter of beans, attender of church, and wearer of stiff hats. In television commercials, through which the new American businessman presents his visions and self-understanding to the public, perpetual revolution and the gospel of rule-breaking are the orthodoxy of the day. You only need to watch for a few minutes before you see one of these slogans and understand the grip of antinomianism over the corporate mind:

Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules --Burger King
If You Don’t Like the Rules, Change Them --WXRT-FM
The Rules Have Changed --Dodge
The Art of Changing --Swatch
There’s no one way to do it. --Levi’s
This is different. Different is good. --Arby’s
Just Different From the Rest --Special Export beer
The Line Has Been Crossed: The Revolutionary New Supra --Toyota
Resist the Usual --the slogan of both Clash Clear Malt and Young & Rubicam
Innovate Don’t Imitate --Hugo Boss
Chart Your Own Course --Navigator Cologne
It separates you from the crowd --Vision Cologne

In most, the commercial message is driven home with the vanguard iconography of the rebel: screaming guitars, whirling cameras, and startled old timers who, we predict, will become an increasingly indispensable prop as consumers require ever-greater assurances that, Yes! You are a rebel! Just look at how offended they are!

Our businessmen imagine themselves rebels, and our rebels sound more and more like ideologists of business. Henry Rollins, for example, the maker of loutish, overbearing music and composer of high-school-grade poetry, straddles both worlds unproblematically. Rollins’ writing and lyrics strike all the standard alienated literary poses: He rails against overcivilization and yearns to “disconnect.” He veers back and forth between vague threats toward “weak” people who “bring me down” and blustery declarations of his weightlifting ability and physical prowess. As a result he ruled for several years as the preeminent darling of Details magazine, a periodical handbook for the young executive on the rise, where rebellion has achieved a perfect synthesis with corporate ideology. In 1992 Details named Rollins a “rock `n’ roll samurai,” an “emblem ... of a new masculinity” whose “enlightened honesty” is “a way of being that seems to flesh out many of the ideas expressed in contemporary culture and fashion.” In 1994 the magazine consummated its relationship with Rollins by naming him “Man of the Year,” printing a fawning story about his muscular worldview and decorating its cover with a photo in which Rollins displays his tattoos and rubs his chin in a thoughtful manner.

Details found Rollins to be such an appropriate role model for the struggling young businessman not only because of his music-product, but because of his excellent “self-styled identity,” which the magazine describes in terms normally reserved for the breast-beating and soul-searching variety of motivational seminars. Although he derives it from the quality-maximizing wisdom of the East rather than the unfashionable doctrines of Calvin, Rollins’ rebel posture is identical to that fabled ethic of the small capitalist whose regimen of positive thinking and hard work will one day pay off. Details describes one of Rollins’ songs, quite seriously, as “a self-motivational superforce, an anthem of empowerment,” teaching lessons that any aspiring middle-manager must internalize. Elsewhere, Iggy Pop, that great chronicler of the ambitionless life, praises Rollins as a “high achiever” who “wants to go somewhere.” Rollins himself even seems to invite such an interpretation. His recent spoken-word account of touring with Black Flag, delivered in an unrelenting two-hour drill-instructor staccato, begins with the timeless bourgeois story of opportunity taken, of young Henry leaving the security of a “straight job,” enlisting with a group of visionaries who were “the hardest working people I have ever seen,” and learning “what hard work is all about.” In the liner notes he speaks proudly of his Deming-esque dedication to quality, of how his bandmates “Delivered under pressure at incredible odds.” When describing his relationship with his parents for the readers of Details, Rollins quickly cuts to the critical matter, the results that such dedication has brought: “Mom, Dad, I outgross both of you put together,” a happy observation he repeats in his interview with the New York Times Magazine.

Despite the extreme hostility of punk rockers with which Rollins had to contend all through the 1980s, it is he who has been chosen by the commercial media as the godfather of rock `n’ roll revolt. It is not difficult to see why. For Rollins the punk rock decade was but a lengthy seminar on leadership skills, thriving on chaos, and total quality management. Rollins’ much-celebrated anger is indistinguishable from the anger of the frustrated junior executive who finds obstacles on the way to the top. His discipline and determination are the automatic catechism of any small entrepreneur who’s just finished brainwashing himself with the latest leadership and positive-thinking tracts; his poetry is the inspired verse of 21 Days to Unlimited Power or Let’s Get Results, Not Excuses. Henry Rollins is no more a threat to established power in America than was Dale Carnegie. And yet Rollins as king of the rebels—peerless and ultimate—is the message hammered home wherever photos of his growling visage appears. If you’re unhappy with your lot, the Culture Trust tells us with each new tale of Rollins, if you feel you must rebel, take your cue from the most disgruntled guy of all: Lift weights! Work hard! Meditate in your back yard! Root out the weaknesses deep down inside yourself! But whatever you do, don’t think about who controls power or how it is wielded.

