Issues In Pop Culture

Below you will find several thought-provoking articles written specifically for this Website. These pieces, which cover topical and timely issues in the world of popular culture, are meant to supplement the issues covered in the textbook, and to provide further material for discussion or analysis.

1. Pop and Politics

2. Countercultures: Socialism, Communism and Popular Culture

3. Invisible Censorship

4. Representing Race on TV: The Sopranos

5. Food as Popular Culture

6. Does the Shoe Fit: Adbusters'  “Unbrand America” Campaign

7. May the Force Be with You: Pop Culture and Religion

8. The Myth of the Liberal Media

1. Pop and Politics

A lot of people got mad when documentary producer Michael Moore used the occasion of his Oscar speech to trash U.S. President George W. Bush and the U.S. war on Iraq. In glaring contrast to actors Susan Sarandon, Adrian Brody and Selma Hayek, who signaled their opposition to the war by wearing tasteful designer pins in the shape of doves, Moore, sporting a button that read “Shoot Movies, Not Iraqis,” literally shouted his message, damning the “fictitious election results that elect[ed] a fictitious president,” and concluding by yelling, “Shame on you, Mr. Bush!” Moore’s speech received an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the press, where it was dismissed as the “Acceptance Speech from Hell,” a “mindless rant” and a “shrill harangue.”

(See the following links for coverage of this event:)

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/3/25/162117.shtml

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/poniewozik/article/0,9565,436268,00.html

While many were bothered by what they saw as Moore’s lack of patriotism—a charge that could equally be directed at Sarandon & co.—the more general complaint was that Moore had broken the unwritten rule of keeping entertainment separate from politics.

What is this rule and what does it mean to break it?   Two general arguments tend to be advanced for the “ban” on mixing pop and politics. The first, reflected in much of the criticism against Moore, is that politics introduces division and controversy into an experience that is meant to be affirmative and celebratory.    This argument shares some common ground with what at first might seem to be the very different argument that Moore and others were unpatriotic in their objections to the war (and significantly, those who objected to the “politicking” of anti-war celebrities weren’t bothered by those, like Tom Cruise, who spoke out in favour of invading Iraq). The first thing to notice about these arguments is that they are based on a particular definition of “politics” as synonymous with dissent and protest.   For many of those unhappy with Moore, the problem isn’t just with the intrusion of politics into popular culture, but with politics, period. To be “political,” from this perspective, is to stir up currents of negativity and confusion at a time when the American nation needs, more than ever, “to stand united around common values.”  

So, what are those values and what is their relationship to popular culture?   The most commonly cited American ideal is “freedom,” a word people often use to lend legitimacy to the more ideologically loaded values of consumerism and individualism. Popular culture (and here we might substitute the term   “commercial culture”) powerfully reflects these ideologies—both in the dominant messages it conveys and in the economy that produces it. Because politics speaks to a desire for choice that can’t be addressed by the freedom to simply pick a lifestyle and pursue the accessories that go along with it, it dampens the “you-go-girl!” spirit of pop culture, and with it, the animating force of commercial society. In this sense, then, politics itself becomes weirdly anti-American.

The second argument about popular culture and politics is concerned not about how politics wrecks pop, but how pop culture wrecks politics by aestheticizing it, turning it into empty spectacle. This argument is often made in relation to events like the 1985 Live Aid and Band Aid concerts and subsequent mega-benefit shows, which take what are fundamentally political and economic issues like famine and turn them into simplistic messages about “reaching out and touching someone”—messages that translate into mega-bucks not for Ethiopian famine victims but for corporate sponsors like AT&T. The same charge of over-simplification applies to celebrity commentaries that reduce situations like the war on Iraq or the treatment of women in Nigeria to 10-second promotional clips on Entertainment Tonight .

Viewed from this angle, “politics” describes the complicated struggles over power that underlie all social formations, even and especially those that seem to be the simplest and the most inviting of universal affirmation.   From this perspective, dissent, which is simply an expression of politics, does not destroy social harmony; rather, it shows such harmony to have been an illusion, dependent on the suppression of underlying divisions and inequalities. The problem with pop and politics, then, is not that popular culture shouldn’t be tangled up with politics—it always is, whether we admit it or not—but that where popular culture does tangle openly with politics, it over-simplifies complex realities for the sake of producing snappy sound bites and happy endings.

We, the authors of this A User’s Guide, like most cultural critics, are more inclined to the second argument.   But there are problems with it, too.   Most significantly, it is based on a nostalgic view of both politics and popular culture, seeing both as ideally transcending base economic interests.   People who subscribe to this argument tend to talk fondly of events like Woodstock as an example of a time (always the 1960s!) when popular culture, or at least a certain segment of pop culture, was unequivocally and uncommercially political.   Leaving aside the question of whether Woodstock was as uncorrupted by consumerism as aging hippies claim (a claim we refute in the User’s Guide ), it is undeniable that the social landscape has changed.   If it can be said that there’s no space outside of politics, it’s also true in a way that it never was before that there’s no space outside of popular culture. This results in a dilution of traditional politics, as evidenced for example by declining interest in the electoral process. It also arguably lends greater substance and importance to popular, commercial culture as the place where power is negotiated and talked about—the place where politics happens .   Not only do celebrity political commentators act as catalysts for public discussion, raising awareness and sparking debate, they often influence policy directly: in the U.S. in particular, the road from Hollywood to the White House is a well-traveled one.

