Bob Dylan and the Ethics of Market Fascism
By Tony Kashani
The Culture of Spectacle
On Sunday, February 2, 2014, according to most reliable news
sources, 111.5 million people (mostly US residents) participated in viewing the
imperial spectacle known as the Super Bowl XLVIII. To be sure, this Super Bowl
was not dissimilar to its predecessors; a made-for-television event of
commodification, showcasing a package of mediocrity with a mind-numbing violent
team sport to be utilized for selling useless junk. According to Bill Wanger,
executive vice president for programming and research at Fox Sports,
"Big-event television is a great way for people to have a communal event,
to talk about it socially and to talk about it as a group."
Wagner presupposes viewers are ready-made consumers who have
lost the ability to think, or perhaps had never developed that ability in the
first place. Therefore, if Fox Sports and their free market economy coconspirators
set the agenda, people longing for community and communal experiences will
simply follow it.
What sets apart this spectacle from the previous ones is not
so much the record-setting viewership, despite the noncompetitiveness of the
game, but the de-imaginative commercials and the mediocre musical performances
of pop artists. One single commercial separates this spectacle from its
counterparts of the past: The two-minute drivel of mythologizing patriotism
featuring Bob Dylan is the culprit.
The Big Sellout
When corporatism manages to buy the soul of an icon, the
poet of the American civil rights movement, we are witnessing a clear sign of
the market becoming an Ethics in itself. This is the man who, in May of 1963,
walked out of "The Ed Sullivan Show" after CBS executives asked him
not to sing "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues," because it would
offend the racist right-wing John Birch Society. Bob Dylan inspired many
Americans then. But he must have broken many a liberal and progressive heart with
his awfully scripted Chrysler commercial, which is filled with jingoistic lines
about American pride and a seriously proto-fascist undertone.
The commercial starts with, "Is there anything more
American than America?" The ad closes with Dylan's voice over a montage of
images of a man's arm pouring beer in medium shot, emphasizing the beer; a
closeup of two hands making a precision watch; and finally, a wide-open
overhead tracking long shot of many, mostly women, anonymous Asian assembly
workers in facemasks putting together cellphones that resemble the ubiquitous
(iconic) iPhones. These aesthetic choices are deliberate, to be sure.
Advertising is an intentional medium. What do we hear him say?
"So let Germany brew your beer. Let Switzerland make
your watch. Let Asia assemble your phone. We . . . will build . . . your
car."
As American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his book, On
Bullshit, puts it, "One of the most salient features of our culture is
that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his
[or her] share. But we tend to take the situation for granted."
Market Fascism at Play
What ought to shock people is the proto-fascist line:
"Let Asia assemble your phone," delivered by a Jewish American who,
at one point in our history, fought for the rights of blacks, Latinos, Jews,
Asians and other minorities in America with his iconic songs filled with
mesmerizing poetry. Did Bob Dylan forget that Asia is the world's largest and
most populous continent filled with a multitude of diverse cultures and the
home of several ancient civilizations, not to mention the home to some of the
world's top-selling automobiles, computers and internet technologies, just to
name a few achievements? Does he not know that Mercedes Benz once owned Chrysler
and now Chrysler is a wholly owned subsidiary of Italian multinational
automaker Fiat? To be sure, the underlying assumption by the ad's producers is
that most Americans - including Bob Dylan - are too ignorant to know this and
will just make the assumption that more than 4 billion people, who are
identified as Asians, are simply assembly workers for Apple corporation;
Germans are only good for beer making; and the Swiss can only make fancy
watches.
This is the man who wrote "The Times They Are a-Changin."
Dylan said of "The Times They Are a-Changin'": "This was
definitely a song with a purpose. I wanted to write a big song, some kind of
theme song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic
way. The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close
and allied together at that time."
One hopes that the irony of this situation is not lost on
people who watch this mythologizing advertisement. Judging from the millions of
hits, many people around the world, including many Asians, Germans and Swiss
people have viewed it.
The Neoliberal Agenda
These is factual evidence that the neoliberal agenda has
achieved its central objectives of commodifying everything, removing an ethics
based on morality from all facets of our society, and finally, transforming
corporatism into an ethics - minus any morality - by itself.
Is it any wonder? We live in an age where our public schools
are directed to build curricula designed to suit the lowest common denominator,
the commercial banks and hedge fund corporations swindle the public and create
a financial meltdown on a global scale and yet get bailed out with taxpayers'
money. We are in an era where anti-intellectualism is revered, and the culture
industry, dominated by a handful of conglomerates, has decided that there is no
longer any need for creativity at even the lowest common denominator level.
Evidently, they presuppose that they have ample supply of docile consumers
ready to buy anything packaged for quick arousal. This is what Henry Giroux
calls, "zombie politics and culture," in his book, Zombie Politics
and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism. This is the age where most people
are bought and sold in the marketplace, only to be told that they are free -
free to choose the product of their choice.
Hope and Imagination
The Bob Dylan-sellout incident is emblematic of the triumph
of neoliberalism and its religious zeal for market fundamentalism. This is what
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had in mind when they built their alliance
30 some years ago. They wanted to buy as many Bob Dylans as they could to sell
patriotism and a new form of market fascism to the world. They knew that myth
always wins over facts and reality on the streets. Will they succeed? Perhaps
the ratings tell us they have triumphed. After all, numbers don't lie, or do
they? There is a number that is absent from news media accounts. Those who
decided to tune out this fraudulent narrative of greatness. They can be counted
too. The world is inhabited by nearly 7 billion people, and as of March 2013,
38.8 percent of this population is using the internet with regularity. And we
can be sure that this number will rise rapidly.
They are connected and interconnected. They talk to one
another and exchange audiovisual messages of dissent, hope and change.
Come senators, congressmen,
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he who gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.
Bob Dylan – "The Times They Are A-changin'," 1964
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