* * *

The structure and thinking of American business have changed enormously in the years since our popular conceptions of its problems and abuses were formulated. In the meantime the mad frothings and jolly apolitical revolt of Beat, despite their vast popularity and insurgent air, have become powerless against a new regime that, one suspects, few of Beat’s present-day admirers and practitioners feel any need to study or understand. Today that beautiful countercultural idea, endorsed now by everyone from the surviving Beats to shampoo manufacturers, is more the official doctrine of corporate America than it is a program of resistance. What we understand as “dissent” does not subvert, does not challenge, does not even question the cultural faiths of Western business. What David Rieff wrote of the revolutionary pretensions of multiculturalism is equally true of the countercultural idea: “The more one reads in academic multiculturalist journals and in business publications, and the more one contrasts the speeches of CEOs and the speeches of noted multiculturalist academics, the more one is struck by the similarities in the way they view the world.” What’s happened is not co-optation or appropriation, but a simple and direct confluence of interest.

The problem with cultural dissent in America isn’t that it’s been co-opted, absorbed, or ripped-off. Of course it’s been all of these things. But it has proven so hopelessly susceptible to such assaults for the same reason it has become so harmless in the first place, so toothless even before Mr. Geffen’s boys discover it angsting away in some bar in Lawrence, Kansas: It is no longer any different from the official culture it’s supposed to be subverting. The basic impulses of the countercultural idea, as descended from the holy Beats, are about as threatening to the new breed of antinomian businessmen as Anthony Robbins, selling success & how to achieve it on a late-night infomercial.

The people who staff the Combine aren’t like Nurse Ratched. They aren’t Frank Burns, they aren’t the Church Lady, they aren’t Dean Wormer from Animal House, they aren’t those repressed old folks in the commercials who want to ban Tropicana Fruit Twisters. They’re hipper than you can ever hope to be because hip is their official ideology, and they’re always going to be there at the poetry reading to encourage your “rebellion” with a hearty “right on, man!” before you even know they’re in the auditorium. You can’t outrun them, or even stay ahead of them for very long: it’s their racetrack, and that’s them waiting at the finish line to congratulate you on how outrageous your new style is, on how you shocked those stuffy prudes out in the heartland.

(C) 1997 The Baffler Literary Magazine, Inc. . ISBN: 0-393-31673-4 ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=432 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=431 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:36:29 GMT Other legendary exponents of the countercultural idea have been more fortunate—William S. Burroughs, for example, who appears in a television spot for the Nike corporation. But so openly does the... Other legendary exponents of the countercultural idea have been more fortunate—William S. Burroughs, for example, who appears in a television spot for the Nike corporation. But so openly does the commercial flaunt the confluence of capital and counterculture that it has brought considerable criticism down on the head of the aging beat. Writing in the Village Voice, Leslie Savan marvels at the contradiction between Burroughs’ writings and the faceless corporate entity for which he is now pushing product. “Now the realization that nothing threatens the system has freed advertising to exploit even the most marginal elements of society,” Savan observes. “In fact, being hip is no longer quite enough—better the pitchman be `underground.’” Meanwhile Burroughs’ manager insists, as all future Cultural Studies treatments of the ad will no doubt also insist, that Burroughs’ presence actually makes the commercial “deeply subversive“—”;I hate to repeat the usual mantra, but you know, homosexual drug addict, manslaughter, accidental homicide.” But Savan wonders whether, in fact, it is Burroughs who has been assimilated by corporate America. “The problem comes,” she writes, “in how easily any idea, deed, or image can become part of the sponsored world.”