So, having surveyed a couple of arguments about pop and politics, how should we regard the “political” rants and platitudes of Michael Moore and Tom Cruise? In short: we should listen to them. Not because they’re necessarily right, but because their comments both reflect and direct the currents of global power. At the same time, we should not mistake them for substantial political actions. It is only as they get translated, via our TV sets, our conversations, and, finally, our own engagements with the wider communities we live in, that they become something more than the “fictions” that Michael Moore denounced and take on substance and global significance.

Other relevant Websites:

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/22/cf.opinion.celebs.war/

http://www.yehey.com/entertainment/article.aspx?i=1200

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/mar2003/osca-m25.shtml

2. Countercultures: Socialism, Communism and Popular Culture            

As political ideologies, both socialism and communism have been under concerted attack for most of the past century, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dismantling of the U.S.S.R. soon after. For conservatives in North America and Europe, the “victory” of the West in the Cold War was taken as proof of the innate superiority of Western-style liberal democracies. The controversial political commentator Francis Fukuyama famously declared the end of the Cold War to signal the “end of history”—the end, that is, not of time itself but of the drama of competing political systems that has defined modern world history since the time of the French Revolution (1789).

To a large degree, Western foreign policy has for the past fifteen years been driven by the desire to solidify the end of this history. Whether through direct intervention in states with competing political systems (Somalia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) or through indirect pressures and incentives (political pressure on North Korea, Syria, and Iran; the emergence of communist China into the capitalist world-economy; a combination of both in the case of Cuba, and so on), liberal democracy and capitalism have been, and continue to be, forcefully “exported” from the West to other parts of the world. This at a time, it has to be noted, when political participation in Western countries is at an all time low and cynicism about the political process remains high; few people believe that the government actively works in the best interests of its citizens as opposed to the corporations who help fund elections and from whose ranks most politicians are in fact drawn.

If they are discussed at all today, socialism and communism are treated mainly as names for dead political ideologies that we are lucky to have moved beyond. Communism has become synonymous with dictatorships and totalitarian rule: while one can still admire Karl Marx as a political philosopher (akin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Voltaire), it is now feasible to mention V.I. Lenin and Saddam Hussein in the same breath as examples of the great dictators of modern history (as President George W. Bush did during his proclamation of the end of the war in Iraq in April, 2003).

Socialism, on the other hand, is imagined at best as a quaint idea with good intentions—the organization of society for the betterment of all involved—but one without a realistic hope of ever working in contemporary societies. Over the past three decades, Western governments have engaged in a process of distancing themselves from the (supposed) taint of socialism as much as possible by selling off government-owned corporations and utilities: the rail system in the United Kingdom, PetroCanada and Air Canada in Canada, and so on.

It is impossible to study popular culture without serious attention to the central role that capitalism has played in commodifying culture and cultural experience. In a similar way, it is impossible to understand the energies of contemporary countercultures (and indeed, of the implicit if not explicit politics of much of popular culture) without taking socialism and communism seriously, as both ideas and projects for a society with different values than those expressed in capitalism. It is no coincidence that the history of popular culture overlaps with the historical development of modern countercultures. The forces and energies that created the conditions for the emergence of mass, popular culture also generated considerable resistance to it. In particular, the maturation and full expression of the capitalist economy in the early nineteenth-century has produced a range of reactions to the world that it has created. As capitalism expanded across the world, and as crises in capitalism expressed themselves in the outbreak of wars, ecological destruction, increased poverty and social deprivation, countercultures have continued to challenge the status quo and to propose new and better ways of organizing communities and nations.

It might seem strange or limiting to describe socialism and communism as countercultures as opposed to ideas (or ideologies) for how to organize and run nation-states. However, this designation in some ways not only better captures their common desire for a total change in society (which we suggested is characteristic of countercultures), but also allows us to think about these ideas without treating them as historical embarrassments or examples of “bad” state formations. Communism and socialism emerge as reactions to the brutal competition for labour, social oppression and unprecedented concentration of wealth that was the product of the Industrial Revolution.

While there are many variants of socialism, they are all based on two founding ideas (or ideals): the equality of all human beings by virtue of their possession of a common humanity, and a recognition of the social and economic problems created by private property, which is what enables the concentration of wealth and the division of society into classes of haves and have-nots. Since private property is an invention of human beings—a social category, not one that exists in nature—both socialism and communism envision the possibility of a more just society organized around principles other than the creation of profit through ownership.

These ideas remain alive in a variety of spaces and places in contemporary culture: the struggle over control of intellectual copyright (as in the cases of Napster or Linux) and the landless peasant movement across Africa and South America emerge as responses to the social and political implications of private property in today’s society, as does the anti-globalization movement, which aims to undo the damage inflicted by the system of international financial transactions which generate wealth for some at the expense of others. And the possession of a common humanity has been essential to the establishment of international human rights and the global struggle for political autonomy, social dignity and cultural self-expression.

Prominent theorists of socialism include Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint Simon (1760-1825), François-Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Robert Owen (1771-1858). The most influential proponents of communism include Karl Marx (1818-1883), V.I. Lenin (1870-1924) and Mao Zedong (1893-1976).

3. Invisible Censorship

The firing of Russell Mills, publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, on June 17, 2002, brought much-needed attention to the problems of media concentration and press censorship in Canada. With the purchase of the Southam newspaper chain of fourteen major dailies in 2001, CanWest Global, one of the major television networks in Canada, overnight became one of the major news sources in the country. Under their previous owners, each of the individual local newspapers (in cities such as Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver) were largely left to their own devices. However, the new corporate owners of the media chain began to insist on coordinating editorial statements with the aim of ensuring that all CanWest papers would advance a single, national editorial position.

