A Diet of Desires

I was walking the dog on a Sunday afternoon when the anxiety hit like a thunderbolt.  Earlier that day, I'd preached on the omnipresence of marketing in American life, and how what we desire is a factor of powerful systems that manipulate our interests.  It folded in neatly with a talk about my book on prayer and our desires, and how we must learn to unwant the things that we are taught to want so very badly.

I'd cited a dollar figure on the scale of the American advertising industry, and even though I'd found it multiply attested earlier in the week, I suddenly got a bad case of the yips.  Did I get that number wrong?  Had I erred?  Maybe I'd mistyped it.  Maybe I'd misread it.

If I had, my mistake was likely not a rounding error.  Not off by two percent, not off by ten percent, but off by 100,000%.  The number was the total 2024 spending on advertising, which came in, averaging from various sources, at just a smidge over $500,000,000,000.  

America spent five hundred billion dollars on marketing in 2024, I declared publicly, while church folks shook their heads in amazement.  

Surely that was wrong.  It couldn't be right.  It's a staggering figure, a preposterous figure, one that I presented with confidence.  Had I made a mistake?

The dog did his business, and I slogged home, suddenly certain that I had catastrophically embarrassed myself.  I checked the numbers again.

There'd been no mistake.

Five hundred billion dollars, more or less, against a global total of one point one trillion.  

I didn't know whether to be relieved or re-horrified.  In context, it does make sense.  Americans see more advertising than any other culture.  It's that money that feeds Facebook, that feeds X, that feeds Google.  It's that money that fills our mailboxes with crap, that forces us to pause multiple times during a show, even if we've paid Bezos for the frickin' "privilege" of Prime.  We've been taught that ads are fun, that ads are cool and great and creative, but Jesus Mary and Joseph, that's insane.

For that price, we as a nation could have Medicare for all, and a fully funded USAID, and retool our economy to actually compete with the Chinese, and have a MoonBase, and be going to Mars.  But instead, we get...what?  We get a cotton candy nothing.  We're penned up and stuffed full of manufactured desires like foie gras geese or penned up veal calves.

None of it, not a bit of it, is necessary for the functioning of a healthy society.  Would we not remember to eat?  Would we forget that we need a roof over our heads?  Would our doctors not recommend appropriate medications?

Of course not.

Imagine an authoritarian regime that spent that much on propaganda, where that amount of energy was spent manipulating the hearts and minds of an endlessly anxious populace.

How is that not what's happening?

Competing Ads, Washington Style

DC, as I've noted numerous times in the past, is a rather idiosyncratic little town.

That particular truth was reinforced to me this last week in a couple of advertising circulars that came inserted into our Washington Post.

Yeah, we got the half-ton of Getmas sale catalogs, reminding us to be about our Sweet Lord Mammon's bidness.   Most of the ads are in flagrant competition with one another.   Best Buy or H.H. Gregg? Giant or Safeway?   Each trumpets its superiority over the other.

But y'all get those no matter where you are.  In Dee See, we do things differently.

What was different this week was a great big ol' advertising section...formatted like a newspaper...from the China Daily, the official English language mouthpiece of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China.   It trumpeted, in language produced by Chinese Communist writers and then massaged out of Chinglish by well paid expatriate editorial staff, the vital importance of China to the business community.

Without China, the global economy would suffer!  China, the key to recovery and prosperity!

There's a reason for this appearing.   In the midst of our being distracted by all manner of silly things in this silly political season, America is semi-quietly pre-positioning itself in the Pacific Theatre.  We're putting bases in Australia, for the first time ever.  We're making overtures to Burma, whose military dictatorship is suddenly compliant.  Why?  Because as China grows in strength and flexes its muscles, its neighbors are getting skittish.  Suddenly, being allied with the predominant military power in the world seems, well, prudent.

And so we get a "look how nice and important and business-friendly we are" insert from the world's dominant Communist nation.  Right there in the Washington Post, where lawmakers and lobbyists can read it.

The next day, the insert was from the competition.

It was an equally glossy, equally pretending-to-be-news advertising insert.  This one was produced, apparently, by a coalition of military-industrial corporations.   It pitched the necessity of maintaining naval power at current levels, and of simultaneously investing in new drone technology for seaborne operations.  We can't cut our force-projection capacity in these uncertain times!  There were big patriotic shots of F-18 Hornets flying in tight formation over aircraft carriers, advertising the wares of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and several major naval shipyards.

The threat?  The reason for maintaining dominance?  To insure that we remain ahead of a resurgent China.

I'm going to guess that if you're not a DC Denizen, you didn't get these competing ads.

Mine is an odd little town.

That Sound is Eisenhower Rolling Over In His Grave

Another interesting bit of collateral damage the recent SCOTUS decision allowing corporations to directly influence elections may only be immediately evident to those of us who live in the Washington Metropolitan Area. From my vantage point inside the Beltway, I see things that most Americans don't get to see.

By "things," I mean advertising. By advertising, I mean the aggressive but very localized ad campaigns run by defense contractors to influence the decisionmaking of military bureaucracy and your elected leaders.

I've blogged on this before. In no other city in the nation do you see advertisements touting the effectiveness of ships and tanks and weapons systems. Full page color ads in the Post and the Times. Tightly produced radio spots on the number-one rated station in the area. Posters with patriotic slogans, flags, eagles, and weapons systems festoon the walls in our Metro subway system, particularly at the Pentagon and Pentagon City stations.