The most startling revelation to emerge from the Burroughs/Nike partnership is not that corporate America has overwhelmed its cultural foes or that Burroughs can somehow remain “subversive” through it all, but the complete lack of dissonance between the two sides. Of course Burroughs is not “subversive,” but neither has he “sold out”: His ravings are no longer appreciably different from the official folklore of American capitalism. What’s changed is not Burroughs, but business itself. As expertly as Burroughs once bayoneted American proprieties, as stridently as he once proclaimed himself beyond the laws of man and God, he is today a respected ideologue of the Information Age, occupying roughly the position in the pantheon of corporate-cultural thought once reserved strictly for Notre Dame football coaches and positive-thinking Methodist ministers. His inspirational writings are boardroom favorites, his dark nihilistic burpings the happy homilies of the new corporate faith.

For with the assumption of power by Drucker’s and Reich’s new class has come an entirely new ideology of business, a way of justifying and exercising power that has little to do with the “conformity” and the “establishment” so vilified by the countercultural idea. The management theorists and “leadership” charlatans of the Information Age don’t waste their time prattling about hierarchy and regulation, but about disorder, chaos, and the meaninglessness of convention. With its reorganization around information, capitalism has developed a new mythology, a sort of corporate antinomianism according to which the breaking of rules and the elimination of rigid corporate structure have become the central article of faith for millions of aspiring executives.

Dropping Naked Lunch and picking up Thriving on Chaos, the groundbreaking 1987 management text by Tom Peters, the most popular business writer of the past decade, one finds more philosophical similarities than one would expect from two manifestos of, respectively, dissident culture and business culture. If anything, Peters’ celebration of disorder is, by virtue of its hard statistics, bleaker and more nightmarish than Burroughs’. For this popular lecturer on such once-blithe topics as competitiveness and pop psychology there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that is certain. His world is one in which the corporate wisdom of the past is meaningless, established customs are ridiculous, and “rules” are some sort of curse, a remnant of the foolish fifties that exist to be defied, not obeyed. We live in what Peters calls “A World Turned Upside Down,” in which whirl is king and, in order to survive, businesses must eventually embrace Peters’ universal solution: “Revolution!” “To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene,” he counsels, “we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past.” He advises businessmen to become Robespierres of routine, to demand of their underlings, “`What have you changed lately?’ `How fast are you changing?’ and `Are you pursuing bold enough change goals?’” “Revolution,” of course, means for Peters the same thing it did to Burroughs and Ginsberg, Presley and the Stones in their heyday: breaking rules, pissing off the suits, shocking the bean-counters: “Actively and publicly hail defiance of the rules, many of which you doubtless labored mightily to construct in the first place.” Peters even suggests that his readers implement this hostility to logocentrism in a carnivalesque celebration, drinking beer out in “the woods” and destroying “all the forms and rules and discontinued reports” and, “if you’ve got real nerve,” a photocopier as well.

Today corporate antinomianism is the emphatic message of nearly every new business text, continually escalating the corporate insurrection begun by Peters. Capitalism, at least as it is envisioned by the best-selling management handbooks, is no longer about enforcing Order, but destroying it. “Revolution,” once the totemic catchphrase of the counterculture, has become the totemic catchphrase of boomer-as-capitalist. The Information Age businessman holds inherited ideas and traditional practices not in reverence, but in high suspicion. Even reason itself is now found to be an enemy of true competitiveness, an out-of-date faculty to be scrupulously avoided by conscientious managers. A 1990 book by Charles Handy entitled The Age of Unreason agrees with Peters that we inhabit a time in which “there can be no certainty” and suggests that readers engage in full-fledged epistemological revolution: “Thinking Upside Down,” using new ways of “learning which can ... be seen as disrespectful if not downright rebellious,” methods of approaching problems that have “never been popular with the upholders of continuity and of the status quo.” Three years later the authors of Reengineering the Corporation (“A Manifesto for Business Revolution,” as its subtitle declares) are ready to push this doctrine even farther. Not only should we be suspicious of traditional practices, but we should cast out virtually everything learned over the past two centuries!

Business reengineering means putting aside much of the received wisdom of two hundred years of industrial management. It means forgetting how work was done in the age of the mass market and deciding how it can best be done now. In business reengineering, old job titles and old organizational arrangements—departments, divisions, groups, and so on—cease to matter. They are artifacts of another age.