Though Mills was officially fired for comments critical of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who is close to the principal owners of CanWest, his ouster took place within an ongoing context of head office interference in the editorial direction of its local papers. Instead of allowing a diversity of opinions and positions to flourish, CanWest Global’s desire to maximize the synergistic possibilities of its different media outlets has resulted in a form of censorship—perhaps not the direct kind that take place in authoritarian countries (where the government imposes strict controls on what can and cannot be published or broadcast), but an indirect kind that emerges out of the challenges of running news as a business in which the bottom line matters.

Criticisms of the news media in the United States and Canada often focus on this kind of economic censorship. On the one hand, newspapers and television news are a public service of vital importance to the function of democracy; on the other, they are also businesses whose product is the readers or viewers whom they bring into connection with advertisers. It is hardly surprising that when confronted with irate advertisers or an offended corporation, that news organizations will back down or mute their criticisms. In the United States, two of the major broadcast networks (ABC and NBC) are owned by large conglomerates (Disney and General Electric, respectively) with spotty labour and environmental records. The fact that ABC and NBC don’t report on this is just one sign of the kinds of widespread informal, non-governmental “censorship” that limits the news that we see each and every day.

There is, however, another level of media censorship that should perhaps concern us even more. This is what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has referred to as invisible censorship —a kind of censorship that emerges out of the daily operations of journalism itself. In On Television , his most sustained critique of journalism, Bourdieu’s criticisms of the contemporary media run through a familiar range of complaints that critics have been voicing for decades. He suggests that under the guise of objectivity the daily news offers a limited, highly suspect view of the world, which results in social disengagement and cynicism towards politics. The news that most of us get amounts to little more than what he characterizes as “variety show … a litany of events with no beginning and no real end, thrown together only because they happened on the same day.” Since the news focuses on “breaking” events and tries to capture audience interest by focusing on new stories and situations, journalism produces a form of cultural amnesia. More originally and insightfully, Bourdieu’s analysis of the failures of journalism is also linked to an elaboration of the structure of the profession of journalism, and of the way that this structure generates a specific and limited view of the world.

Invisible censorship names the structural limits of the journalistic profession, limits that emerge as a result how and why news events are covered. These limits appear to journalists as the “common sense” of both how the news is supposed to be reported—as the rules of reportage itself, which are (supposedly) designed to eliminate bias in favour of the truth. The journalistic profession, like all professions, is “based on a set of shared assumptions and beliefs, which reach beyond differences of position and opinion.” Journalists imagine that they stand in for the public at large, when in truth they tend to reflect what is of interest to their particular profession.

As just one example, Bourdieu points to the way in which journalists cover politics: as a game played by high-level competitors, each struggling to achieve and consolidate power in their profession (just like journalists themselves, who are struggling to score a scoop). Since the journalists that cover Parliament or Congress have a degree of inside access to the players, it’s not surprising that political coverage comes across as either sport or soap opera. What’s all too frequently missing is what the content or consequences of these games are: cabinet shuffles garner more attention that the drab banalities of government reports, though it is really in the latter the true political “action” lies, largely because this is where one can easily witness the game of politics.

Another form of invisible censorship emerges out of the inevitable limits of time and space involved in reporting—that is, out of the structural limits of journalism. Bourdieu is particularly critical of television journalism and its abuse of its most precious commodity: time. Every sensational story, every image of car crashes and burning houses that passes for news takes away from the time spent on more important matters. Of course, the fact that television is a visual medium means that journalists are already attracted to the spectacular, sensational and dramatic. Yet what looks good isn’t always what’s essential or serious. By concentrating on some stories over others, by misusing or misallocating the limited time (and space) available for news, television enacts an implicit kind of censorship: “real” issues and stories are blocked from view.

The lessons here can be applied more generally. As we have emphasized repeatedly, social reality is not ever simply “given” to the senses, but is the result of competing ideas, visions and ideologies. It is only by interrogating the ways and sites through and at which this historically variable creation is transformed into a (supposedly) unalterable “common sense” that we can begin to see how power circulates in contemporary popular culture.

Other relevant Websites:

For a look at media concentration in Canada, you can visit: http://www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/background/mediaownership.html

For more information on CanWestGlobal Communications Corp.: http://www.canwestglobal.com

4. Representing Race on TV: The Sopranos

Responding to complaints from 138 Canadians, the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council (CBSC) released a ruling on April 9, 2003, concerning the appropriateness of the broadcast of first season of The Sopranos on CTV Television between September 17 and October 1, 2000. By broadcast television standards, The Sopranos is racy stuff: profanity-laden, excessively and sometimes graphically violent, and frequently containing depictions of nudity and sexual activity. But in addition to worries about its appropriateness for Canadian television for these reasons, the complainants also concerned the way in which The Sopranos depict Italians. The April 2003 CBSC ruling was in fact a follow-up to an initial decision on The Sopranos released in March 2001. A request was made to the CBSC to review its initial decision, focusing this time more directly on the “alleged negative ethnic stereotyping of Italians in the series, and the specific linking of Italians with mob characters.”

Television has long been accused for negatively portraying minorities—and justly so. Though there has been a slow development and improvement in the way in which minorities are depicted on television, it is still the case that, to a very large degree, minorities continue to be portrayed in stereotypical ways—when, that is, they are present on TV at all. For example, in the United States, while Hispanic-Americans continue to make up a larger and larger portion of the overall population, they make up an extremely small portion of the characters on prime-time television. When they do appear on TV, they often do so in token (the Hispanic friend or officemate of a main character) or stereotypical roles (drug dealers, gang members, cleaners and service workers).

