Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

LESSONS FROM CONSUMER SOCIETY

The punishment of Tantalus is the fate that torments the poor. Condemned to hunger and thirst, they are condemned as well to contemplate the delights dangled before them by advertising. As they crane their necks and reach out, those marvels are snatched away. And if they manage to catch one and hold on tight, they end up in jail or in the cemetery.

Plastic delights, plastic dreams. In the paradise promised to all and reserved for a few, things are more and more important and people less and less so. The ends have been kidnapped by the means: things buy you, cars drive you, computers program you, television watches you.

GLOBALIZATION, GLOBALONEY

Until a few years ago, a man who had no debts was considered virtuous, honest, and hardworking. Today, he’s an extraterrestrial. Whoever does not owe, does not exist. I owe, therefore I am. Whoever is not credit-worthy deserves neither name nor face. The credit card is proof of the right to exist; debt, something even those who have nothing have. Every single person or country that belongs to this world has at least one foot caught in this trap.

The productive system, which has become the financial system, multiplies debtors to multiply consumers. Karl Marx, who saw this coming over a century ago, warned that the tendency of the profit rate to decline and the tendency of production to overproduce would oblige the system to seek limitless growth and to extend an insane degree of power to the parasites of the “modern bankocracy,” which he defined as a “gang” that “knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it.”

Today’s explosion of consumption makes more noise than all the wars that ever were and causes a greater uproar than every Mardi Gras in the world happening at once. As the old Turkish proverb has it, he who drinks on credit gets twice as drunk. This fiesta, this great global binge, makes our heads spin and clouds our vision; it seems to have no limits in time or space. But consumer culture is like a drum: it resonates so loudly because it’s empty. At the moment of truth, when the clamor ceases and the party’s over, the drunk wakes up and finds himself alone, accompanied only by his shadow and the broken dishes for which he must pay. The system that drives demand and obliges it to expand also builds walls for it to crash into. While the system needs markets that are ever broader and more open, the way lungs need air, at the same time it requires raw materials and human labor that are cheaper and cheaper. This system speaks in the name of all, to all it directs its imperious orders to consume, among all it sows the buying fever. But it won’t do: for nearly everyone, this adventure starts and ends on the TV screen. Most people who go into debt in order to have things soon have nothing more than debts taken on to pay debts that lead to more debts, and they end up consuming fantasies that only come true by stealing.

Poverties

Truly poor people have no time to waste time.

Truly poor people have no silence and can’t buy it.

Truly poor people have legs that don’t remember how to walk any more than chicken wings remember how to fly.

Truly poor people eat garbage as if it were food and pay for it.

Truly poor people have the right to breathe shit as if it were air and not pay for it.

Truly poor people have the freedom to choose — between one TV channel and another.

Truly poor people live passionate dramas with their machines.

Truly poor people are always cheek by jowl and always alone.

Truly poor people don’t know they are poor.

With the massive growth of credit, warns sociologist Tomás Moulian, Chile’s everyday culture has come to revolve around symbols of consumption: appearance as the essence of personality, artifice as a way of life, “utopia on the installment plan.” Consumerism has been imposed bit by bit, year by year, ever since Hawker Hunter jets bombed Salvador Allende’s presidential palace in 1973 and General Augusto Pinochet inaugurated the era of the miracle. A quarter of a century later, the New York Times explained that it was the “coup that began Chile’s transformation from a backwater banana republic to the economic star of Latin America.”

On how many Chileans does that star shine? One-fourth of the population lives in absolute poverty and, as Christian Democratic senator Jorge Lavandero has pointed out, the hundred richest Chileans earn more in a year than the entire state budget for social services. U.S. journalist Marc Cooper found quite a few impostors in the paradise of consumption: Chileans who roast in their cars rather than roll down the windows and reveal that they have no air-conditioning, or who talk on toy cellular phones, or who use credit cards to buy potatoes or a pair of pants in twelve monthly installments. Cooper also found several angry workers at the Jumbo supermarket chain. On Saturday mornings, there are people who fill their shopping carts to the brim with the costliest items, then stroll the aisles for a long while, showing off, before abandoning their carts and sneaking out a side door without buying so much as a stick of gum.

The right to waste, privilege of a few, masquerades as freedom for all. Tell me how much you consume and I’ll tell you what you’re worth. This civilization won’t let flowers or chickens or people sleep. In greenhouses, flowers are subjected to twenty-four-hour lighting so they’ll grow faster. In egg factories, night is denied to the hens. And people, too, are condemned to insomnia, kept up by the anxiety of buying and the anguish of paying.

A Martyr

In the fall of 1998, in the center of Buenos Aires, a distracted pedestrian got flattened by a city bus. The victim was crossing the street while talking on a cell phone. While talking? While pretending to talk: the phone was a toy.

Magic

In the barrio of Cerro Norte, a poor suburb of the city of Montevideo, a magician gave a street performance. With a touch of his wand, he made a dollar bill sprout from his fist, then from his hat.

When the show was over, the magic wand disappeared. The next day, neighbors saw a barefoot child walking the streets, magic wand in hand. He tapped the wand on everything he came across and stood waiting.

Like many other children in the neighborhood, that nine-year-old boy liked to sink his nose into a plastic bag filled with glue. Once he explained why: “It takes me to another country.”

This way of life may not be very healthy, but it’s great for the pharmaceutical industry. People in the United States consume half the sleeping pills, tranquilizers, and other legal drugs sold in the world, as well as half the illegal drugs, which ain’t chicken feed considering that the United States makes up only 5 percent of the world’s population.

“Unhappy people, who live comparing themselves with others,” laments a woman in Montevideo’s barrio of Buceo. The pain of no longer being, of which the tango once sang, has made way for the shame of not having. A poor man is an object of pity. “When you have nothing, you think you’re worth nothing,” says a young man in the barrio of Villa Fiorito in Buenos Aires. And another, in the Dominican town of San Francisco de Macorís, adds, “My brothers work for brand names. They live to buy labels, and they work from dawn to dusk to keep up with the payments.”

It’s a Joke/2

A car crashes on the outskirts of Moscow. The driver crawls out of the wreckage and moans: “My Mercedes … My Mercedes…”

Somebody says to him: “Buddy, who cares about the car! Don’t you see your arm is missing?”

One look at his bleeding stump, and the man cries: “My Rolex! My Rolex!”

The invisible violence of the market: diversity is the enemy of profitability, and uniformity rules. Mass production on a gigantic scale imposes its obligatory patterns of consumption everywhere. More devastating than any single-party dictatorship is the tyranny of forced uniformity. It imposes on the entire world a way of life that reproduces human beings as if they were photocopies of the consummate consumer.

The consummate consumer is a man who sits still. This civilization, which confuses quantity with quality, also confuses obesity with good nutrition. According to the British scientific journal the Lancet, over the past decade “severe obesity” has increased by nearly 30 percent among young people in the most-developed countries. Among U.S. children, obesity has increased 40 percent in the past sixteen years, according to a recent study by the Health Sciences Center of the University of Colorado. The country that invented “lite,” “diet,” and “fat-free” foods has the most fat people in the world. The consummate consumer gets out of his car only to work and to watch television. He spends four hours a day sitting in front of the small screen, devouring plastic.

