The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Their New Henchmen
ZNet Commentary

by Doug Dowd

The first leap was in the 1890s, with the invention of the automobile, and its fabulous contribution to global warming; soon after, in the 1920s, TV was invented, which, when finally made available after World War II, was invaluable in amputating us from our humanity and anaesthetizing us. But that was not enough to provide the nails for our coffin; so our best and brightest invented nukes. Thus was completed the Unholy Family of our time: If global warming (and its siblings) don’t get us, the nukes will. But neither of those calamities could occur without the helping hand of the Boob Tube.

Taken separately, no one of that monstrous three could turn the trick; it is the ways in which they interact that has given apocalypse its big boost. If current tendencies persist or, more likely, accelerate — the Big A could have its day in this century; could even come in your lifetime if you’re not too old.

In a society very different from ours, any one of the three might be safely absorbed; but not in this one. A sane society would produce goods and services to meet human and social and environmental needs, not for you know what. And instead of exacerbating national, “racial,” ethnic, and other rivalries, that society would do whatever was necessary to reduce them.

Item: the automobile. It could be a convenient and pleasant means of personal transportation, supplementing public transport, rentable for this or that occasion: moving, vacations, picnics, etc. (Years ago, Chicago city government toyed with such a plan, cars to be made available through, in effect, [un]parking meters. Crazy, man.) Item: TV (and film) could be an excellent source of inexpensive good entertainment and education , but of course its use has depended upon its — and its sponsors’ — profitability (which meant its use awaited post-World War II, of which more below). The much cheaper radio was invented for and used only by the military through World War I; it came into popular use in the 1920s, twinned with infant consumerism — advertising mostly cigarettes, soap, cornflakes, toothpaste — and cars. But radio does not mesmerize, and so lacks the effectiveness and toxicity of TV.

And nukes? Whether for military or peaceful purposes, we not only could but very much should have gotten along without nukes, forever. The timing and reasons for their first use against the Japanese tell us that governments possessing them cannot be trusted not to use them. And who’d like to bet that Chernobyl and Three Mile Island will never happen again? Nukes have been the most costly and dangerous junk ever produced, in a world whose instabilities would be terrifying even if we were back with only rifles and Gatling guns.

So how does the trio interact? (As if you didn’t know.) First, cars, then TV, then nukes. When the auto was first produced, it was as a rich man’s toy, costing (in today’s dollars) $100,000 minimum: Great Gatsby stuff. As the new century began, there were many hundreds of producers, all producing elegant cars. Henry Ford brought an end to that in 1908, with the mass production of his “Model T” — at $250 ea. (about $5000 now). Ole Henry used to say “You can have any model you want, as long as it’s the “T,” in any color, as long as it’s black.”

The “T” was produced for farmers: essentially a pickup truck, with a high axle for the non- or dirt roads. Henry kept that up until 1926 (when he brought on the Model A), making a fortune for himself while transforminig the industry. The latter had slimmed down to a couple of dozen companies as the 1920s began (less than 10 by 1930), providing multiple models (2-door, 4-door, roadsters) and colors aimed at an upper middle class market; and Henry had to adapt to that.

Despite all, the market was saturated already by 1923. Then GM (a merger of Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac) reshaped the industry into what it has been ever since (and always more so): not just different models (50–100 for every make), but an annual model change (designed to require costly repairs every three years: “deliberate obsolescence,” the industry calls it), mucho advertising, and the beginnings of consumer credit (GM with its own credit company: GMAC). Bingo! consumerism had squealed its way into our lives — not just with autos, but, as noted above, a whole range of durable and non-durable consumer goods — toasters and soap and cornflakes and toothpaste and, most dramatically, cigarettes — with billboard, newspaper and magazine and radio campaigns, the most inventive and successful of which was “Reach for Lucky Instead of a Sweet.” (The wife of its guiding genius, Edward L. Bernays [Freud’s nephew!], died of lung cancer).

Taking only those developments of the 1920s, advertising had become a business essential to activate consumers to buy products in response to one or another irrational fear or hope...or something, and to borrow to do so. Closely associated with that development was the beginning of the masssive wastefulness (and its associated real and money costs and prices) now characterizing all “modern” economies.

Item: Using the industry’s own data, 2 percent of a $2 tube of toothpaste is attributable to its ingredients and production; the rest of it is packaging, advertising and profits.

Item: before a congressional committee in 1939 (already!) GM stated that the production costs of a $950 car were $150; the rest was for PAP (packaging, advertising and profits). And now we have SUVs, more dysfunctional, wasteful and dangerous than anything earlier and — what luck! — three-to-four times more profitable than regular models. That’s progress — and more than that: in a monologue on cars already in the early 60s, Mort Sahl asked his audience, “Well, how else are ya gonna get sexual satisfaction?”.

Withal, there was that depression of the 1930s. But the numerous stimuli of World War II (including the destruction of all other industrial economies) and the ensuing “Cold War Liberalism” gave access to consumer goods for the great majority of the population: unions were strong, income inequalities narrowed, and credit cards for one and all were being stamped out.