Representation on television matters because TV is such a powerful tool in creating and reinforcing ideas about social reality, especially stereotypes about race, ethnicity and gender. However, the difficulty of getting representations “right,” that is, of correcting false stereotypes and introducing more balanced and fair characterizations of racial, ethnic and gendered identities, can be seen in the controversy that greeted the popular Cosby Show during its television run in the 1980s. On the one hand, a show about upper-middle class African-Americans confident in their unique cultural heritage goes well beyond popular 1970s “ghetto” sitcoms like Good Times and Sanford and Son . At the same time, many critics drew attention to the somewhat problematic message the show was sending to white and black audiences about the economic and social realities of African-American life in the United States: the fact that the Huxtables were well off could mislead audiences about the poverty and racism that are realities for many U.S. minority groups.

The outcry by some members of the community in Canada and the United States concerning the depiction of Italians in The Sopranos offers a particularly rich site for thinking about racial representation in popular media. First of all, unlike the examples we have pointed to above, the claim that Italian-Americans are minorities in Canada and the United States is not without problems. In many (if not most) cases, people of Italian descent have been assimilated into the larger body of “white” North American society; Italian-Americans and -Canadians do not face the same social and economic conditions that Hispanics and African-Americans and –Canadians do. This does not mean that they cannot be negatively stereotyped, but the stakes are certainly different and would have to be explored with this in mind.

Second, The Sopranos is itself extremely insightful about the way in which Italian-American identity is developed, defended and circulated in both negative and positive ways. The negative depiction of Italian-Americans in the media and the continual invention and reinvention of Italian-American identity forms one of the persistent themes of the show, coming to the surface in the episode “Christopher” (Episode 2, Season 4), which charts the reaction of the main characters to threats by Native Americans to shut down the annual Columbus Day Parade in Newark.

Finally, in the case of the Canadian decision, the arguments both for and against CTVs broadcast of The Sopranos contained in the CBSC decision make for a fascinating case study of the dilemmas of representation in contemporary society. For instance, in arguing for a review of the original decision, the complainant objected to “the lack of ethnic diversity on the CBSC panel.” In their response to this complaint, the National Chair of the CSBC responded that “the quality of the people (who do include ethnically diverse representatives) on the CSBC panel is such that they are easily able to distinguish between right and wrong without being members of the ‘wronged’ group.” It must be nice to be so confident about the ability to make correct judgments in complex cases like this one.

The April 9, 2003 ruling of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council can be found at:  http://www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Decisions/2003/db2003-112.htm

5. Food as Popular Culture

A surgeon cuts into a limb. Wielding his scalpel with care, he points out bone, ligaments and tendons to his eagerly attentive audience. A life-saving operation? No, a new cooking show in which the “patient” is a pig, recently slaughtered and about to be turned into juicy pork tenderloin.   Think it sounds weird?   So did broadcasters approached with the idea of a TV show, “Close to the Bone: Chefs and Surgeons,” in which surgeons would apply their skills in a novel direction: carving up animal carcasses to produce their favourite meat recipes.   In each episode, which also features a trip to the butcher to offer tips on how to select the best cuts of meat, the featured surgeon delivers an anatomy lesson, focusing on the differences between animals and humans.   In the words of orthopaedic surgeon Richard Hu, the show’s creator, Close to the Bone “brings different aspects of what people are interested in, together in a way that hasn’t been done before. . . it’s not a morbid Fear Factor kind of thing, it’s much more informative” (Millar).

Sounds pretty straightforward and, on the face of it, a logical idea: cutting into human flesh every day gives surgeons an understanding of the ins and outs of meat that rivals that of any butcher. It should be an easy sell, given the popularity of cooking shows, from Emeril Live to The Naked Chef to Nigella Bites. So why does it sound like an unlikely hit?   Why does it seem so, well, creepy? To answer that question we need to think about what it is about food shows that makes people want to watch them.  This is connected to a broader question about the role of food in popular culture. Has that role changed? If so, how might that change account for the recent media food obsession, fuelling the hopes of aspiring surgeon/chef/celebrities that a show like Close to the Bone might get a cut of the action?

Food and Culture

Food has always been part of culture. We eat not only to fuel our bodies, but also to satisfy more complicated social and emotional needs.   In the West, over the last century, those second, cultural aspects of eating have come to overshadow the biological aspect.   As recently as a hundred years ago, the tasks of procuring and producing food consumed a huge amount of human labour, with hunger an ever-present concern. However, beginning in the nineteenth century, food, along with other goods necessary for human survival (see User’s Guide, Chapter Five), increasingly turned into a commodity—

something people bought rather than produced for themselves.  

This had a lot to do with the Industrial Revolution, a period that saw the diversion of the economy away from agriculture towards industry, and the related development of new methods of food production.  Rising wages allowed people to buy the things they had once grown or produced themselves, while an increasingly sophisticated advertising industry stimulated tastes for new, more exotic fare. Flourishing trade with the colonies also played a key role in expanding the traditional British diet of “meat and two veg” to include fruits from the Americas, African grains and Indian curries.