It’s No Joke/2

In the spring of 1998 in Vienna, a newborn perfume is baptized. TV cameras record the ceremony, held in the vault of the Bank of Austria. The infant answers to the name “Cash” and she exudes the exciting fragrance of money. More baptismal parties are planned in Germany at the main offices of Deutsche Bank and in Switzerland at the Union des Banques Suisses.

“Cash” can be bought only on the Internet or in the most exclusive boutiques. “We’d like it to be the Ferrari of perfumes,” say the creators.

Garbage disguised as food is colonizing palates everywhere and annihilating local cooking traditions in the process. Fine dining, the joy of eating, cultivated and diversified over thousands of years in some countries, constitutes a collective patrimony that finds its way to everyone’s hearth, not only to the tables of the rich. Such traditions, such signs of cultural identity, such celebrations of life are being steamrollered by the globalization of hamburgers, the dictatorship of fast food. The worldwide Coca-Colonization of food, successfully imposed by McDonald’s, Burger King, and similar factories, violates cooking’s right to self-determination — a sacred right, since the mouth, as we know, is one of the doorways to the soul.

The 1998 soccer World Cup confirmed, among other things, that MasterCard tones muscles, Coca-Cola offers eternal youth, and a good athlete can’t get by without a shot of McDonald’s fries. The golden arches were carried as a standard during the recent conquest of Eastern Europe. When the first McDonald’s opened with pomp and ceremony in Moscow in 1990, the line outside symbolized the victory of the West as eloquently as the crumbling of the Berlin Wall.

It is a sign of the times that this company, which embodies the virtues of the free world, denies its employees the freedom to join a union. McDonald’s thus violates a legally sanctioned right in many countries in which it operates. In 1997, a handful of workers, members of what the company calls the McFamily, tried to form a union in Montreal; the restaurant closed its doors. A year later, a group of employees in a small city near Vancouver actually succeeded, a feat worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records.

In 1996, two British environmental activists, Helen Steel and David Morris, sued McDonald’s for mistreating its workers, destroying nature, and manipulating the emotions of children. The company’s employees are poorly paid, their working conditions are awful, and they can’t unionize. Tropical forests are razed and indigenous peoples are run off their lands to produce meat for its hamburgers. What’s more, its multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns threaten public health by enticing children to desire food of questionable nutritional value. The lawsuit, which at first seemed like a mosquito bite on an elephant’s back, had unexpected repercussions, helped inform public opinion, and is turning into a long and costly headache for a company accustomed to unchallenged power. After all, power is what all this is about. In the United States, McDonald’s employs more people than the steel industry, and in 1997 its sales were greater than the total exports of Argentina and Hungary combined. Its star product, the Big Mac, is so very important that in several countries its price is used as a unit of value for international financial transactions: virtual food orienting the virtual economy. According to McDonald’s advertising in Brazil, the Big Mac is like love. Two bodies, aroused by cheese and pickle, embrace and kiss, oozing special sauce, while their hearts of onion thrill to the green hope of lettuce.

Cheap prices, quick service: the human machinery gasses up and goes right back to work. The German writer Günter Wallraff worked in one of those gas stations in 1983, a McDonald’s in the city of Hamburg, which is certainly innocent of the things being done in its name. He found himself toiling at a feverish pace without a break, spattered with boiling oil: once thawed, the hamburgers have ten minutes to live. After that, they stink. You’ve got to get them on the stove right away. The fries, the vegetables, the meat, the fish, the chicken, it all has the same taste, an artificial flavor dictated by the chemical industry, which also supplies the colorants that hide the meat’s 25 percent fat content. This garbage is our most successful millennial meal. Its chefs study at Hamburger University in Elk Grove, Illinois. But the owners of the business, according to well-informed sources, prefer elegant restaurants serving the finest dishes of what has come to be called “ethnic food”: Japanese, Thai, Persian, Javanese, Indian, Mexican … Democracy is nothing to laugh at.

Faces and Masks/1

Only the poor are condemned to be ugly and old. The rest can buy the hair, noses, eyelids, lips, cheekbones, tits, bellies, asses, thighs, or calves they need to correct the errors of nature and slow the passage of time. The operating rooms of plastic surgeons are shopping malls where you can find the face, body, and age you seek. “Surgery is a necessity of the soul,” explains Argentina’s answer to Rodin, Roberto Zelicovich. In Lima, billboards offer perfect noses and white skin for every pocketbook that can afford them. Peruvian television interviews a young man who replaced his aquiline Indian nose with a little meatball that he proudly displays, full-face and in profile. He says now he scores with the girls.

In cities like Los Angeles, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires, those with money can indulge in the luxury of going to the operating room the way the rest of us go to the dentist. After a few years and several operations, they all look alike. The men have faces like mummies without wrinkles, the women look like Dracula’s girlfriend, and they’re all bound to have trouble expressing themselves. When they wink, their belly buttons jump.

Faces and Masks/2

Latin American cities also get face-lifts to wipe away their age and erase their identities. Without their wrinkles or long noses, cities lose their memory. They seem less and less like themselves and more and more like one another.

The same tall prisms, cubes, and cylinders form the urban skyline, all crowned by the names of international brands in gigantic letters. In this era of obligatory cloning, advertisers are the real urban planners.

The consuming masses take orders in a language that is universal; advertising has achieved what Esperanto could not. Every person everywhere understands what television broadcasts. Over the past quarter of a century, global spending on advertising has doubled. Thanks to that small fact, poor children drink more Coca-Cola and even less milk, and leisure time is eaten up by obligatory consumption. Free time, time imprisoned: the homes of the very poor have no beds, but they have TVs and the TV has the floor. Bought on credit, this little beast is proof of the democratic nature of progress. It listens to no one but speaks for all. Poor and rich alike thus learn the virtues of the latest car, and poor and rich alike discover the favorable interest rates offered by one bank or another.

“A poor person is someone who has no one,” an old woman who talks to herself in the streets of São Paulo says repeatedly. People are ever more numerous and ever more alone. These crowded, lonely souls are then packed into big cities. “Would you please mind taking your elbow out of my eye?” they ask.

Experts know how to turn merchandise into magic charms against loneliness. Things have human attributes: they caress, accompany, understand, help. Perfume kisses you; your car never lets you down. Consumer culture has found in solitude the most lucrative of markets. Holes in your heart can be stuffed with things — or with dreams of things, anyway. And things can be more than embraces, they can be symbols of social mobility, passports to get you by the border guards of class society, keys that open doors usually locked tight. The more exclusive, the better; things lift you out of the crowd and save you from being nobody. Rarely does advertising tell you about the product being sold. That’s the least of it. Advertising’s primary function is to compensate for frustrations and feed fantasies. Whom do you wish to become by buying this aftershave?

Criminologist Anthony Platt observed that street crime is more than the fruit of extreme poverty. It is also the result of the ethics of individualism. The obsession with success, says Platt, plays a decisive role in the illegal appropriation of things. I’ve always heard that money can’t buy happiness, but every poor TV viewer has ample grounds for believing money can buy something so close to happiness that the difference can be left to specialists.