And every household was either watching the tube or a film, and getting the same fare from both, if with somewhat different (but always joining) techniques. Some will remember that banal and soporific as most entertainment was in the 50s and 60s, there were more than a few solid entertainment shows by comparison with today, as was also true of news and educational programs. Back in those days, that an average family might spend as much as 2–3 hours a day glued to the tube was seen as a matter for concern; recently, the average was 6 hours a day for youngsters (in 40 countries)  — which says nothing about films and Nintendos and...

The intended impact of TV is presumably to sell products, any old products; its larger impact, intended or not, has been to render consumption the main activity of the citizenry, and, in doing so, to reduce other elements of our lives to the realm of after thoughts, at best. That is an exaggeration for some; for most, it is probably an understatement. Something of the same may be said of films: their aim was to sell seats, but it has been Hollywood’s always mounting conviction that the best way to sell tickets is to pander to the adolescent in us; with current film (and TV) technology, that is easy to do. And it makes everything else harder to be done, seen or heard.

A people whose main yearnings are for constant buying under the spur of irrational impulses and that increasingly seeks and finds infantilizing entertainment will be undone by today’s challenges — whether involving personal or social relationships, or those entailing social and military viiolence. The ongoing dilution and distortion of reality is clearest in the ways in which violence is treated in the entertainment world: lots of blood and gore, very good guys vs. very bad guys, fun and games, no pain. The learning processes thus involved effectively act as a roadblock for the intricate processes of achieving adulthood, whether as regards economic, military, emotional or other vital aspects of our lives.

Mind numbing and flattening socialization tendencies would be worrisome enough in times of social ease; such times do not exist now, nor will they in any foreseeable future. What we do face, instead, is an intensification of the problems now facing us at home and abroad, always more complicated and threatening developments within and betrween nations, whether economic, environmental, racial or military or, as is common, these in combination. The resolution of always more demanding problems such as those in the Middle East or of global warming would be difficult with the clearest minds at work, representing well-informed and conscientious citizenries. The mere mention of such matters with today’s ill-informed and consumeristic citizenries in mind — most particularly ours, the most potent nation of all  — is, to say the least, unnerving.

As dire as the relevant conditions elsewhere are, here they are at their most formidable: the interaction of autos and TV is such that our cultivated passion for autos (etc.) is in direct competition with the quite clear need not only to tame autos (unleaded gas, emission controls, etc.) but to decrease their production, sale and use. Meanwhile, the auto industry publicly affirms that it must increase its annual sales by 3 percent, as TV successfully induces us to buy more and larger cars. And what is true of autos is true of a long list of other environmentally dangerous products and plain junk: mass wastefulness, much of it destructive, in a world where billions live on or over the edge of desperation.

The other side of that dirty coin is political, where corruption rules. TV’s virtual dominance of political “discourse,” whether day-to-day or in election campaigns, has risen, as other sources of information and understanding have shriveled. Many years ago, Jerry Mander warned us (in his Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television) that the technology of TV transmission affected the attention span so as to require that “scenes” change every few seconds, and what that meant: it meant, among other things, the sound byte as communication. So, for these (and, of course, other equally ominous) reasons the main issues of the day are left to bottom-feeding politicians speaking their lines at the beck and call of bottom line giant corporations. Some day, in the midst of an international conflict, some “leader” will deem it reasonable to use his nukes — either because the opponent presumably has — or does not have — nukes. And then?

The world would be too tragic and too dangerous even if none of the foregoing were so. As things are now, however, and even more as they are tending, the Four Horsemen and their Three Henchmen could soon be knocking at our door (or battering it down)...

Writing a century or so ago, as our three villains were just making their entrance, Thorstein Veblen was completing his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and his Theory of Business Enterprise (1904). The first explored our society’s “pecuniary culture,” the second analyzed the always more enfolding relationships between business ways and means and their impact on on the totality of our lives.

Remarkably, he clearly anticipated the 20th century evolution of giant business and its connections with the always expanding empire of the USA, and how those two developments would require and create a media world suited to their needs — creating and feeding heedless and aggressive patriotism and (what came to be called) a military-industrial complex. And he foresaw that this would be facilitated by what business also needed, what we now call consumerism. Putting that together with his leading concepts of “conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste” he predicted the nourishing, growth and evolving domination of deeply irrational sets of attitudes and behavior. Decades later, as I have noted in other essays, Paul Baran came to characterize the consequences: people “taught to want what they don’t need, and not to want what they do.”

Veblen hoped that people’s instinctive good sense would push them to replace the rule of the common sense — what Gramsci called “the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie” — that makes us complicit in our own destruction; ruefully, however, he observed that

[H]istory records more frequent and more spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture than of peoples who have saved themselves alive out of a desperately precarious institutional situation, such, for instance, as now faces the people of Christendom.

Make that the whole world, and Veblen got it just right for today’s imbecile institutions, so much more imbecilic than in his day. With nukes, yet.

Save ourselves alive, anyone?

June 17, 2003