Food as Commodity Fetish

In short, food became caught up in the process of commodity fetishism that Marx identified as a critical part of capitalism. To fetishize commodities is to imbue things we buy and sell with a kind of magical power. That power is not defined by their use value–e.g. their importance to our survival, nor by the labour that went into producing them (the cheapness of a cup of coffee, for example, doesn’t take into account the physical work of production and transportation, let alone more intangible costs such as the environmental impact of those processes). Instead, it is measured by the more abstract and unstable forces of the market.  

From one perspective, the liberation of food from the material realm–the realm of physical labour and biological need–seems like a good thing. This is particularly true in the West, where the project of civilization has been defined by the triumph of culture over nature.  Of course, the dream of liberation from material concerns like hunger is pretty much an illusion, one that only works for a tiny fraction of wealthy consumers.  The costs of forgetting the material stuff of food production and consumption are borne primarily by the poor, on whose labour and lives the over-abundance of cheap food for the wealthy few depends.

However there’s a cost to the consumer as well. Commodity fetishism works on the basis of a promise—that the stuff we buy can ultimately satisfy our needs. That promise is ultimately a false one: the economy can only continue to function by perpetuating the state of un-satisfaction that keeps us buying stuff, a contradiction that is nowhere more powerful than in the case of food.   The more food is commoditized–the more it is stripped of its material nature–the less satisfying it is. So we arrive at the paradox of being surrounded by food but still, weirdly, hungry.

Food Porn

That hunger has helped to fuel the explosion of cooking shows, gourmet magazines and even movies about food (Babette’s Feast, Like Water For Chocolate , Eat Drink, Man Woman) onto the pop culture scene.  The jokey term “food porn” accurately describes most of these texts, not just because eating and sex are both sensual pleasures, but because pornography is a kind of representation in which the subject is wrenched from the context of lived experience and effectively turned into a commodity, an object.   As with other kinds of pornography, food porn works only to stimulate the appetite, give it momentary satisfaction and inaugurate a quest for more and different pleasures. Thus, foodies who were once content with the occasional episode of Martha Stewart now depend on the cable fix of domestic goddess Nigella Lawson to satisfy their urges. Meanwhile, our hunger for the real, meaningful social and and physical engagement once associated with eating remains unsated.

The Bigger Picture

That isn’t to say that the current media obsession with food can all be lumped into the category of food porn.  Over the last decade, scares like BSE (mad-cow disease) and grisly stories of E. coli in hamburger have raised awareness about the consequences, for human and animal health and for the natural environment, of industrial methods of food production. More and more of us are starting to pay attention to where our food comes from, as reflected in the growing popularity of organic foods, vegetarian and vegan diets.  

However, these trends too, however, are ripe for exploitation by conversion into what could be called “soft core” food porn. As large food corporations like Loblaws seize on the marketing opportunities offered by more ethical production methods, labels like “organic” no longer work to prompt a critical awareness of food’s always messy origins.  Instead they stifle such awareness with reassuring images of purity, physical health and moral virtue.   Who’s going to pick up a bunch of dirt-covered carrots with the leaves still attached when you can get a nice, neat bag of already-cleaned ones, branded with the comforting seal of President’s Choice Organics?

So we’re back to the question of what to make of a show like Close to the Bone –still looking for a network to carry it—which promise to expose the bloody origins of that tasty bit of pork tenderloin on the cover of LCBO’s Food and Drink magazine. Will the weird analogy of surgery and slaughter satisfy some carnivorous rush, ushering in a whole new genre of hard-core food porn? Or might it prompt us to think about the inherent violence of meat consumption and, even more disturbingly, about our own status as animals?   Either way, it’s pretty certain to find an audience, given our insatiable appetites for new and bizarre additions to our TV dinner menus. And we can look forward to hearing that mouth-warming promise: "Keep your forceps, there’s pie!"

Sources:

Millar, Carey.   “Calgary Docs Cook Up New TV Show.”   Calgary Health Region Newslink.   http://www.calgaryhealthregion.ca/newslink/nl_071803cooks.html

Other relevant Websites:

Gayle MacDonald. “Nurse, Get Me a Fork.”  The Globe and Mail. 19 June, 2003.

http://globeandmail.workopolis.com/servlet/Content/
fasttrack/20030619/RVSURG? section=Healthcare

“Nigella Biography.” Channel4

http://www.channel4.com/life/microsites/N/nigella/biography.shtml

6. Does the Shoe Fit: Adbusters' “Unbrand America” Campaign

The magazine Adbusters (which bills itself as the “Journal for the Mental Environment”) has become well known for its virulent critique of the effects of rampant consumerism, as well as for its inventive anti-consumer campaigns, such as “Buy-Nothing Day,” which follows U.S. Thanksgiving and encourages consumers to examine their free-spending habits. On July 3, 2003, Adbuster s premiered a new campaign in a full-page ad in the New York Times. The ad featured an enormous, black spot, scrawled onto the page above a hand-written declaration obviously intended to stand in for U.S. Pledge of Allegiance. It reads:

              July 3, 2003

Because my country has sold its soul to corporate power

Because consumerism has become our national religion

Because we’ve forgotten the true meaning of freedom

And because patriotism now means agreeing with the president

I pledge to do my duty…and take my country back.

Adbuster s imagines the black spot being placed all over the urban landscape, especially and most prominently on top of corporate logos in order to blot them out. As with all of the campaigns carried out by Adbuster s, the aim is to directly challenge corporate power, consumerism, and its impact on the kinds of lives we live today.