According to historian Eric Hobsbawm, the twentieth century put an end to the seven thousand years of human life based on agriculture that started at the end of the Paleolithic age with the first farming communities. The world’s population is becoming urban, peasants are becoming citizens. In Latin America we have empty fields and enormous urban ant-hills. Driven off the land by modern export agriculture and the erosion of their plots, peasants invade the shantytowns. They believe God is everywhere, but by experience they know he keeps office hours in the city. Cities promise jobs, prosperity, a future for the children. In the countryside, the hopeful watch life pass by and die yawning; in the cities, life happens and beckons. Packed into slums, the newly arrived soon discover that there aren’t enough jobs for the many hands, that nothing is free, and that the most expensive luxuries are air and silence.

At the dawn of the fourteenth century, Father Giordano da Rivalto of Florence offered an elegy to cities. He said that they grow “because people take pleasure in being together.” Being together, meeting. Now who meets whom? Does hope meet up with reality? Do desires meet up with deeds? And people, do they meet other people? If human relations have been reduced to the relations among things, how many people meet up with things?

The world is becoming a huge TV screen: look and listen but don’t touch. Merchandise on display invades and privatizes public spaces. Bus and train stations, until not long ago meeting places for people, are being turned into commercial bazaars.

The shopping mall, a store window to top all store windows, lords it over us with its imposing presence. Multitudes make the pilgrimage to this, the grandest of all temples, for celebrating the mass of consumption. Most of the devotees contemplate in ecstasy the things they can’t afford, while the buying minority submits to the withering bombardment of relentless sales pitches. Going up and down the escalators the crowds travel the world; they watch mannequins dress in fashions from Paris or Milan and listen to stereos that sound as they would in Chicago, and to see and hear all this you pay no fare. Tourists from the hinterlands or from cities still free of this blessing of modern happiness pose for pictures beside the best-known international brands the way they used to pose in the plaza beneath the statue of a national hero. For poor residents of the outskirts, notes Argentine sociologist Beatriz Sarlo, the traditional weekend trip downtown has been replaced by an excursion to one of these urban oases. Spruced up and dressed in their Sunday best, the guests arrive at the party well aware they can only be wallflowers. Entire families board the space capsule to tour the universe of consumption and contemplate the hallucinatory display of models, brands, and labels served up by the aesthetics of the market.

The Days

We don’t know if Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus or of Mercury, god of commerce, but surely it’s Mercury who thought up mandatory shopping days: Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Children’s Day, Grandparent’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Friendship Day, Secretary’s Day, Policeman’s Day, Nurse’s Day. Every year there are more Somebody Days on the commercial calendar.

At this rate, soon we’ll have days to honor the Unknown Scoundrel, the Anonymous Corrupt Official, and the Last Surviving Worker.

The Great Day

They live off garbage amid garbage, eating garbage in garbage houses. But once a year, the garbage collectors of Managua star in the show that draws the country’s largest crowds. “The Ben-Hur Races” were the inspiration of a businessman who came back from Miami to do his part for “the Americanization of Nicaragua.”

Riding their garbage carts, fists in the air, Managua’s garbage collectors salute the president of the country, the ambassador of the United States, and the other dignitaries who grace the dais of honor. Over their everyday rags, the competitors wear broad colorful capes, and on their heads sit the plumed helmets of Roman warriors. Their dilapidated carts are freshly painted, the better to display the names of their sponsors. The skinny horses, covered with open sores like their owners and punished like their owners, are corsairs that fly to the finish line for the sake of glory, or at least a case of soda.

Trumpets blare. The starting flag drops, and they’re off. Whips beat down on the bony haunches of the sorry nags, while the delirious crowd cheers: “Co-ca-Co-la! Co-ca-Co-la!”

Consumer culture, ephemeral culture, condemns everything to immediate obsolescence. Everything changes at the dizzying pace of fashion, at the service of the need to sell. Things grow old in the blink of an eye, only to be replaced by other things no less short-lived. When only insecurity is permanent, merchandise made to wear out is as volatile as the capital that finances it and the labor that produces it. Money flies at the speed of light — yesterday it was over there, today it’s here, tomorrow who can say — and every worker is a potential recruit for the vast army of the unemployed. Paradoxically, it’s shopping malls, the kingdoms of fleeting fashion, that offer the most successful illusion of security. They seem to exist beyond time, ageless and rootless, without night or day or memory, and outside of space, apart from the turbulence of dangerous reality.

The Global Field

In its current form, soccer was born over a century ago. It was born speaking English, and it still speaks English everywhere it’s played. But now you hear it singing the praises of a good “sponsor” and lauding the virtues of “marketing” with as much fervor as it used to commend a good “forward” and the art of “dribbling.”

Tournaments are named for those who pay, not those who play. The Argentine championship is called Pepsi-Cola. Coca-Cola is the name of the world youth soccer tournament. The intercontinental club tournament is called the Toyota Cup.

For the fan of the most popular sport in the world, for the fanatic of the most universally fanatical passion, a team’s shirt is a sacred mantle, a second skin, his other breast. But the shirt has also become a walking billboard. In 1998, players for Rapid of Vienna wore four advertisements at once. On their shirts were ads for a bank, a company, and a brand of cars, and on their shorts they advertised a credit card. When River Plate and Boca Juniors play each other in Buenos Aires’s soccer classic, it’s Quilmes against Quilmes: both teams wear the name of the same brand of beer. In this era of globalization, River also plays for Adidas and Boca for Nike. In fact, you could say Adidas beat Nike when France defeated Brazil in the final of the 1998 World Cup.

In these sanctuaries of well-being, you can do everything without ever stepping into the dirty, threatening outdoors. In some, you can even sleep. The newest ones, in places like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, include hotels and health clubs. Oblivious to cold or heat, malls are safe from pollution and violence. Michael A. Petti publishes scientific advice in a syndicated column called “Live Longer.” In cities “with poor air quality,” Dr. Petti suggests that those who wish to live longer should “walk inside shopping centers.” Atomic clouds of pollution hang over Mexico City, São Paulo, and Santiago, and on the corners muggers lie in wait, but in this carefree world outside the world — with its filtered air and guarded walkways — you can breathe and walk safely.

Malls are all more or less alike, in Los Angeles or Bangkok, in Buenos Aires or Glasgow. Uniformity, however, doesn’t keep them from competing for clients by inventing new come-ons. At the end of 1991, for example, Veja magazine praised a novelty from Praia de Belas mall in Pôrto Alegre, Brazil: “For baby’s comfort, they provide strollers to help these small consumers move about.” But security is the most important item offered by all shopping centers. A luxury on the outside, it can be had by anyone who penetrates these bunkers. In its infinite generosity, consumer culture issues safe-conduct passes so we can flee the hell of the streets. Surrounded by parking lots like vast moats, these island kingdoms provide closed and protected spaces where people cross paths drawn by the urge to have, the way people used to meet, drawn by the desire for companionship, in the cafés or plazas, parks or markets of old. The public police and the private police, the visible police and the invisible police make sure anyone suspicious gets tossed into the street or thrown into jail. Poor people who don’t manage to disguise their congenital malevolence, especially dark-skinned ones, are guilty until proven innocent. And if they happen to be children, so much the worse. Malevolence is inversely proportional to age. Way back in 1979, Colombia’s police reported to the South American Police Congress that their juvenile division had no choice but to give up social work so that they could “undercut the evil deeds” of dangerous minors and “avoid the nuisance of their presence in shopping centers.”