As countercultural rebellion becomes corporate ideology, even the beloved Buddhism of the Beats wins a place on the executive bookshelf. In The Leader as Martial Artist (1993), Arnold Mindell advises men of commerce in the ways of the Tao, mastery of which he likens, of course, to surfing. For Mindell’s Zen businessman, as for the followers of Tom Peters, the world is a wildly chaotic place of opportunity, navigable only to an enlightened “leader” who can discern the “timespirits” at work behind the scenes. In terms Peters himself might use were he a more more meditative sort of inspiration professional, Mindell explains that “the wise facilitator” doesn’t seek to prevent the inevitable and random clashes between “conflicting field spirits,” but to anticipate such bouts of disorder and profit thereby.

Contemporary corporate fantasy imagines a world of ceaseless, turbulent change, of centers that ecstatically fail to hold, of joyous extinction for the craven gray-flannel creature of the past. Businessmen today decorate the walls of their offices not with portraits of President Eisenhower and emblems of suburban order, but with images of extreme athletic daring, with sayings about “diversity” and “empowerment” and “thinking outside the box.” They theorize their world not in the bar car of the commuter train, but in weepy corporate retreats at which they beat their tom-toms and envision themselves as part of the great avant-garde tradition of edge-livers, risk-takers, and ass-kickers. Their world is a place not of sublimation and conformity, but of “leadership” and bold talk about defying the herd. And there is nothing this new enlightened species of businessman despises more than “rules” and “reason.” The prominent culture-warriors of the right may believe that the counterculture was capitalism’s undoing, but the antinomian businessmen know better. “One of the t-shirt slogans of the sixties read, `Question authority,’” the authors of Reengineering the Corporation write. “Process owners might buy their reengineering team members the nineties version: `Question assumptions.’” ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=431 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=430 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:35:27 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/frank-dissent.html The...]]> Why Johnny Can’t Dissent
from http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/frank-dissent.html

The public be damned! I work for my stockholders.
--William H. Vanderbilt, 1879

Break the rules. Stand apart. Keep your head. Go with your heart.
--TV commercial for Vanderbilt perfume, 1994

Capitalism is changing, obviously and drastically. From the moneyed pages of the Wall Street Journal to TV commercials for airlines and photocopiers we hear every day about the new order’s globe-spanning, cyber-accumulating ways. But our notion about what’s wrong with American life and how the figures responsible are to be confronted haven’t changed much in thirty years. Call it, for convenience, the “countercultural idea.” It holds that the paramount ailment of our society is conformity, a malady that has variously been described as over-organization, bureaucracy, homogeneity, hierarchy, logocentrism, technocracy, the Combine, the Apollonian. We all know what it is and what it does. It transforms humanity into “organization man,” into “the man in the gray flannel suit.” It is “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery,” the “incomprehensible prison” that consumes “brains and imagination.” It is artifice, starched shirts, tailfins, carefully mowed lawns, and always, always, the consciousness of impending nuclear destruction. It is a stiff, militaristic order that seeks to suppress instinct, to forbid sex and pleasure, to deny basic human impulses and individuality, to enforce through a rigid uniformity a meaningless plastic consumerism.

As this half of the countercultural idea originated during the 1950s, it is appropriate that the evils of conformity are most conveniently summarized with images of 1950s suburban correctness. You know, that land of sedate music, sexual repression, deference to authority, Red Scares, and smiling white people standing politely in line to go to church. Constantly appearing as a symbol of arch-backwardness in advertising and movies, it is an image we find easy to evoke.

The ways in which this system are to be resisted are equally well understood and agreed-upon. The Establishment demands homogeneity; we revolt by embracing diverse, individual lifestyles. It demands self-denial and rigid adherence to convention; we revolt through immediate gratification, instinct uninhibited, and liberation of the libido and the appetites. Few have put it more bluntly than Jerry Rubin did in 1970: “Amerika says: Don’t! The yippies say: Do It!” The countercultural idea is hostile to any law and every establishment. “Whenever we see a rule, we must break it,” Rubin continued. “Only by breaking rules do we discover who we are.” Above all rebellion consists of a sort of Nietzschean antinomianism, an automatic questioning of rules, a rejection of whatever social prescriptions we’ve happened to inherit. Just Do It is the whole of the law.