Recently, Adbuster s upped the ante in its anti-corporate campaigning. As part of the black spot campaign, the magazine announced a “black spot sneaker,” “designed for only one thing: kicking Phil’s ass.” The “Phil” here is Phil Knight, C.E.O. of Nike and long time bête noire of Adbusters , which has taken the company and its president to task for its use of sweatshop labour in the developing world and the ubiquity of its “swoosh” logo on the consumer landscape. The black spot sneaker is black, with the anti-logo black spot emblazoned on the side in the place where one would usually find a Nike “swoosh.”  Such images and the anti-consumerist rhetoric that accompany them are familiar to readers of the magazine. In this case, however, Adbusters appears ready to go one step further: backed by a $500,000 ad budget, it is preparing to produce and sell the black spot sneaker in the consumer marketplace.

The paradoxes and dilemmas introduced by a move into the market by an anti-consumerist group should be evident enough. Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters, hopes that the sneaker will deal Nike a “death blow.” However, selling the sneakers as “a new kind of activist cool” seems to play into the circuits of contemporary consumerism as opposed to challenging them. The paradoxes multiply when one considers that the shoes will cost $50-$60/pair and be produced offshore, though not under sweatshop conditions. (Lasn suggests that “a lot of this ‘let’s do it locally’ is just trade union, old lefty talk.”)

The black spot sneaker campaign is an excellent example of the problems and possibilities that arise out of the politics of consumption (see User’s Guide, Chapter 5). To what degree is it possible to challenge consumerism by making use of it? Should activists avoid advertising, for example, even though the mass media effectively reaches a wide audience? These are just some of the questions that come up in the case of the “Unbrand America” campaign. It is also worth questioning the implicit nationalism of the campaign. Is consumerism only an American problem or is it wider than that? Shouldn’t we be wary of a pledge that calls on people to take back their nation? (See the discussion of nationalism in Chapter 7).

Besides the contents of its campaigns, what has always been interesting about the political projects undertaken by Adbusters is that the problems and limits of its project are almost always staged within its own magazine. The magazine is a glossy, beautifully designed object, a fact which often draws the wrath of its readers, who berate it for failing to be more effective in its use of recycled paper, or challenge its reliance on the ideology of contemporary design even as it challenges this ideology. The letter section in each and every issue is full of condemnations of the magazine’s purported politics (e.g., “Your ‘revolutionary’ viewpoints and calls to action are nothing more than a kind of catharsis, letting us know that ‘someone feels like me’” [Adbusters no. 38]). This openness to criticism is perhaps the most political part of Adbusters. Unlike corporations, Adbusters is willing to take negative criticism along with kudos; in doing so, it expands considerably the discussion about and around consumerism.

As part of its “Unbrand America” campaign, Adbusters took a poll of the twelve worst corporations. According to its readers, the “dirty dozen” included companies like McDonald’s, ExxonMobil, Nike, WalMart, Disney, and Coca Cola. Printed beside this list on the “Unbrand America” website is a selection of letters that criticize the selected “dirty dozen” in a way that effectively criticizes the general focus of Adbusters' political actions as well. The letters point to a consumer “tunnel vision” even in the challenge to the world wrought by consumerism. The dirty dozen is described as “the ‘hip’ visible corporations you egg during an anti-globalization rally”—corporations that are visible due to their presence in shopping malls and on street corners. The letter writers point out, however, that the impact of these companies pale in comparison to (for example) defense industry giants (Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, etc.) and chemical and biotechnology corporations (Haliburton, Cargill, Dow, Archer Daniel Midlands, etc.). These are the true “dirty” corporations, even if they don’t advertise in prime time or have a space in the mall next to Gap.

The ultimate impact of the black spot shoe might be best measured in terms of the discussion and debate it produces, as much as in its own ultimately limited and problematic political impact. At an initial product run of 10,000 pairs, they are sure to become hot items for activists and collectors alike.

Information on Adbusters can be found at: http: www.adbusters.org . The black spot sneaker can found at www.blackspotsneaker.org , while the home page for the “Unbrand America” campaign is: www.unbrandamerica.org

Sources:

All quotations are from the Websites listed above, or from Martin Patriquin, “The running shoe fits for AdBusters: Vancouver anti-consumption magazine to match Nike stride for stride,” Globe and Mail, August 20, 2003: B9.

7. May the Force Be With You: Pop Culture and Religion

In the 2001 census, 20,000 Canadians identified their religion as “Jedi” (Anthony).  Those identifying as Protestants declined by 773,000, and there was a big jump in the number of those who declared no religious affiliation. Priests and pundits were quick to define the meaning of this new trend: for some, the suggestion that Luke Skywalker might be emerging as a rival to Christ was alarming evidence of the death of spirituality at the hands of popular culture. Others argued that the swelling ranks of Star Wars fans testified to the genuine strength of the Force as a moral creed for contemporary society. Still others argued that the whole Jedi thing was a hugely successful joke, started by a guy in Australia as a protest against the census-taking process.  

Assuming it’s more than just a scam, the apparent flourishing of Jedi-ism raises interesting questions about the relationship between popular culture and religion, two things that, on the surface, would seem to be not just unrelated but entirely at odds with one another: the ephemeral and commercial vs. the eternal and the spiritual.  

Pop Culture and Protestantism

To see the connections between these seemingly disparate parts of culture, it’s useful to take a step back—both in time and focus—to look at how both evolved in the context of other social, economic and technological developments. Christianity in particular is deeply entwined with pop culture, a relationship that can be traced to the invention of mechanical type in the sixteenth century, and the subsequent flourishing of print capitalism. Printed for the first time in vernacular, or the spoken language of the people, instead of Latin or Greek, the Bible became the first bestseller, helping to give birth to both media culture and the democratization of religion. Once the sacred possession of the church hierarchy, the word of God was now available and comprehensible to the masses.  