The Injection

More than half a century ago, a writer named Felisberto Hernández published a prophetic tale. A man dressed in white and carrying a syringe boards streetcars in Montevideo and amiably injects the arms of all the passengers. Immediately they hear advertising jingles from the Canary furniture factory. To get the ads out of their veins, they have to go to the drugstore for Canary pills that suppress the effect of the shot.

These gigantic supermarkets turned into miniature cities are also guarded by electronic control systems, eyes that see without being seen, hidden cameras that follow the steps of the crowd wandering amid the merchandise. Electronics are useful not only for watching and punishing undesirables who might succumb to the temptation of forbidden fruits but for making consumers consume more. In the cybernetic age, when the right to citizenship is based on the duty of buying, large companies take X rays of every citizen’s habits, calling up data from credit card, bank machine, and e-mail use to discern a potential customer’s earnings and yearnings — and then pummel him with advertising. This happens more and more in highly developed countries, where commercial manipulation of the on-line world freely violates private life and places it at the service of the market. It has become increasingly difficult, for example, for a U.S. citizen to keep secret such things as the purchases he makes, the diseases he suffers, the money he has, and the money he owes. From such data it’s not hard to figure out what new services he might pay for, what new debts he might take on, or what sort of new things he might purchase.

No matter how much we buy, it’s always little compared with what has to be sold. Over the past few years, for example, the automobile industry has been churning out more cars than the market can absorb. Latin America’s huge cities keep on buying and buying, but they’re caught between the orders the world market takes and the orders the world market gives, the contradiction between obsessive consumption, which requires higher wages, and the obligation to compete, which demands lower ones.

Take the case of the car, which advertising portrays as a blessing within everyone’s reach. A universal right? An achievement of democracy? If that were true and every human being could become the happy owner of one of these four-wheeled good-luck charms, the planet would face sudden death by asphyxiation. Even before that, it would run out of fuel and grind to a halt. The world has already burned up, in a brief span, most of the oil formed in the earth over millions of years. Cars built one after another, at the rate of a beating heart, devour half the oil the world produces every year.

Its owners treat the planet as if it could be discarded, a commodity to be used up, the way images flitting across a TV screen or the fashions and idols launched by advertising fade away shortly after they are born. But what other world are we going to move to? Are we all obliged to swallow the line that God sold the planet to a few companies because in a foul mood he decided to privatize the universe? Consumer society is a booby trap. Those at the controls feign ignorance, but anybody with eyes in his head can see that the great majority of people necessarily must consume not much, very little, or nothing at all in order to save the bit of nature we have left. Social injustice is not an error to be corrected, nor is it a defect to be overcome; it is an essential requirement of the system. No natural world is capable of supporting a mall the size of the planet.

The leaders who promise to take the countries of the South into the First World by an act of magic that will turn us all into prosperous subjects of the kingdom of waste ought to be tried for fraud and as accessories to a crime. For fraud because they promise the impossible; if we all consumed like those who are squeezing the earth dry, we’d have no world left. And as accessories to a crime because the lifestyle they promote — the huge orgasm of delirious consumption they call happiness — sickens our bodies, poisons our souls, and leaves us without the home the world wished to become long before it existed.

CRASH COURSE ON INCOMMUNICATIONS

War is the continuation of television by other means. So General Karl von Clausewitz might say if he were to come back to life after a century and a half and start channel surfing. Real reality imitates virtual reality, which imitates real reality in a world that sweats violence from every pore. Violence begets violence, as we all know, but it also begets profits for the industry that turns violence into merchandise, then sells it as spectacle.

The ends no longer need to justify the means. Today the means, the means of mass communication, justify the ends of a system of power that imposes its values on the entire planet. A handful of giant corporations are in charge of the world’s Ministry of Education. Never have so many been held incommunicado by so few.

IS THE RIGHT OF FREE EXPRESSION THE RIGHT TO LISTEN?

In the sixteenth century, several theologians of the Catholic Church justified the Conquest of America in the name of communication. Jus communicationis: the conquistadors spoke, the Indians listened. War turned out to be both inevitable and just, since the Indians pretended to be deaf. Their right to communicate was the right to obey. At the end of the twentieth century, that rape of America is still called an “encounter,” and we still use the term “communication” for the monologues of the powerful.

Tell Me Your Secrets/1

Malaysia recently revamped its communications network. A Japanese company was to do the work, but at the last minute the U.S. giant AT&T suddenly undercut its offer and snatched the deal away. AT&T won the contract thanks to the good offices of the NSA, the National Security Agency, which tracked down and deciphered the Japanese bid.

The NSA, a U.S. spy agency with a budget four times that of the CIA, has the technology to record every word transmitted by telephone, fax, or e-mail in any part of the world. It can intercept up to two million conversations per minute. The NSA’s real mission is to maintain U.S. economic and political control over the planet, but national security and the struggle against terrorism are its formal covers. Its eavesdropping systems allow it to track every message that has anything to do with criminal organizations as dangerous as, for example, Greenpeace or Amnesty International.

All these facts came out in March 1998 when the European Parliament published an official report entitled, “Evaluation of the Technologies of Political Control.”

Tell Me Your Secrets/2

How does a modern company communicate with its real customers? By means of virtual customers, programmed by computer.

The British supermarket chain Sainsbury has worked up a mathematical model to simulate the movements and sentiments of its shoppers. The computer screen shows the virtual customer walking down the aisles amid shopping carts, revealing his or her tastes and fears, family commitments and personal needs, social position and ambitions. It can also measure the impact of advertising and discounts, the influence of store hours on the flow of customers, and the importance of the location of merchandise.

That’s how they study buying behavior and that’s how they design sales strategies: virtual media to multiply real profits.

Around the world spins a ring of satellites filled with millions and millions of words and images that come from the earth and are returned to it. Marvelous gadgets the size of your fingernail receive, process, and transmit at the speed of light messages that half a century ago would have required thirty tons of machinery. Miracles of technoscience in these technotimes: the most fortunate members of our media-mad society can now enjoy their vacations at the beach picking up the cell phone, receiving e-mail, checking the beeper, reading faxes, responding to messages on the answering machine by leaving messages on other answering machines, shopping by computer, and spending their free time playing video games or watching tiny portable TVs. In its awesome rise and dizzying flight, communications technology displays almighty powers. At midnight the computer kisses the forehead of Bill Gates, and at dawn he wakes up as the richest man in the world. Now on the market is a computer with a built-in microphone so you can talk to it. In cyberspace’s Celestial City, the computer marries the telephone and the television, and all of humanity is invited to the baptism of their astonishing children.