The patron saints of the countercultural idea are, of course, the Beats, whose frenzied style and merry alienation still maintain a powerful grip on the American imagination. Even forty years after the publication of On the Road, the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs remain the sine qua non of dissidence, the model for aspiring poets, rock stars, or indeed anyone who feels vaguely artistic or alienated. That frenzied sensibility of pure experience, life on the edge, immediate gratification, and total freedom from moral restraint, which the Beats first propounded back in those heady days when suddenly everyone could have their own TV and powerful V-8, has stuck with us through all the intervening years and become something of a permanent American style. Go to any poetry reading and you can see a string of junior Kerouacs go through the routine, upsetting cultural hierarchies by pushing themselves to the limit, straining for that gorgeous moment of original vice when Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl” in 1955 and the patriarchs of our fantasies recoiled in shock. The Gap may have since claimed Ginsberg and USA Today may run feature stories about the brilliance of the beloved Kerouac, but the rebel race continues today regardless, with ever-heightening shit-references calculated to scare Jesse Helms, talk about sex and smack that is supposed to bring the electricity of real life, and ever-more determined defiance of the repressive rules and mores of the American 1950s—rules and mores that by now we know only from movies.

But one hardly has to go to a poetry reading to see the countercultural idea acted out. Its frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official aesthetic of consumer society, a monotheme of mass as well as adversarial culture. Turn on the TV and there it is instantly: the unending drama of consumer unbound and in search of an ever-heightened good time, the inescapable rock `n’ roll soundtrack, dreadlocks and ponytails bounding into Taco Bells, a drunken, swinging-camera epiphany of tennis shoes, outlaw soda pops, and mind-bending dandruff shampoos. Corporate America, it turns out, no longer speaks in the voice of oppressive order that it did when Ginsberg moaned in 1956 that Time magazine was

always telling me about responsibility. Business-
men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody’s serious but me.

Nobody wants you to think they’re serious today, least of all Time Warner. On the contrary: the Culture Trust is now our leader in the Ginsbergian search for kicks upon kicks. Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival, our slang-speaking partner in the quest for that ever-more apocalyptic orgasm. The countercultural idea has become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices and lifestyle experimentation.

Consumerism is no longer about “conformity” but about “difference.” Advertising teaches us not in the ways of puritanical self-denial (a bizarre notion on the face of it), but in orgiastic, never-ending self-fulfillment. It counsels not rigid adherence to the tastes of the herd but vigilant and constantly updated individualism. We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock `n’ roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60s, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer. This imperative of endless difference is today the genius at the heart of American capitalism, an eternal fleeing from “sameness” that satiates our thirst for the New with such achievements of civilization as the infinite brands of identical cola, the myriad colors and irrepressible variety of the cigarette rack at 7-Eleven.

As existential rebellion has become a more or less official style of Information Age capitalism, so has the countercultural notion of a static, repressive Establishment grown hopelessly obsolete. However the basic impulses of the countercultural idea may have disturbed a nation lost in Cold War darkness, they are today in fundamental agreement with the basic tenets of Information Age business theory. So close are they, in fact, that it has become difficult to understand the countercultural idea as anything more than the self-justifying ideology of the new bourgeoisie that has arisen since the 1960s, the cultural means by which this group has proven itself ever so much better skilled than its slow-moving, security-minded forebears at adapting to the accelerated, always-changing consumerism of today. The anointed cultural opponents of capitalism are now capitalism’s ideologues.

The two come together in perfect synchronization in a figure like Camille Paglia, whose ravings are grounded in the absolutely noncontroversial ideas of the golden sixties. According to Paglia, American business is still exactly what it was believed to have been in that beloved decade, that is, “puritanical and desensualized.” Its great opponents are, of course, liberated figures like “the beatniks,” Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. Culture is, quite simply, a binary battle between the repressive Apollonian order of capitalism and the Dionysian impulses of the counterculture. Rebellion makes no sense without repression; we must remain forever convinced of capitalism’s fundamental hostility to pleasure in order to consume capitalism’s rebel products as avidly as we do. It comes as little surprise when, after criticizing the “Apollonian capitalist machine” (in her book, Vamps & Tramps), Paglia applauds American mass culture (in Utne Reader), the preeminent product of that “capitalist machine,” as a “third great eruption” of a Dionysian “paganism.” For her, as for most other designated dissidents, there is no contradiction between replaying the standard critique of capitalist conformity and repressiveness and then endorsing its rebel products—for Paglia the car culture and Madonna—as the obvious solution: the Culture Trust offers both Establishment and Resistance in one convenient package. The only question that remains is why Paglia has not yet landed an endorsement contract from a soda pop or automobile manufacturer. ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=430 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=429 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:33:37 GMT That the communications giants would find “freedom of the press” to be such an obliging concept does not disturb Reporters sans frontières (RSF, Reporters without borders). RSF’s secretary general,... That the communications giants would find “freedom of the press” to be such an obliging concept does not disturb Reporters sans frontières (RSF, Reporters without borders). RSF’s secretary general, Robert Ménard, offers this concession: “In order to defend journalists throughout the world, we require the consent and support of the profession, whereas discussions concerning the journalistic profession are by definition contentious. For instance, how can we organise a discussion on the increasing concentration of the media and then ask Havas or Hachette to sponsor an event?” (10). Since defending journalists in China or Chechnya also means dealing with Hachette and Havas (not to mention Silvio Berslusconi, Rupert Murdoch and Francis Bouygues), is it surprising that among the “predators of freedom of the press” named by RSF - and pilloried last 4 May at the Fnac (the French book and department store chain) - there were no names that might possibly “sponsor an event”? Least of all that of François Pinault, Fnac’s owner.