The relationship between Christianity and pop culture goes deeper than this, as sociologist Max Weber showed in his study of the connections between Puritanism and capitalism in nineteenth-century America. The belief structure that underlies capitalism works in sync with such Puritan tenets as the work ethic and an emphasis on individual self-improvement. These values proved easy to hijack by the forces of consumerism, so that throughout the nineteenth century, the focus in Christianity began gradually to shift away from the afterlife to this life. At the same time, consumption came to be seen as somehow aligned with patriotic and even spiritual duty: the health of the Kingdom of God was reflected in the wealth of his kingdom on earth, just as the accumulation of individual wealth was seen as a reflection of individual virtue.  

Of course not all religion—and not all parts of Christianity—in nineteenth century America developed in lock-step with industrial capitalism. Industrialization also spurred the politicization of religion, with churches taking a lead in protests against economic inequality, the battle for universal suffrage (voting rights), the abolition of slavery and, eventually, civil rights. Many Christians also rallied against the burgeoning business of pop culture. Dime-store novels, magazines and, by century’s end, movies, weren’t just morally dodgy; they also represented the thin edge of a commercial wedge that threatened to submerge spirituality in a tide of money and consumer goods.

Religion and Contemporary Pop Culture

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the relationship between religion and popular culture has become more tangled, and more contradictory.  During the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, the Cold War ideology that saw the world divided into forces of good (capitalism) and evil (communism), played a huge role in shaping pop culture—think James Bond—as well as nurturing the kind of militaristic Christianity that continues to emanate from the White House today.  

At the same time, many Christians, along with Jews, Muslims and other religious groups, have also taken a leading role in protests against war, economic globalization, and the spread of consumerism. These religious groups in some ways have less in common with more conservative members of their own faiths than they do with the would-be Jedi—the scores of mostly young people who are turning away from the religions of their parents towards a more grassroots, do-it-yourself approach to faith.  

Not all spiritual seekers are taking up light sabres, however. Along with the decline in Christianity, Canadian census data shows an increase in members of Eastern religions such as Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. This change reflects not just patterns of immigration, but also changing beliefs amongst Westerners, many of whom express discomfort with Christianity’s evangelical aspects and its sometimes close alliance with forms of extreme social and economic conservatism. Of course it doesn’t hurt that celebrities from Madonna to Sharon Stone are touting the benefits of ashrams and Buddhist meditation.

The Spirit of Celebrity

What’s clear is that spirituality has not disappeared: indeed, in the supposedly secular United States, religion has never been a more potent force—it’s just morphed into the culture of celebrity. This shift is evident in the uncanny parallels between two of the most powerful influences on global culture today: Oprah Winfrey, TV star and guru of consumer culture who preaches her own brand of spirituality, and the Dalai Lama, leader of a major world religion who also appears in ads for Apple™ computers. What these figures—and their followers—have in common is their adherence to some aspects of traditional religion, such as a concern for peace and social justice, along with a new emphasis on the power and responsibility of the individual, a belief that happens to fit pretty comfortably with the values of a consumer society.  

Besides being infused with the cult of celebrity, religion in North America is also shaped by the technology of pop culture. While community remains an important part of spiritual life, increasingly people are turning to the Internet to find that community. Websites like Beliefnet offer a smorgasbord of spiritual traditions, along with prayer groups and chat rooms where users can pick and choose bits of inspiration that best fit their lifestyle.  

More traditional forms of media have also served as vehicles for religion. Books in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ paperback series Left Behind , based on the Apocalypse, regularly make the New York Times bestseller list, and are now being turned into equally successful films. The first two in the series, Left Behind and Left Behind II: Tribulation together grossed more than $130 million (U.S.) in box-office and video sales (MacDonald R1).   Meanwhile, Christian and Muslim rockers are giving secular pop a run for its money in concert and CD sales, and TV shows like Touched by an Angel , 7 th Heaven and, new this season, Joan of Arcadia , occupy comfortable slots in prime time.       

The Return of the Jedi

So, surveying all these trends, what can we predict about the future of Obi-Wan Kenobi as a spiritual leader? Based on the evidence, we can say with some certainty that the cult of the Jedi won’t be centralized; the creative forces of Lucasfilm will be constantly undermined by creative adaptation. New Empires will rise, and the relationship between forces of Dark and Light will get increasingly tangled. . .

Nutty speculations aside, the sci-fi mythology of Star Wars may well help its followers deal with murky questions of technology, cyborgs, and environmental problems, just as older religions have served as battleground over the rights of racial minorities, women and homosexuals.  Just as the faith and questioning of traditional religionists has always exceeded their official institutional containers, the imaginative reach of the Force will outlive the screen, DVD and collectible merchandise of Star Wars .

Sources:

Anthony, Lorrayne. “Jedis Have Some Fun With Statistics Canada.” The Globe and Mail 14 May 2003: A4.

MacDonald, Gayle.  “Lights, Camera, Apocalypse!”  The Globe and Mail 19 July 2003: R1, R10.

Weber, Max.  The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons.  London: Routledge, 2001.