The emerging cybercommunity takes refuge in virtual reality, while real communities are transformed into an immense desert filled with people, each of whom lights a candle to his own saint, each of whom is encased in his own bubble. Forty years ago, according to polls, six out of ten North Americans trusted most people. But the trust index is down: today it’s only four out of ten. This sort of progress just promotes separation. The more relations between people get demonized — they’ll give you AIDS, or take away your job, or ransack your house — the more relations with machines get sacralized. The communications industry, that most dynamic sector of the world economy, sells abracadabras that open the doors to a new era in human history. But this so-well-communicated world looks too much like a kingdom of loners and the mute.

The dominant means of communication lie in a few hands that are always becoming fewer, and usually serve a system that reduces human relations to mutual use and mutual fear. The Internet galaxy has opened unexpected and valuable opportunities for alternative expression, allowing many voices that are not the echoes of power to broadcast their messages. But access to the information superhighway is still the privilege of developed countries, where 95 percent of users reside, and commercial advertising is doing its all to turn the Internet into the Businessnet. This new medium for freedom of communication is also a new medium for freedom of commerce. On the virtual planet there’s no risk of meeting up with customs officers or governments crazed with delusions of independence. In the middle of 1997, when advertising already occupied far more space on the Internet than educational material, the president of the United States ventured that every country in the world should keep the sale of goods and services by Internet duty-free, and from that point on, this issue has been high on the U.S. agenda in international organizations.

Control of cyberspace depends on telephone lines, and it’s no accident that the privatizing wave of recent years has yanked the phones out of the public’s hands around the world and given them over to the great communications conglomerates. Foreign phone companies have received far more U.S. investment than any other sector, while the concentration of capital has forged ahead at a gallop. Up to the middle of 1998, eight megacompanies dominated the phone trade in the United States; in just a week, these were reduced to five.

Television, the movie industry, the mass-circulation press, the great publishing houses and record companies, and the biggest radio stations, too, are all marching double-time toward monopoly. The global mass media have set the price of freedom of expression in the clouds; the opinioned, who have the right to listen, are ever more numerous, while the opinionators, who have the right to make themselves heard, are ever fewer. In the years following World War II, independent media still provided broad coverage of news, opinion, and the creative adventures that reveal and nourish cultural diversity. By 1980, the devouring of medium-sized and small companies had put most of the planetary market under the control of fifty corporations. Since then, independence and diversity have become rarer than a green dog.

According to producer Jerry Isenberg, the erosion of independent television in the United States over the past twenty years has been overwhelming. Independent companies used to supply between 30 and 50 percent of what was seen on the small screen; today the figure is barely 10 percent. Also revealing are the world’s advertising statistics: currently, half of all the money the world spends on advertising goes down the throat of only ten conglomerates that produce and distribute everything you can imagine involving images, words, and music.

Over the past five years the biggest U.S. communications companies doubled their international sales: General Electric, Disney/ABC, Time Warner/CNN, Viacom, Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), and Microsoft, Bill Gates’s baby, which rules the software market and has successfully broken into cable TV and TV production. These giants exercise oligopolistic power, which they share globally with the Murdoch empire, Sony of Japan, Bertelsmann of Germany, and one or two more. Among them they’ve woven a global spider’s web, their interests linked like so many knotted threads. Although these mastodons of communication pretend to compete, and sometimes even come to blows or exchange insults to satisfy the spectators, at the moment of truth the spectacle ends and they calmly carve up the planet.

The Globalized Hero

Secret Agent 007 no longer works for the British crown. Today James Bond is a sandwich-board man for many companies from many countries. Every scene in his 1997 film, Tomorrow Never Dies, is an advertisement. The infallible Bond checks his Omega watch, talks on an Ericsson cell phone, leaps from a rooftop onto the roof of a Heineken beer truck, flees in a BMW rented from Avis, pays with a Visa card, drinks Dom Pérignon champagne, undresses women previously dressed by Armani and Gucci and coiffed by L’Oréal, and fights an opponent in Kenzo attire.

By grace of cybernetic providence, Bill Gates amassed a sudden fortune equivalent to the entire annual budget of Argentina. In the middle of 1998, the United States government charged Microsoft with using monopolistic methods to crush its competitors. Some time previously, the federal government had put together a similar suit against IBM; after thirteen years of back-and-forth, the matter was left in murky waters. Judicial law can’t do much when faced with economic law, and capitalism brings on the concentration of power as inevitably as winter brings on the cold. The antitrust laws that once threatened the kings of oil and steel are unlikely ever to imperil the planetary machinery that sets the stage for the most dangerous of despotisms, that which acts on the heart and conscience of all humanity.

Technological diversity is said to be democratic diversity. Technology places images, words, and music within the reach of all, as never before. But this marvel becomes a dirty trick if private monopoly ends up imposing a one-image, one-word, one-tune dictatorship. Even taking into account the exceptions — and fortunately there are exceptions and they aren’t so few — this diversity tends to offer us thousands of ways of choosing between the same and the same. As Argentine journalist Ezequiel Fernández-Moores said of the news: “We’re told about everything, but we don’t find out a thing.”

Although the structures of power have become more international and it’s difficult to distinguish any borders, to say that the United States sits at the center of the nervous system of contemporary communications wouldn’t be a sin of primitive anti-imperialism. U.S. companies rule in film and TV, in information and computers. The world, an immense Wild West, begs to be won. For the United States, the global reach of its mass messages is a matter of state. The governments of the South tend to think of culture as playing a decorative function, but the tenants of the White House, at least on this matter, aren’t the least bit stupid. Every president knows that the political importance of the culture industry is at least as great as its economic value, great as that is. For years, to give an example, the government has used diplomatic pressure to promote Hollywood’s products, which never err on the side of diplomacy, in countries that attempt to protect their own national film industries.

Exemplary Lives/4

Admirers and enemies concur: his main virtue is his lack of scruples. They also appreciate his capacity for extermination, essential for success in today’s world. Busting unions and devouring competitors, Rupert Murdoch arose from nowhere to become a magnate of world communications. His meteoric career began when he inherited a newspaper in far-off Australia. Today he is the owner of 130 dailies in several countries, including the venerable Times of London and the English tabloids that in their glory days reported on who slept last night with Princess Diana. This modeler of minds and consoler of souls made the world’s biggest investment in satellite communications technology and controls one of the largest television networks on the planet. He also owns the Fox movie studios and HarperCollins publishing house, where he published several masterworks of world literature, including those of his friends Margaret Thatcher and Newt Gingrich.

Over half of Hollywood’s earnings already comes from foreign markets, sales that grow spectacularly year by year, while the Oscars attract a universal viewership comparable only to that drawn by soccer’s World Cup or the Olympics. The powers that be are no dummies; they know that imperial power largely rests on the unfettered spread of emotion, on illusions of success, symbols of strength, orders to consume, and elegies to violence. In the film Close to Eden by Nikita Mikhalkov, the peasants of Mongolia dance to rock music, smoke Marlboros, wear Donald Duck hats, and surround themselves with images of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. That other great master of the art of pulverizing your neighbor, the Terminator, is the character most admired by the children of the world: a 1997 UNESCO poll taken simultaneously in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America found that nine out of ten children identified with that musclebound purveyor of violence played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In the global village of the mediated universe, all continents flow together and all centuries occur at once. “We are from here and from everywhere at the same time, which is to say, from nowhere,” says Alain Touraine about television. “Images, always attractive to the public, juxtapose gas station jockeys and camels, Coca-Cola and Andean villages, blue jeans and an imposing castle.” Believing themselves condemned to choose between copying and casting themselves adrift, many local cultures, off-balance, torn loose, fading away, take refuge in the past. With desperate frequency, cultures seek shelter in religious fundamentalism or other absolute truths; they propose a return to times gone by, the more puritanical the better, as if there were no other response to overpowering modernity than intolerance and nostalgia.

