Modern advertising, like medieval plumbing, owes its continued existence to the fact that people will get used to anything if it happens often enough. There is almost no difference, whether psychological or aesthetic, between having one’s viewing interrupted by a bonbon of venality and having to cross the road to avoid being drenched by a pail of eau d’plague, slung out of a second floor window. Both varieties of slop are noisome, and attract diseases of body and mind while crippling any progression towards an adult, sophisticated public space. And yet advertising seems destined to last at least as long as aerial ballistic sewerage disposal did in the Middle Ages.
When ghastliness is tolerated, or at the very least ignored, more than stoicism is at work. Which is why, when one considers our collective surrender to those messages that are injected through rusty and blunt needles directly into our eyeballs, hundreds of times a day, we might have to confess to a certain numbness that has taken over some of our critical senses, as if all the shrieking and promises and puerile lies have chafed against our souls for so long that a callus has formed.
But every now and then one’s callus peels off, to leave one pink and raw and clear-eyed, to be appalled anew. Sometimes it is a particularly evil sentiment, couched in the materialistic tropes that now pass for culture in this country. Sometimes it is a staggeringly stupid reaction by the international media to a staggeringly stupid event. But this week it was both.
Of course, the callus had been softening for a while. Ford had done its part, re-airing its saccharine little tale of a young father spending an enormous amount of time and money to build his unborn son a rugby field. Why? Because boys play rugby and wear blue and are good at things, and girls play nicely and wear pink and aren’t good at very much except cooking and pushing out hiers who will play rugby and drive Fords.
Estée Lauder and Gwyneth Paltrow, too, had helped pick at the edges. To see the Wasp Queen drifting on a white yacht through the Hamptons with a smug half-smile on her kisser is one thing; but to have her singing Summertime attests to creative minds long lost to the dark side. Yes, sweet child, your daddy’s rich and your momma’s good looking, but even better than that, the fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high, so all them coons who first sang this song will be off toiling and unavailable to spell out a few home truths about cultural sensitivity.
It was, however, the combination of advertising and public comment — headlined as ‘news”, although this title is almost meaningless in the age of the tabloid — that did the trick this time. The ads were bad, but the earnest face of the newsreader was worse: Britney Spears had shaved her head, and the curtain in the temple had rent in twain. One should be used to the media’s lobotomising effect by now, but nonetheless it was deeply depressing to realise that, thanks to the Information Age and the digital winged monkeys that do its bidding, far more people now know that the grand dame of trailer-park lust has had a haircut than know how to breathe with their mouths shut.
It could have been worse, of course. Britney could have decided to have an inch taken off the bottom and left it at that, deflecting none of the avalanche of prose that has followed the untimely death — or should that be puncture? — of one Anna Nicole Smith.
It was understandable that American thinkers would feel obliged to scribble something about the Texan’s end: no writer is unmoved when a figure so architectural — nay, geological — comes crashing down, and on the Rushmoresque peaks of American B-grade celebrity, Smith’s bust was one of the biggest. But their intellectual depth and range has been truly startling, and not a little disturbing. Smith, it seems, was all things to all Americans, at least to those Americans who write donnish columns in august publications with titles like The Minuteman and Nuke Them Ay-rabs While Ye Can Still Count On The Jew Lobby.
The undressing of the former centrefold model was elegant, even poignant, but ultimately even these suave scribes fumbled with teenaged fingers at the bra-catch. Smith, they agreed, represented the American Dream, a gold-digging narcissistic child, nothing but a shining façade that dazzled and appalled, like a casino rising up out of the desert sagebrush. But then the slip, and a bad one: Anna, they said, was beautiful. Not Marilyn-beautiful, but beautiful nonetheless.
It was compelling evidence that Americans have transcended their evolutionary roles. Had they been a few thousand years closer to their roots, they might have recognised Anna’s standard expression, that expression they mistook for beauty. They might have known that when a predator, even a blonde one, raises her top lip to show her teeth, and narrows her eyes until they are gleaming slits, she is not smiling. She is snarling, and you need to start running.
But then why would they know that? Why would any of us run, numbed and callused as we are? The living is, after all, easy, and the cotton is high —