Oct. 23, 2020
By Hugh Iglarsh
Link:https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/23/advertising-vs-democracy-an-interview-with-jean-kilbourne/
There it is, on
page 56 of Jean Kilbourne’s book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We
Think and Feel: the graphic that stopped me cold and made me
realize just how prophetic was her work (originally published in hardcover in
1999 as Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight
the Addictive Power of Advertising). It was an ad for a German
marketing firm, contained within a decades-old issue of the trade journal Advertising
Age. Beneath a corporate cornucopia of All-American legacy brands
and products – Levi’s, Pepsi, Camel cigarettes, a Chiquita banana, a Big Mac,
etc. – was the caption, “Let’s make America great again.”
With its depiction of American “greatness” as a collage of
heavily advertised commodities, the ad would have seemed crass and stupid when
it first appeared, but hardly remarkable. Now, of course, that cluster of words
and pictures glitters with irony and implication. The caption of this homage to
consumerism suggests a link between the slick hucksterism of the ad business
and the fanatical nationalism of the MAGA cult. Is the connection real? If so,
how does the Trump phenomenon – that cheesy mash-up of reality TV and Triumph
of the Will – relate to the marketing and PR that saturate
American culture and consciousness? Is Trump’s ugly but compelling political
spectacle, which hogs the media foreground, an outgrowth of the inescapable,
desensitizing background noise that is advertising?