The Spectacle

A criminal trial was the most successful product sold by U.S. television in 1995. The trial of former athlete O. J. Simpson, charged with two murders, filled the networks’ programming hours with innumerable episodes that won the fervent allegiance of the television audience.

Crime as spectacle: every one of the trial’s many actors played a role, and acting, good or bad, was more important than the guilt or innocence of the defendant, the validity of the charges, the propriety of the investigation, or the truth of the testimony. In his free time, the judge instructed other judges in the secret arts of playing a convincing judge on camera.

The Cold War has been left behind. Without it, the so-called free world has lost its magical justification for a holy crusade against the totalitarianism that until a short while ago ruled the countries of the East. Yet it grows more evident every day that communications manipulated by a handful of giants can be just as totalitarian as communications monopolized by the state. We are all obliged to accept freedom of expression as freedom of business. Culture is reduced to entertainment, and entertainment is a brilliant global enterprise. Life is reduced to spectacle, and spectacle is a source of economic and political power. News is reduced to advertising, and advertising rules.

Two out of three human beings live in the so-called Third World, but two out of three correspondents of the biggest news agencies work in Europe and the United States. What happened to the free flow of information and the respect for diversity enshrined in international treaties and praised in the speeches of political leaders? Most of the news the world receives comes from and is directed at a minority of humanity — understandably so from the point of view of the commercial operations that sell news and collect the lion’s share of their revenue in Europe and the United States. It’s a monologue by the North. Other regions and countries get little or no attention, except in the case of war or catastrophe, and then the journalists covering the story often don’t speak the language or have the least idea of local history or culture. News tends to be dubious and sometimes plainly, simply wrong. The South is condemned to look at itself through the eyes of those who scorn it.

In the early eighties, UNESCO proposed an initiative based on the truth that news is not a simple commodity but a social right and that the communications media should bear responsibilities commensurate with the educational purpose they serve. UNESCO set out to create an independent international news agency working from the countries that suffer the indifference of the factories of information and opinion. Even though the proposal was framed in ambiguous and cautious terms, the U.S. government thundered furiously against such an attack on freedom of information. What business did UNESCO have sticking its nose into matters pertaining to the living forces of the market? The United States walked out of UNESCO, slamming the door, as did Great Britain, which tends to act as if it were a colony of the country that was once its colony. At that point the idea of promoting international news unhampered by political or commercial interests was shelved. Any attempt to gain independence, timid as it may be, threatens the international division of labor by which a handful of people actively produce news and opinion and the rest of us passively consume it.

Little is said about the South, and never or almost never from the South’s point of view. In general, mass media news of the South reflects the prejudices of an outsider looking on from above and beyond. Between ads, television tends to stick to images of hunger and war. These horrors, these “fatalities,” occur in a hellish underworld and serve only to emphasize the paradise of consumer society, which offers cars to suppress distance, facial creams to suppress wrinkles, dyes to suppress gray hair, and pills to suppress pain, among its many suppressive marvels. Frequently, those images of the “other” world come from Africa. African hunger is portrayed as a natural catastrophe, and African wars are strictly “a black thing,” bloody rituals of “tribes” who have a savage habit of cutting one another to pieces. Images of hunger never allude, not even in passing, to colonial pillage. Never do they mention the responsibility of Western powers that yesterday bled Africa through the slave trade and single-crop plantations and that today perpetuate the hemorrhage through hunger wages and ruinous prices. The same is true of news about wars; there is always the same silence about the colonial legacy, always the same impunity for the white boss who mortgaged Africa’s independence, leaving in his wake corrupt bureaucracies, despotic military officers, artificial borders, and mutual hatred. And always the same omission of any reference to the northern industry of death that sells the weapons that so encourage the South to go on killing itself.

The Information Age

Just before Christmas 1989, we all viewed horrendous evidence of the killings ordered by Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania.

The crazed despot who liked to be called the “Blue Danube of Socialism” killed four thousand dissidents in the city of Timişoara. We saw many of the bodies, thanks to the global reach of television and the good work of the international agencies that feed images to newspapers and magazines. Long rows of dead bodies, deformed by torture, shocked the world.

Later some papers published a correction, though not many read it. Killings had indeed occurred at Timişoara, but the victims numbered about a hundred and included some of the dictatorship’s henchmen. What’s more, those hair-raising images had been staged. The bodies had nothing to do with the story and were disfigured not by torture but by the passage of time. The news factories unearthed them from a cemetery and had them pose for the camera.

At first view, as the writer Wole Soyinka once said, the map of Africa looks like the creation of a demented weaver who paid no attention to the texture, color, or design of the cloth he was making. Many of the borders that splintered black Africa into over forty pieces can only be explained by a desire for military or commercial control; they have nothing at all to do with historical roots or nature. The colonial powers who drew up the borders were also good at manipulating ethnic contradictions. Divide et impera: one fine day the king of Belgium decided that Tutsis were those who had more than eight cows and Hutus were those who had fewer in the territory today occupied by Rwanda and Burundi. Although the Tutsis, shepherds, and the Hutus, farmers, had different origins, they shared several centuries of common history in the same physical space, spoke the same language, and lived together in peace. They did not know they were enemies but ended up believing it with such fervor that in 1994 massacres between Hutus and Tutsis cost close to a million lives. In the news coverage of this butchery, we never once heard, even by chance — and only rarely did we read — any acknowledgment of Germany’s or Belgium’s colonial assaults on the tradition of peaceful coexistence between two sister peoples or of France’s later contribution of weapons and military aid to facilitate mutual extermination.

Let’s Play War/1

Yenuri Chihuala died in 1995 during the border war between Peru and Ecuador. He was fourteen. Like many other boys from the poor barrios of Lima, he had been recruited by force. They took him away and left no footprints.

Television, radio, and the print media all praised the child martyr as a role model who gave his life for Peru. During those days of war, the daily El Comercio devoted its front page to glorifying the very young people it normally curses on its crime and sports pages. The cholos trinchudos—literally “carved-up half-breeds”—grandchildren of Indians, poor kids with spiky hair and dark skin, are heroes of the fatherland when they wear a military uniform on the battlefield, but these same noble savages are dangerous beasts, violent by nature, when they wear civilian clothes on city streets and in soccer stadiums.