The truth is that the various overlapping alliances have made it harder to challenge individual media magnates, even by a media source that is not yet dependent on them. Vivendi’s chairman and CEO, Jean-Marie Messier, and Rupert Murdoch have just merged their pay-TV operations in Italy. Berlusconi and Murdoch, together with Pinault and the French TV network TF1, are shareholders in TV Breizh, a privately-owned Breton channel (11). The French media giant Lagardère and Vivendi are partners in Canal Satellite, the French digital satellite provider. Hachette, the Pinault-controlled news magazine Le Point, and the daily papers Le Monde, Le Figaro and Libération are all part of a joint venture that is in the running for a Parisian channel (12).

In this world of industrial complicity, where the same names and the same class interests keep coming up, the distinction between the public and the commercial realms is also becoming blurred. This is certainly the case in Italy since Berlusconi, the richest man in the country and owner of Italy’s three private television networks, became prime minister.

Such confusion is occurring elsewhere as well. Robert Maxwell bought a newspaper in Kenya while he was a business partner of Kenya’s president Daniel Arap Moi, about whom the paper found only good things to say. The Marhino family, which dominates the Brazilian media, has made use of an informal parliamentary group more powerful than any political party. Francis Bouygues admits that he bought TF1 to increase his influence in the political and cultural arenas and a member of his inner circle made this confession: “Francis held politicians in the greatest contempt since he knew he could buy them off. As the owner of a TV network, he understands that he no longer has to go begging after them since they will be the ones eating out of his hand” (13).

Indeed, who would dare refuse such a hand? Not the activists who bounce from one media appearance to another to criticise “ultra-liberalism”, but who rarely focus on the role of the media multinationals and the mercenary spin they give to the information they disseminate. Nor do the intellectuals who, even as they express disdain for the lowly position reserved for them by the media, cannot help but accept the invitations they receive. Almost a quarter century ago, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze warned the intelligentsia of the techniques and dangers of the “philosophical marketing” utilised by philosopher/journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy and his friends: “Talking about a book and getting people to talk about it are more important than what the book itself says or does not say. Taken to the limit, the multitude of newspaper articles, interviews, colloquia, radio or television broadcasts must replace the book, which might as well not exist at all. … Intellectuals, writers, even artists, are thus invited to become journalists if they want to conform to the norms. It’s a new type of thinking, the interview-thought, the instant-thought” (14) .

Thus glorifying “freedom of the press” often serves to mask the silent tyranny that the media and their proprietors would like to impose on political and cultural life (15). However it is not hard to determine the extent of the danger. For example, in 1996 the US Congress, which had just cut federal aid to the poor, granted frequencies worth some $70bn at no cost to the recipients. Viacom, Disney and General Electric - the respective owners of the CBS, ABC and NBC networks - were the main beneficiaries of the decision. Protesting the give-away, Senator John McCain said during the congressional debate: “You will not see this story on any television or hear it on any radio broadcast because it directly affects them”. In fact, during the nine months that elapsed between the introduction of the legislation and its final approval, the three main news networks devoted only 19 minutes to the subject. The question of whether the largest communications companies could afford to pay for the frequencies that the US government awarded them was not raised (16). Is there any other country where “freedom of the press” is safeguarded more effectively than in the United States?
Serge Halimi.
Translated by Luke Sandford

(1) Jacques Bouveresse, Schmock ou le triomphe du journalisme, Seuil, Paris, 2001, p 72.

