December 23, 2001
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Attacking the corporate shell instead of its contents
While I did not make my way through most of the New York Times this weekend, I could not help but notice the Thomas Frank Op-Ed on the fellow who has come to be known as Tali-boy (the American formerly known as John Walker).
This article is extraordinary. First it lays out a reasonable criticism of the moral right's reaction to Tali-boy:
the culture warriors have decided that Mr. Walker's doings are an obvious reflection of the treasonous tendencies of the "liberal elite" and have commenced offensive operations accordingly. Radio commentators decry Californian "permissiveness." The Weekly Standard has posted Mr. Walker's teenage hip-hop noodlings on its Web site as though these were profoundly embarrassing to the left. Shelby Steele suggested in The Wall Street Journal that Mr. Walker's path to the Taliban started with the 60's, "countercultural hipness," sneering intellectuals and "cultural liberalism."We really don't know enough about John Walker to pin his deeds on anyone other than himself.
I don't object to examining Mr. Walker's writings, and if they happen to parrot one ideology or another I don't care. Frank is right, it's a bit of a stretch to link Walker's obviously losing his group on reality to the political orientation of his family, let alone those he parroted along the way. Can you feel the "but.." coming?
But as long as we're passing out explosive bits of blame, we would do well to turn the spotlight on that other corner of American life where a band of impudent snobs, elected by no one, wax subversive and work to undermine the authority of parents, the sanctity of marriage and even the honor of the flag.I refer, of course, to corporate America.
Oh God, not one of these. Here we go:
It is from TV commercials for sneakers and S.U.V.'s that we learn of the horror of American sameness and the freedom and personal authenticity that await us when we fire up a Macintosh or zoom away in a Honda CR-V. Extremism in the pursuit of intensity, the ad men tell us, is no vice. John Walker's generation was encouraged to use "extreme" cordless drills, buy its Dodges from an extreme used car dealer and catch its trout with an extreme fishing rod. Just for them did ecstatic TV hipsters steer their sedans up Himalayan peaks in search of the phattest possible brand experience. Maybe the boy Talib is simply an attentive consumer, his ill-fated affair with extreme Islam merely a twisted continuation of his search for the weapons-grade authenticity promised him so many times by manufacturers of bell-bottom jeans and lemon-lime soda.The HORROR! That's right, "extreme sports" breeds extremists! What an epiphany. All those people who climb sheer cliffs with their bare hands and drive SUVs are just Taliban waiting to happen. And when we promise extreme sports and deliver only Mountain Dew we are driving them to misogyny and genocide rationalized by religious fundamentalism. While he's at it, Frank also manages to join the human haters who consider not only consumption, but catering to consumption a form of coercion. Not only is purchasing an SUV a sin, but selling one is worse.
Corporations are, of course, to blame for the tastes of their customers. It's also hard not to notice that Frank rather enjoys employing the very tactics he criticized ages ago in the prior paragraph. But wait a minute, he's not done:
And if shallow, questing soul talk has an institutional home, it is management theory. This is where you go to find impassioned stories about becoming a "change agent," searching earnestly for the true identity of a brand or devoting yourself to a "corporate holy man."All that our culture warriors claim to deplore can be found in fashionable corporate literature: the relativism, the affected reverence for the wisdom of the East, the denunciation of old white males. Had the world not changed on Sept. 11, the teenage Talib might have anticipated a career back in Marin, schooling audiences made up of his middle-class homies in the leadership secrets of Mullah Omar.
Well, I like some of the scholarship on leadership, but I'll admit, some of its over the top. Management is about people, so the leadership studies tend to focus on getting managers excited about the people who work for them. But isn't the idea of Tali-boy being a young Peter Senge or Jack Weber a little far-fetched? And isn't likening those folks to Mullah Omar...well, extreme? This is by far the most curious (not to mention puerile and silly) example of Ad Talibanum I've seen yet. I've been imagining in my free moments this weekend, how else could we build an argument similar to Frank's? I have a few.
1. Media. It's the media that's to blame. They are constantly offering us quick fixes for short attention spans. Good Morning America tells us if we read a book or change a few daily habits, we'll turn our lives around. It's no wonder John Walker went off in search of a more rigorous and effective curative for his soul, which was emptied by the media2. Self-help specialists. There's not a religion or philosophy in the world these folks have boiled down or strained through a sieve as a band-aid for our deeper needs. If "shallow questing soul talk" has an institutional home, it is the self-help world.
3. Women. Women wear all these clothes that flatter their shape. They employ the artifice of underwire bras and control hose. They use makeup to enhance the smoothness of their skin and the shape of their cheekbones. They flirt and are coy. But when you see them in the morning, they aren't what they appeared to be. Walker's conversion to a misogynistic religion is just a "twisted continuation" of his search for the flesh and blood authenticity of a woman under a cane fearing for her life.
I looked into Thomas Frank's body of work. He clearly believes that corporations rule our culture unchallenged, and are enemies of democracy. Seeing as we customers vote every day with our dollars, I find his entire worldview hard to fathom. Take for instance his claim in this article that "Above all markets love the country of Singapore." Have a look at a chart of Singapore's STI index against the S&P 500 (SPX) and wonder how Frank developed this conclusion.
Of course, Singapore is a country known for favoring caning. Frank might argue that's a reasonable "authentic" reaction to all the fake violence peddled by corporations.
Corporations are groups of individuals, banded together to work make a profit in the free market. They are slaves to their customers - the people in their markets. And they have been an important agent in capitalism, which is the best friend the little guy ever had. It's a mystery to me why commentators of both conservative and liberal ilk crap on them like this. Except to observe that since it has become unacceptable to openly peddle your hatred of humanity, beating up on the corporate shell has become sort of chic, much like those leadership gurus Frank hates so much.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at December 23, 2001 11:04 PM | Technorati inbound links