What happens to poor countries is what happens to the poor of every country: the mass media only deign to glance at them when they suffer some spectacular misfortune that will be a hit in the viewers market. How many people must be slain by war or earthquake or drowned in floods for their countries to become news and show up on the map of the world? How many ghosts must someone dying of hunger accumulate before the cameras focus on him for once in his life? The world is like a stage for a gigantic reality show. The poor, the ones who always get overlooked, only appear on TV as some hidden camera’s object of ridicule or as actors in their own cruelties. Those unknown need to be known, the invisible to become visible, the uprooted to have roots. If something doesn’t exist on television, does it exist in reality? Pariahs dream of glory on the small screen, where any sow’s ear can turn into a silk purse. To get to the Olympus where the telegods reside, one poor soul on a variety show even shot himself on camera.

Let’s Play War/2

Video games have a huge and growing public of all ages. Their proponents say that the violence in video games is innocent because it imitates the news and that such entertainment is good for keeping children off the streets and away from the lure of cigarettes.

Video games speak a language made up of the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns, horror-movie music, agonized screams, and barked commands: “Finish him!” “Beat ’em up!” “Shoot ’em!” The war of the future, the future as war: the most popular video games take place on battlefields where the player has to shoot without a moment’s hesitation, destroying anything that moves. No pause or truce is possible against an enemy stampede of despised extraterrestrials, ferocious robots, humanoid hordes, ghostly cyberdemons, mutant monsters, and skulls that stick out their tongues. The more adversaries the player kills, the closer he comes to winning. In the already-classic Mortal Kombat, you get extra points for blows that decapitate the enemy and send his head flying, that knock his bloody heart right out of his breast, or blast his head into a thousand pieces.

There are also a few video games that are not about war. Car races, for example. In one of them, a good way to score points is to run over pedestrians.

Lately, talk shows have become even more popular than soap operas in some Latin American countries. When the girl who was raped is interviewed, she sobs as if the man were raping her all over again … This monster is the new Elephant Man. Look, ladies and gentlemen, don’t miss this incredible sight … The bearded lady wants a boyfriend … A fat man says he’s pregnant. Thirty or so years ago in Brazil, freak shows brought scores of candidates out of the woodwork and garnered huge TV audiences. Who is the shortest dwarf in the country? Who has a schnoz so long his feet stay dry in the shower? Who is the wretchedest wretch of all? A parade of miracles passed through the studios: a girl with ears eaten by rats; an idiot chained to a bedpost for thirty years; a woman who was the daughter, sister-in-law, mother-in-law, and wife of the drunk who made her a cripple. And every wretch had fans who screamed from the balconies in a chorus: “The winner! The winner!”

The poor nearly always get top billing in crime stories. Any suspect who’s poor can be freely filmed, photographed, and put on display when the police arrest him. That way he’s sentenced by TV and the press before the trial begins. The media declare the pernicious poor guilty from the word go, the same way they condemn pernicious countries, and there is no appeal.

At the end of the eighties, Saddam Hussein was demonized by the same mass media that had previously idolized him. When he became the Satan of Baghdad, Hussein shone as a star of evil in the galaxy of world politics, and the media’s lie machine took care of convincing the world that Iraq was a threat to humanity. At the beginning of 1991, the United States launched Operation Desert Storm with the backing of twenty-eight countries and broad public support. The United States, having just invaded Panama, invaded Iraq because Iraq had invaded Kuwait. With a million extras and at a cost of $1 billion a day, the big show, which writer Tom Engelhardt called the greatest megaproduction in the history of television, was a winner in the stadium of international TV, earning high ratings in every country — and on the New York Stock Exchange, which reached record heights.

For History Class

During the year 1998 the globalized media dedicated the most space and their best energies to the romance between the president of the planet and a plump, voracious, talkative woman named Monica Lewinsky.

In every country we were all Lewinskyized. We had her for breakfast, reading the papers; we had her for lunch, listening to the radio; and we had her for dinner, watching TV.

I think something else happened in 1998, but I can’t remember what.

The art of war, cannibalism as gastronomy: the Gulf war was an interminable, obscene spectacle that paid homage to high-tech weapons and disparaged human life. In that war of machines led by satellites, radars, and computers, TV screens showcased beautiful missiles and marvelous rockets, extraordinary airplanes and smart bombs that with admirable precision turned people into dust. The venture killed a total of 115 North Americans. Nobody bothered to count the Iraqis, though estimates put the figure as high as a hundred thousand. They never appeared on camera; the only victim shown on TV was an oil-slicked duck. Later on, it came out that the image was a fake; the duck was from another war. Retired U.S. Navy Admiral Gene LaRocque commented to Studs Terkel: “We now kill people without ever seeing them. Now you push a button thousands of miles away.… Since it’s all done by remote control, there’s no feeling of remorse.… Then we come home in triumph.”

A few years later, at the beginning of 1998, the United States tried to repeat this feat. The immense communications apparatus geared up once again to serve the immense military apparatus by convincing the world that Iraq was, again, a threat to humanity. This time, the excuse was chemical and bacteriological weapons. Years before, Hussein had used U.S.-made poison gas against Iran and then had used the same gas to crush the Kurds, and nobody’s hair got the least bit mussed. But panic descended suddenly with the news that Iraq possessed an arsenal of bacteriological weapons: anthrax, bubonic plague, botulism, cancer cells, and other lethal pathogenic agents that any lab in the United States can purchase over the phone or by mail from a company called American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), located just outside Washington. United Nations inspectors, however, found nothing in the palaces of a thousand and one nights, and war was postponed until the next pretext.

The Electronic Friend

The players, absorbed, in a trance, don’t speak to one another.

On the way home from work or to work from home, thirty million Japanese find themselves playing Pachinko and to Pachinko they offer their souls. Players spend hours sitting in front of the machine, shooting little steel balls at needles to win prizes. Every machine is run by a computer that makes sure the players nearly always lose and also that they win once in a while to keep the flame of faith burning. Since gambling for money is illegal in Japan, you play with cards bought with money, and the prizes are paid in gadgets that can be exchanged for money around the corner.

In 1998, the Japanese made offerings of $500 million a day in the temples of Pachinko.

Manipulation of world news by the military isn’t the least bit surprising if you consider the modern history of communications technology. The Pentagon has always been the principal funder of and the principal client for all new developments. The first electronic computer was created to fill a Pentagon purchase order. Communications satellites grew out of military projects, and it was the Pentagon that first set up the Internet to coordinate its operations across the globe. The multimillion-dollar investments made by the armed forces simplified and accelerated the development of communications technology and made it possible to promote their criminal acts worldwide as if they were contributions to world peace.

Fortunately, history is also nourished by paradox. The Pentagon never suspected that the Internet, born to program the world as a great battlefield, would be used to spread the words of pacifist movements usually condemned to near silence. That said, the primary effect of the spectacular development of communications technology and information systems has been to radiate violence as a way of life and as the dominant culture. The communications media, reaching ever more people in more places, accustom us to the inevitability of violence and train us for it from childhood.

On screens — movie, TV, computer — things blow up and bleed ceaselessly. A research project at two universities in Buenos Aires measured the frequency of violence on children’s TV in 1994: one scene every three minutes. The researchers concluded that, by the age of ten, Argentine children have seen eighty-eight thousand acts of violence, not counting the many violent incidents suggested but not portrayed. The dose increases, they found, on weekends. A year before, a poll taken on the outskirts of Lima revealed that nearly every parent condoned that sort of programming: “Those are the programs the kids like.” “That way they’re entertained.” “If they like them, it must be okay.” “It’s better. That way they learn what life is like.” And also, “It doesn’t affect them, it’s nothing.” At the same time, research carried out by the Rio de Janeiro state government concluded that half of all the violent scenes broadcast on the Globo television network were on children’s programs; Brazilian children get brutality shot at them every two minutes and forty-six seconds.