(2) “Nouvelle économie”, L’Express, 5 July 2001.

(3) Until 1995 Alcatel effectively controlled, via Générale Occidentale, 50% of the French market for general-interest weekly magazines, including Le Point and L’Express.

(4) Vivendi Universal Publishing recently sold the weekly Courrier international to Le Monde “for an undisclosed amount”. Periodicals are accustomed to demanding transparency from others, but can they abide a lack of transparency when they themselves are concerned?.

(5) Jean-Marie Cavada, CEO of Radio France and Michel Denizot, associate managing director of Canal Plus, specialise in the brands and products of business school terminology.

(6) Patrick Eveno, Le journal Le Monde: Une Histoire d’indépendance, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2001.

(7) The M6 network (owned by BMG, the Bertelsmann group has contacted the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (France’s audiovisual council) and has applied for permission to increase its time devoted to advertisements from an average of 6 to 9 minutes per hour.

(8) On 21 March 2001 the French daily Libération was printed on purple paper to satisfy one of its advertisers. As a result the paper was virtually illegible. Totalling 71bn francs (approximately $10bn) last year, publicity and advertising revenues represented 45.5% of total income for the print media. In relative terms this was the highest level for advertising revenues over the last 10 years.

(9) L’Evénement, 22 July 1999.

(10) Robert Ménard, Ces journalistes que l’on veut faire taire, Albin Michel, Paris, 2001, pp 63-64. .

(11) TV Breizh’s capital structure is allocated as follows: Artemis (Pinault), 27%; TF1, 22%; Crédit Agricole de Bretagne TV, 15%; News International PLC (Murdoch), 13%; Mediaset Investment (Berlusconi), 13%; etc. Pinault, who owns the weekly Le Point and the monthly L’Histoire, is one of TF1’s primary shareholders.

(12) See Jean-Marie Colombani, editor of Le Monde, “Nous allons nouer des liens forts pour bâtir un réseau européen”, Le Nouvel Hebdo, 13 July 2001.

(13) Pierre Péan and Christophe Nick, TF1: un pouvoir, Fayard, Paris, 1997, p 193.

(14) Gilles Deleuze, “On the New Philosophers and a More General Problem”, in Discourse 20:3 (Fall 1998), pp 38-40.

(15) See “La pire des censures”, Pour Lire Pas Lu, Marseille, June-August 2001.

(16) See Bill Moyers, “Journalism and Democracy”, The Nation, 7 May 2001. ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=429 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=428 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:33:02 GMT http://mondediplo.com/2001/08/04press The media may now...]]> MEDIA OWNERSHIP AND BIAS
France: his master’s voice

http://mondediplo.com/2001/08/04press

The media may now be free of governmental censorship, but this has been replaced by self-censorship serving the interests of individual and corporate media owners - and the self-promotion of intellectuals.

By Serge Halimi

Is it just coincidence or are Western journalists obsessed with the word morality? Moral demands are made on our political leaders, and morality now figures in international law, and there are endless media debates by omnipresent intellectuals of little worth, professors of morality and those who like to theorise about evil. More than a century ago the Austrian satirical review Die Fackel(The Torch) made this observation: “The newspapers seem to offer up the spectacle of a million dirty hands holding a million brooms, all bent on sweeping other people’s doorsteps” (1).

Somehow these same dirty hands are considered clean enough to wield the scalpel. Last June the French supplier of telecommunications equipment Alcatel announced plans to close most of its factories. Denis Jeambar immediately took umbrage at governmental inaction: “Our political leaders live under the empire of the markets and globalised companies. Politics no longer exists” (2). Yet the man behind this insightful reproach is both managing editor of the French news magazine L’Express and president of the general information service of Vivendi Universal Publishing, formerly known as Havas, which was at one time controlled by Alcatel (3). As the lieutenant of one of the world’s largest multinationals, is Jeambar in any position to hold forth on the shifting tides of current events as if they were alien to him? Is it not true that the globalised companies that live under the empire of the markets in fact the media conglomerates themselves? Surely it would be beneficial if their own doorsteps were swept from time to time) (4).

