Panic Ads

Walk beneath the Golden Arches and enter the church of McDonald's. The avatars and acolytes of Ronald will welcome and minister to you. Did Ronald Reagan become President because the faithful were remembering Ronald McDonald? All are admitted here, young and old, rich and poor, girl and boy, black and white, healthy and halt, sane and schizy. One of the multitude of universal churches. Mix your fetishes - a burger, fries, and a Coke. "Coke is life." "I'd like to give the world a Coke." But Pepsi is "the choice of a new generation." Ideology and utopia. A bill and some change tossed into the collection plate buys you your festish. You eat in order to worhip. "It's a good time for a great day at McDonald's." Instant kairos.

Blessed are the poor in imagination. "We do it all for you." Religion for the service economy. The ubiquity of the weak imagination. What do the French know? They're learning. There's no "simulacrum." There's no deconstruction." Here in the New World we know that these are only the words of the bourgeois gentilhomme who is bitterly nostalgic for "high modernism." That wonderful high modernism of critical theories, right, left, and center, steeped in angoisse over ... not the meta-narrative, not the Caresian ego, not the absolute spirit, but the dissolution of Rousseau's nature. Isn't it a pity that we've confused culture with nature? It's all rock and roll to the New World. It's all religion, even though you might not recognize that if you're still Judaeo-Christian-Greco-Roman-modern. It's the ageless religion of perpetually exhausted humanity, polytheism, and fetishism, the natural rites of man. The weakest of the weak religions for the legions who drink lite beer, have phone sex, smoke lite menthol cigarettes, eat imitation margarine, drink wine coolers, vacation at Disneyland, watch Bill Cosby, and have their panic fun. Poor French, always behind the times, mopping up from the old party while the new one is in full swing. Go and lament over your noble savage and chant your nomadology. The noble savage lost the competition for who would be the type-man. The last man, that is, the old Adam, won. There's no Abraham to shatter the graven images. We want our panic fun, our MTV. It's all positive, no negations. We want to pray at our own pleasure. And, poor French, you want it, too. Coke is the ens realissimum. Crack!

Panic polytheism. Ronald McDonald clones himself for a thousand grand openings, the man-God. Cosby appears ubiquitously with his M.O.M., the God-man. Nice and cute. Blink! Star Wars, the initiative. Also cute. "I want my MTV." "I want my Dire Straits."

What's the trick? You won't find it by deconstructing Flaubert. Emma had a soul. Look at the construct, the res Hera: Coke is life. It's easy. Just draw a picture and put yourself into it. Then make that picture into your transient heaven. Instant Eden. As many Edens as you please. And why even draw your own picture? The pictures are everywhere and each of them has a hole where you can fit. And nobody expects you to stay in any of them for too long. How long does it take to drink in a life? Don't worry. You don't stay in Disneyland forever. You're allowed to go to Kentucky Fried. The great inversion of capitalism has been accomplished, fantasia has captured calculation. The ad has been spiritualized. Capitalism exists to produce ads. The commodity was a silly fetish, conceived in the Sartean "spirit of seriousness." The commodity is like a little relic that you buy to take home with you so that you'll always have a piece of a church with you. The ad is what we want, the vision of a heaven or a hell, or of a heaven-hell. Man cannot live by technology alone and doesn't.

Ever wonder why all of a sudden the whole world is beating a path to the New World? The shopping mall is the mosque and California the Mecca. The whole world has grasped unconsciously the truth that capitalism has been inverted. It's driven by the ad, by the icon. And the whole world can have, whatever "relations of production" prevail. Postmodernism means the end of materialism, of naturalism. In the beginning was animism. At the end there's culturalism. We worship our own works of the weak imagination, the imagination that can pray for short attention spans, that has to blink with accelerating frequency. What have we become? We are filling the holes in the pictures that we have made for ourselves in an endless circle dance, the eternal recurrence come true. "You deserve a break today." "You only go around once in life, so grab for the the gusto (Zen!) you can get." "It never gets better than this." What's this "This?" It's transient communion with the ad. The beer in your hand is just your confirmation, your prop in the hole that you're filling.

Panic polytheism. Weak religion. Campy. Camp is postmodern spirituality. The spirit of seriousness fails, its place taken by universal complicity in the circle dance. It's just entertainment tonite. Our only article of faith is that we musn't be too serious. We must be able to exchange fetishes with no regrets. Loyalty has imploded and we have become fans. We are loyal to disloyalty. We're in a panic. Our nervous laughter gives it away. We're living in the holes of the surfaces and we've voided every intentionality but the will to believe that we're diverted. We all know that we're not, but we try to pretend that we are. We confront our inmost possibility in the ad and we wretch with a giggle. The ads are meant for us. They don't seduce us, beguile us, or belabor us. They show us who we already are and our response to them is our spirituality. Panic narcissism. That is the secret of camp.

Plunge the probe into the void and make it ache, form its own vacuity. Sing a dirge for the will to believe and Hosannah! for the will to disbelieve belief, the last station on the walk of fear. Panic polytheism is the projection of panic fear onto the culturescape. Go back to the beginning when Calvinism lost its nerve in the person of William James. The story is well known. At a Paris hospital his contingency seized him when he realized that a misfired neuron could tranform him instantaneously into the epileptic in front of him. There, but for the grace of God ... But God was dead. No more vocations, no more predestination: everything is possible, nothing is necessary. Vertiginous panic. Constitutive insecurity. No more consciouness, just "Sciousness," as he called it. He felt like a spongy rubber ball. Enter the will to believe, the first moment of the postmodern. WilliamJames, the Baron von Munchausen of philosophy, engaged in the ludicrous play of trying to pull himself out of the quicksand of panic fear by his own mindstraps. The French quiver at playing this game. The North Americans are past masters at it. The ads are their counters.

America is for sale, but its universal gift, the first genuine world culture in the history of humankind, is free. The Americans aren't Munchausens and neither is the rest of humanity. The last man is masterless. It will just take some time for everyone to realize that, but it's a fait accompli. The ad is the great mediator, the emblem of panic fear and the substance of panic polytheism. Camp is the spirit of culturalism, the characteristic response to the weak and undemanding lure to feeling. "Coke is the real thing," the en realissimum, the res Hera. This is NOT the corruption of signifiers but the new religion of culture. Once it was thought that the ad existed to sell the product, but now we know that the product is sold to finance the ad. As Dostoevsky foresaw, the spirit has triumphed over the flesh, because the flesh is weak and the spirit is ever-fertile in devising ways to deprecate its Siamese twin. It will stick it with deodorant and shoot it full of Nutrasweet so that it will be purified and prepared to take its place in the tableau vivante of the fetishes. We are our own fetishes, the walking advertisements of panic fear, telling each other how nice and cute it is here in the mall, the expo-center of the new churches. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And we have panicked. "Have a Coke." "Coke is life." The weakest and most transient of lives, but still "the real thing." What did you expect? We've made the world a monastery where we worship our self-images.