FOX News blowhard Glenn Beck is not the first person most of us would expect to wax poetic about simple living. But there he was last week, fighting back tears as he recalled a “simpler time.” Beck played a couple of video clips he felt summed up those halcyon days. What do you suppose the iconic images were — old home movies, perhaps? Scenes of birthdays, graduations, and vacations with the people we love?
They were TV commercials.
Ersatz life
I’d like to think Beck’s teary homage to Coca-Cola’s Seventies-era Mean Joe Green commercial and Kodak’s Times of Your Life campaign was just a clumsy rip-off of Don Draper’s brilliant Kodak moment on the series Mad Men (minus the brilliance).
Whether or not this is the case, Beck’s piece takes Consumerism to a place even Don Draper couldn’t have imagined. The Draper character is attempting to move people to a purchase decision by exploiting their most emotional memories. Glenn Beck has completely bypassed this process, replacing personal memories with pure advertising.
Get real
While Beck’s rhetorical device seems like quite a leap, he’s just taking advertising to its logical end. Most ads are written to stir feelings. An automaker wants you to imagine how being seen in their car would make you feel; Ralph Loren wants you to feel skinny and fashionable; a mortgage company wants you to feel like a good provider to your family. So when Beck remembers how the Good Ole Days made him feel and pulls out a couple of ads instead of personal experience, he’s not pushing something on society. He’s reflecting it.
Advertising isn’t inherently evil. It can inform or entertain. But we can’t allow it to manipulate us into filling our need for family, community, and purpose with buying things. This is the stuff of mental illness.
As is the failure to differentiate reality from the gossamer half-life of electronic media. Ultimately, of course, these pixels and flickering images and carefully polished messages should have no power over us. Because we have their antidote: reason, and a finger on the OFF button.