See also:

www.beliefnet.com

8: The Myth of the Liberal Media

Over the past twenty-five years (since, at the very least, the election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. President in 1980), criticisms of the inherently “liberal” or “left-wing” bias of the North American media have become commonplace. In Canada, this is a criticism that has been voiced by political parties, business groups, and citizens alike against the news coverage provided by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Since the CBC is funded (at least in part) by the Canadian federal government, there are expectations that it will provide “fair” and “balanced” coverage of news events around the world. Some groups, such as the Canadian Alliance and the Fraser Institute (a B.C.-based economic think tank), have regularly derided the CBC and other Canadian media outlets either for (in their opinion) not telling it like it is, or failing to explore all sides to news stories. Criticisms of the liberal tilt of the media are even more common in the United States, where conservative politicians and lobby groups routinely attack what they see as the entrenched biases of the “mainstream media.”

Is the mainstream media in North America really “liberal” and “left wing”? Though these are themselves complex, contested terms that resist easy definition, it might be helpful to briefly discuss what they have come to imply in contemporary public discourse. The term “liberal” means something very different than it did when it first appeared in political philosophy or what is represented by the policies of the Liberal Party of Canada. In public discourse today, liberal means (for some) a philosophy that insists on considerable individual freedom (freedom of religion, sexual preference, etc.) combined with an active government that aims to smooth out social and economic disparities through the provision of high levels of social services, education, and so on.

Those who complain about the “liberal” media tend to have a different view of what being a “liberal” means. For conservatives (which is roughly the opposite of liberal—though in Canada, the Liberals are conservatives, too!), liberals are exceedingly permissive and wanton in their view of what is socially permissible, while their social agenda is an example of “big government” meddling in the lives (and freedoms) of individuals. Conservatives emphasize personal freedom, too, though they tend to emphasize complete and unfettered economic freedom as opposed to (for instance) the freedom of gay and lesbian couples to marry. The activities of the government should in their opinion be limited to smoothing the way for maximal economic activity as opposed to engaging in “social engineering” through affirmative action and other social programs.

This is a perhaps an overly stark characterization of the divide between “liberal” (left wing) and “conservative” (right wing) ideologies. Nevertheless, it allows us to think about the claims made regarding the media’s liberal slant. Built into the worry about the inherent biases of the media is a claim about the media’s power in society: since it is the means by which most of us learn about society, what is shown in the media has a determinate effect on the shape of society.

So if the media has a liberal slant, we’d expect our political system to consist of high-levels of government involvement in society, and maybe even the existence of such things as free university education, adequate levels of support for child care and welfare, and a strong policy on the environment. But in both Canada and (especially) the United States, the opposite seems to be the case: over the past twenty years, and even more so over the past decade, the government has slashed social spending and taxes (especially corporate taxes), with the result being that university students have experienced both higher university tuition fees and bigger class sizes and fewer student services. The same is true for almost every other sector of government activity. Which means that either the media doesn’t have the powers that we believe it has to shape public opinion, or the media isn’t liberal at all. So why, then, does there exist this worry about the liberal biases of the media?

As with much of what passes for public discourse, the repeated cries about the liberal character of the media is really a rhetorical, political ploy that has been so effective to have become accepted by many as reality. The aim of these cries, which seems to be about the need for a more balanced approach to news coverage, is in fact to shrink “still further—to the point of oblivion—the space for critical analysis in journalism” (McChesney and Foster). In other words, the reality of the situation is that far from being tilted towards the liberal side of the spectrum, the media has a tendency to reinforce a conservative view of the world: the claims to the contrary are meant to push media representations—and so our sense of acceptable ways of understanding society—further and further to the right.

There are a whole host of problems with claims about the “liberal” bias of the media that point to the politics behind these claims. First, it is hard to reconcile claims about (for instance) the media’s anti-corporate bias with the fact that virtually all forms of media in North America are themselves businesses, and are in fact often part of major corporations with vested interests in the political system. North American newspapers all carry a daily business section—but none has a “Report on Labour.” Second, what often “counts” as news are statements by official sources and those in power; these are almost never those who want to pursue or legitimize a true liberal agenda. Third, as the limited range of mainstream media coverage of resistance to the War in Iraq and the War on Terrorism has made clear, there are certain accepted truths of “how the world works” that the media seems unable to move beyond or outside of. In the United States, there was almost no question raised about the very right of the United States to invade a foreign country for its own purposes; when the Canadian government refused to participate in war effort, the supposedly liberal media in the U.S. featured prominent politicians and broadcasters who saw fit to label Canada as a neo-communist country (“Soviet Canuckistan”). Even mild dissent is often greeted with wildly over-the-top rhetoric.

Criticisms of the media’s liberal bias rely on the public’s belief in the journalist’s commitment to fairness and objectivity. Those who voice this complaint pretend to be worried about upholding this commitment; in truth, they want to eliminate it in order to be certain that the news serves and reflects their view of the world. (For a recent, extended discussion of this issue, see the McChesney and Foster article listed in Sources below.)

In one of his recent columns in the National Post , Robert Fulford makes the claim that the CBC, the BBC, and National Public Radio in the United States all show evidence of “liberal bias.” It is interesting to read Fulford’s claims against some of the articles contained in the same section of the August 9 th Post , which include (in typical Post fashion) an out-and-out attack on the Liberal government for failing to do anything to help Saudi captive Bill Sampson, a long and sympathetic account of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s recent struggles, and a story on a website that posts a “Republican Babe of the Week!”).

Sources:

McChesney, Robert W., and Foster, John Bellamy. “The ‘Left-Wing’ Media?” Monthly Review 55.2 (June 2003). Available on-line at: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0603editr.htm

Fulford, Robert. “The liberal media: a study in groupthink.” National Post. 9 August, 2002: A18.