These are not ads for you and me, because we don't tend to purchase fighter aircraft, no matter how much our 9 year old son might beg and plead. We don't buy military transports, or missile defense systems, or destroyers. But these products are all advertised inside the Beltway, by major corporations that produce systems that are only bought with our tax dollars. General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman exist in their current form not to provide products for individual citizens, but for consumption by the federal government. Their considerable profits are dependent on the largesse of Washington.

Now, lets for a moment imagine that a United States senator feels that a particular weapons system...say, the engine for the Joint Strike Fighter that the military doesn't want but that we're making anyway...should be canceled. The corporations whose profits are dependent on We The People buying this weapon already have a substantial advertising budget. What do you suppose the odds are that when this senator comes up for re-election that instead of just ads inside the Beltway, we might now see some attack ads running in this senator's home state? Or some juicy gotcha clips that seem to imply that said senator has a prurient interest in livestock? Or worse yet, that they Don't Support Our Troops (tm)? The self-dealing manipulation of the electoral process by corporations who need compliant senators and representatives is now perfectly acceptable. It's always been there, of course. Money has been funneled to oppo researchers and into the coffers of political action committees. But now it can operate unfettered in the light of day.

Looks like the military-industrial complex is going to be adding a marketing department.

Fox News: Truth in Advertising

I've blogged before about the strange state of advertising here in DC. On the #1 radio station in the area, it's not uncommon to hear ads for major weapons systems. It's a government town, and major corporations buy up lots of ads to hawk their wares to government procurement specialists. There are also political ads, run by interest groups or oppressive regimes, which are intended to fall on the eyes of lawmakers.

Today's Washington Post had an interesting one. It was a full page color ad from Fox News lambasting all of the other networks for "missing" the 9.12 demonstrations. A major news event! And those pinheads in the Main Stream Media missed it! Included in the ad were pictures. One large one showed folks gathered in front of the Capitol. Another was an aerial shot, which showed a moderate crowd extending five or six blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue. I have three reactions to this:

1) Fox News seems to be misrepresenting...intentionally...the coverage of this event. CNN, NBC, ABC, and MSNBC didn't "miss" the event. Missing an event means not covering it. The other networks did cover it. They didn't give it quite the prominence that Fox News did, but there was a rather significant reason for that, and that is...

2) Fox News was responsible for the event. It was the brainchild of one of their more successful infotainment personalities. Other conservative organizations signed on, sure. But this isn't something that occurred, and that was then "covered" by Fox News. It was whole-cloth created by Fox News. This isn't invective. Just reality. Heck, Fox is still pitching the event.

3) Fox News seems to be misrepresenting...intentionally...the size of the event. The two images in the ad are juxtaposed in a way that implies a huge crowd. The largest image is shot from the mall, and shows a densely packed group on the National Mall. It's not a particularly long shot, though. We're not seeing a large expanse of the Mall...just a block or so. There's then that second shot, which shows the demonstration as it moves down Pennsylvania Ave. towards the Capitol. But that street is comparatively narrow...and filling it for six or seven blocks is something that could be done with a moderate crowd..between 65,000 and 70,000. What the images are *intended* to convey is a significantly larger crowd. They are presented to imply that the Mall crowd extended as far as the one on Pennsylvania Avenue, which it did not. There've been immense conservative demonstrations in DC...one pro-life event back in the 90s had at least 450,000. This was not one of them.

Honesty is, as I'm recalling, the first of the "Twelve" principles being pitched by Fox. Evidently "irony" is number two.

Monetizing Your Jesus

Given that my blogging is more personal journaling than it is a public resource, I rarely even notice the repeated nudgings from Google, which suggest I consider "monetizing" my blog. That means google ads, targeted specifically to the interests of the dozen or so human beings who stop by here on a daily basis. There are two reasons I just don't want to do this.

First, the practical. I just don't have enough traffic to justify it. My technorati rating is functionally nonexistent. If I "monetized" my blogging, I'd be surprised if it generated enough income in a year to get me a cup of coffee. Seven Eleven coffee.

Second, I just don't want to go that route. I do not blog because I expect it to be an income stream. I blog because I want to blog. I enjoy the occasional dialogue it generates, and writing helps me frame my thoughts. Pastors are supposed to journal, and supposed to make their thinking and meditation public. That's the point of writing and preaching, after all. If you're serving a community as a pastor, my strong feeling is that you're already kinda sorta committing yourself to doing this...and getting paid to do it, too.

There are those that do run ads, of course, and I don't begrudge them their income. Going ad-based certainly does provide a significantly higher level of motivation. But at some level, I just can't quite accept putting advertising anywhere near writing that frequently takes the form and function of articulating or proclaiming the Word. It feels a bit like interspersing ads in the different slides in your sermon Powerpoint, or dropping a few egregious product placements in your worship service.

"And when the meal was finished, Jesus took the Glen Ellen Cabernet Sauvignon, and poured it out in their presence, saying 'This is my body, which is inexpensive and surprisingly rich and full flavored.'"

If I'm talking about God, I'd really rather not go there. Advertising inherently desacralizes (ooh, a new word) both physical space and human discourse. Nothing wrong with it in the secular world, but I chafe at it's presence in conversations about our Creator.

That, I guess, is the challenge of blogging with your pastor hat on.