Journalists increasingly serve as masters of ceremony for the powerful groups that they should be seeking to control. In more and more countries those who own the media outlets hold both governments and politicians on a tight leash. Some reporters have dubbed this transformation “the end of history” and the apotheosis of “freedom of the press”. Yet, for such journalists, the victory in question is only one step along the road to greater dependence. The fallen walls of state censorship have been replaced by more subtle barriers; there is no point in having newscasters in military uniforms, as was the case in communist Poland, when the truly powerful have journalists at their disposal. Nowadays journalists’ finery is emblazoned with the logos of the markets.

The revolt against subservience to merchandise may have begun: but not in the press. Whether you take the key daily papers, publicly-owned radio stations or private television networks, their overriding concern seems to be to mention the words “brand” and “product” as often as possible to describe what until quite recently journalists preferred to call “news” (5). Even then, they failed to take into account that capitalism flourished in conjunction with “freedom of the press”. And in a liberal economy information and news is designed to sell and to be sold, whether to readers, advertisers or shareholders.

The historian Patrick Eveno reminds them of this fact with an enthusiasm that appears genuine: “Almost nothing remains of the coercive mechanisms set up after the second world war to regulate the media. Aside from the NMPP (Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne, a press distribution service), AFP (Agence France-Presse) and various remnants of the ex-ORTF (the former French radio and television organisation), which must also adapt to the new reality, the French media have regained their operating freedom by cutting the ties that bound them to the state. The press is in better shape not only because advertising has been on the upswing, but also because the print media have plans for both the editorial and commercial domains. ... The French media have entered the era of modern democratic capitalism. …The only way for newspapers to preserve their independence is to keep both readers and shareholders satisfied” (6).

So it is that freedom and independence in their new “unregulated” form must follow in the wake of advertisers and proprietors. This “philosophy” has become commonplace. Certain issues are no longer even raised in most newspapers, as journalists become indistinguishable from everyone else.

For years, radio and television programmes broadcast in cafés, restaurants and supermarkets have been interrupted by loud, invasive advertising breaks (7). This phenomenon occurs quite naturally, and meets with no resistance. Imagine the reaction of the media overseers, listeners and passers-by if a government spokesman were to interrupt a broadcast every 10 minutes in cafés, restaurants and supermarkets to read an official communiqué. Outraged people would be screaming that the airwaves had been overrun and that dictatorship had arrived. And they would be right. Advertising’s licence to take over minds and souls and the way it has been auctioned off to the highest bidder are truly alarming (8).
Proud to be with Hachette

To say that such questions have not been addressed would be inaccurate since some journalists have offered their reaction. Two years ago Alain Genestar gave an interview in the French weekly L’Evénement, which used to be published by the Hachette group. Genestar was then managing director of the Hachette-controlled weekly Journal du dimanche and is now managing director of the Hachette-controlled magazine Paris Match and a regular contributor to the Hachette-controlled Europe 1 radio network. In the interview he described his relationship with his proprietor: “I have been a journalist with Hachette for 18 years. I like working with the people there and I get along well with management. At a time when international press organisations are expanding rapidly, I hope that the Hachette group will become a major player” (9). No doubt Genestar is also pleased with the freedoms won by journalists when the state stopped regulating the media. After all, he is free to proclaim himself a Hachette journalist and offer proof of this in the publications he manages. ]]> Benga http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=428 http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=425 Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:24:39 GMT swim got a hold of 'buddy' yesterday before her s.o. got home, and she's been tweakin' since, not without some accidents. Pushin' is the best way to feel the snow. Swim thinks of the cold steel sliding easily into the chosen vein, trying not to get excited, for fear of 'missing', she watches as the blue blood in her veins hits the oxygen outside and slowly discolours the inside of the syringe red. She can see it ebbing and flowing, but she must act fast... push that needle's head ever so slowly, so as not to break the vein... and then the rush. She closes her eyes and enjoys the euphoria for a few minutes, her mouth gaping, tongue resting on the roof of her mouth - something her massage therapist taught her to stop her from grinding her teeth. Time passes quickly, and soon the rush is gone, only to be chased for the rest of her waking day. Four more misses, and she considers changing her method, but oh, that rush is so attractive... sniffing just doesn't cut it after one has pushed. That doctor never should have showed and allowed her to give her own b12 injections... look what it has lead to... but no, she would probably have ended up here sometime, following in her estranged father's footsteps... trying to keep her 'dirty little secret' gets harder each month... and now it's time to 'try' again.... ]]> redblurb http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/blog.php?b=425