The
Age of LiesThe
Age of LiesWed 2/04/2009 1:42 pm. I often have vague fantasies of eloquently skewering with my rapier denunciations some offensive liberal totally-impartial gas-bag carpet-bagging cockroach — but the fantasies always occur on a TV show! To the riotous acclaim of a vast audience!
But the audience has gone; the TV shows are bankrupt. ... I saw in the NY Post that the Times is going to print ads on the front page. ... But who will know? ... Or if Katie Couric does a striptease before the commercial break? ... It’s so cruel; even as these wretched lying thieves sink into the dust from which we all come, there will be no witness!
Well, of course, there’s still me; and thou, my treasured audience member. ... And I’m happy-enough at least; every sling ’n’ arrow in the liberal-media axis cheers me immensely. ... But the upcoming generations will, as usual, never understand what we’re whining about, and wonder why the heck we bothered reading and viewing all this tripe anyway, huh?
I don’t consume much old media; can’t even stand Limbaugh anymore. ... But once, long ago, the primal newspaper crawled from the swamp and gave amusement to the people: news, a fabulous substance containing events from far away! ... Liberal media morons imagine that because it was good, it prevailed. ... But no; actually, there were greedy free market merchants wishing to sway the weak minds of the multitudes, and thus news came to be financed by advertising.
Advertising means, approximately, lying. ... With elaboration, to be sure; not just verbal falsehoods, but at least pictures. ... While it is true that some advertising is not false, nevertheless most advertising is intentionally deceptive in some way or other.
H.G. Wells’ Tono Bongay appeared in 1909, which we can regard roughly as the beginning of the Age of Lies. ... Certainly systematic advertising was going on long before that, but Wells and others perceived those years as the beginning of large-scale commercial exploitation of the technique: the trademarks, illustrations, slogans, etc., repeated ad nauseum as widely as possible, that we have come to regard as just the normal way business is done....
Wells was a good socialist and cursed the capitalists for polluting the beautiful world with their ugly advertising, initiating a theme that continues to this day amongst the politically demented. ... And for a while, Big Biz managed to hold on to the golden genie, leaving politics to whimper in the cold. ... But not for very long. ... I’ve been reading a ’20s history of the world written by obvious happy liberals, and they are so pleased to report how progressive Teddy Roosevelt was! One of the really progressive things he did was organize a Mississippi river “governor’s tour”, where numerous governors showed-up, each in its own boat, and “inspected” the river, ascertaining its problems and opportunities, hopes and dreams, all gathering at some happy locale in their boats together to chat at last and come to important conclusions after reasoned and thoughtful debate. ... That is, Teddy invented the photo-op! ... What a genius! And the only difference from advertising is, it’s paid-for with your taxes! ... So the newspaper can print pretend news! To fill-in the blank spots between the private-sector advertising, always a problem....
The twentieth century saw endless elaboration of this kind of idiotic activity, plus political appropriation of more traditional advertising techniques — not of course for a moment inhibiting political swine from high moral complaints against the evil advertisers, either the Republicans or the whole tribe, the two generally equated in liberal orthodoxy (Selling of the President etc.). ... But I noticed at a relatively early age — well, who didn’t? — that photo-op “events” are really really boring — just like advertising, eh?...
The elderly and romantically liberal may retain a lingering tolerance for obvious photo-op-style bogosities, perhaps yearning for the days when wire photos were new and wondrous. ... Which, of course, they were, once. ... Actually, even printed advertising notices on the side of buildings were probably pretty cool, once. ... Or even now and then....
Through the world wars and the depression, the cold war, and until the end of the twentieth century, large parts of at least developed economies were fueled by advertising. ... Worry not your soul about tottering Moore’s law and/or your favorite political falling-sky theory; the engine of commerce and politics, the systematic lying of advertising — it’s taking a hike!
It’s the web, of course. Everyone knows what’s happened; but many of us, either through wishful thinking or old-fashioned genuine stupidity, imagine that advertising on the web will be just like TV, only a little different....
But no; old-fashioned advertising needs a captive audience. That’s why it’s so annoying. Or at least, the genuine 200 proof kind, the kind that works, that is, lying. ... “Advertising” on the web will sink into a harmless fluffery which hardly has much impact or even, gasp, degenerate into just providing information about products. ... The point is, to convince young men that buying a particular car will endear them to tastefully-underdressed young women, you must run the ad over and over, everywhere, to influence their tiny brains. ... Even on cable, you can still do that, in a way, although it’s obviously harder....
But saturation advertising is just hopeless on the web. ... Because it is annoying; it’s always been that way — or at least for a hundred years or so — but we put up with it, to see the stupid movie, to see the news, to utilize the street with the advertising sign.
But there are a million movies on the web; a million streets; and the news just spurts out of the thing. ... The web can’t torture you with boring stupid lying advertising, because people just go somewhere else, of course. Particularly young people who don’t know any better.
The Lore of the Age of Lies would be incomplete without noting how the commission of advertising always seems to be accompanied by attempts to manipulate things so people can’t avoid being advertised at. And successful monopolistic practices of this kind inevitably begin with good solid government bribes — oh, excuse me, legislation. ... TV broadcasting, where every little region had a small number of stations, so that it was eminently feasible for large corporations to relentlessly repeat advertising on all of them, is a wonderful example of thoughtful federal regulation of giant immensely-wealthy corporations. ... The newspapers, obviously finished in the post-war TV era, had their lifespans extended decades by pro-newspaper-monopoly legislation. ... Radio, of course, was a lost cause, which is how Rock ’n’ Roll — and Rush Limbaugh — wound up there....
Google has already developed a money-making model for “advertising” but it’s really not the old rot-gut at all; it’s something new and different. They realized what I did years later: you can’t pester people with Web advertising, because they just go away. Many sites on the web continue to ignore this — and disappear into the darkness regularly — largely because they want to; they can’t stand the idea that annoying people and lying to them doesn’t work anymore. ... But Google “ads” are small bits of information that appear on their search results page; they don’t pop-up or take over your browser and they’re easy to ignore. I gather the “profit” side of this arrangement is that this kind of advertising can be very cheap — because the web is so cheap — compared to the traditional abuse-and-badger route. ... But there is an entire new industry that intensely thinks about this stuff; and while some try to claim this business has continuity with traditional lying-scum advertising, it doesn’t. And when it does, the web’ll flush it. ... I hope....