Hours spent in front of the television easily surpass those spent in the classroom, when hours are spent in the classroom at all. It is a universal truth that, with or without school, TV programs are children’s primary source of formation, information, and deformation, as well as their principal source of topics for conversation. The predominance of TV pedagogy is particularly alarming in Latin America in light of the recent decline of public education. In their speeches politicians are prepared to die for education, and in their acts they proceed to kill it, thus liberating children to take more classes in consumption and violence from the small screen. In their speeches politicians denounce the plague of crime and demand an iron hand, and in their acts they encourage the mental colonization of the next generation. From early on, children are trained to find their identities in merchandise that symbolizes power and to get hold of it with a gun.

Do the media reflect reality or shape it? Who begets whom? Is it the chicken or the egg? Wouldn’t a better zoological metaphor be a snake biting its own tail? We give the people what they want, say the media to absolve themselves. But the supply they offer in response to demand creates more demand for more of the same supply; it becomes a habit, creates a need for itself, and turns into an addiction. In the streets there is as much violence as on television, say the media. But violence in the media, which expresses the violence of the world, also promotes more violence.

Europe has had some healthy experiences with the media. In several countries television and radio achieve a high level of quality as public services, run not by the state but directly by organizations that represent diverse sectors of civil society. These experiences, threatened today by a stampede of competition from commercial outlets, offer examples of communication that is truly communicative and democratic, able to speak to people’s human dignity and their right to information and knowledge. But that is not the approach that has been promoted internationally. The world has been slipped a lethal cocktail of blood, Valium, and advertising by private U.S. television networks. They’ve imposed a model based on the proven notion that good is what makes the most profit at the least cost and bad is what pays no dividends.

In Greece at the time of Pericles, there was a tribunal for judging things. It punished the knife, for example, that had been the weapon in a crime, sentencing it to be broken into pieces or thrown into the depths of the sea. Today would it be fair to condemn the television set as the Taliban does? Those who consider TV to have an evil heart slander it by calling it the idiot box. Yes, commercial television reduces communication to business, but obvious though it seems when you say it, TV sets are innocent of the use they are put to and the abuse committed with them. That fact shouldn’t stop us from raising an alarm about what all the evidence makes evident: this, the most worshiped totem of our times, is the medium that has been employed most successfully to impose on the four cardinal points of the earth the idols, myths, and dreams designed by the engineers of emotions and mass-produced by the factories of the soul.

Language/5

Several anthropologists traveled about the countryside on Colombia’s Pacific coast in search of life stories. An old man told them: “Don’t record me, I speak so ugly. Better to get my grandchildren.”

Not far from there, anthropologists traveled about the countryside of Grand Canary Island. Another old man welcomed them, served them coffee, and regaled them with hallucinatory tales delightfully recounted. And then he, too, said: “We speak ugly. They’re the ones who can talk, the kids.”

The grandchildren, the kids, the ones who speak pretty, speak like the TV.

Peter Menzel and other photographers compiled a book of families from all over the planet. Their portraits of family intimacy in England and Kuwait, Italy and Japan, Mexico, Vietnam, Russia, Albania, Thailand, and South Africa are quite different. But all these families have something in common and that something is television. There are 1.2 billion TV sets in the world. Recent surveys in the Americas, from north to south, reveal the omnipresence and omnipotence of the small screen:

• in four out of ten homes in Canada, parents are unable to recall a single family meal eaten without the TV on

• tied to the electronic leash, children in the United States spend forty times as many hours watching TV as talking to their parents

• in most homes in Mexico, the furniture is arranged around the television

• in Brazil, one-fourth of the population admits they would not know what to do with their lives if television did not exist.

Working, sleeping, and watching television are the three activities that eat up most of people’s time in today’s world — something politicians are well aware of. This electronic network, which brings the pulpit into millions and millions of homes, delivers an audience bigger than any ever dreamed of by the many preachers the world has produced. The power of persuasion depends not on content — the greater or lesser truth of the message — but rather on imagery and the efficacy of the ad blitz to sell the product. Detergents are pushed at shoppers the same way presidents are pushed at the public. Ronald Reagan was the first telepresident in history, a mediocre actor who, in his long years in Hollywood, learned how to lie with sincerity before the camera’s eye and whose velvet voice won him a job as spokesperson for General Electric. In the era of television, Reagan needed nothing else to have a political career. His ideas, not very numerous, came from Reader’s Digest. (Writer Gore Vidal observes that the complete set of Reader’s Digest was as important to Reagan as the collected works of Montesquieu were for Jefferson.) With the help of the small screen, President Reagan was able to convince the U.S. public that Nicaragua was a threat. Standing in front of a map of North America with a red stain slowly spreading up from the south, Reagan demonstrated that Nicaragua was planning to invade the United States through Texas.

After Reagan, other telepoliticians started winning. Fernando Collor, once a model for Christian Dior, became the president of Brazil in 1990 thanks to television. The same TV that produced him and blocked a victory of the left overthrew him a couple of years later. The rise of Silvio Berlusconi to the summit of political power in Italy in 1994 would be inexplicable without television. Berlusconi exercised influence over a vast TV audience after he obtained, in the name of democratic diversity, a monopoly on private television. It was that monopoly, along with his success as the owner of the Milan soccer club, that provided an effective catapult for his political ambitions.

In every country, politicians fear being punished or shut out by television. On the news and on the soap operas, there are heroes and villains, victims and executioners. No politician likes to play the bad guy, but bad guys at least get covered. It’s far worse to be ignored. Politicians are terrified that television will fail to notice them, condemning them to civic death. Whoever does not appear on TV does not exist in reality; whoever disappears from TV leaves the world. To have a presence on the political stage, you have to appear with a certain regularity on the small screen, and that regularity, not easily achieved, does not tend to come free. The owners of television offer politicians a platform, and the politicians return the favor by offering the owners impunity; without fear of retribution, they can continue placing a public service at the service of their private pocketbooks.

Politicians are not unaware, can’t afford the luxury of being unaware, of the low standing of their profession and the magical, seductive power that television, and to a much lesser degree radio and the press, exercise over the multitudes. A poll taken in several Latin American countries in 1996 confirmed what you hear in the streets: nine out of ten Guatemalans and Ecuadorians have a poor opinion or worse of their parliamentarians, and nine out of ten Peruvians and Bolivians do not trust political parties. In contrast, two out of three Latin Americans believe what they see and hear in the media. José Ignacio López Vigil, an activist in alternative media, summed it up well: “In Latin America, if you want a political career, your best option is to become a TV anchor, a radio host, or a singer.”

To win and consolidate popular legitimacy, some politicians take direct control of television. The most powerful and conservative of Brazilian politicians, for example, Antonio Carlos Magalhães, graciously received a concession for private TV in the state of Bahía, and in his fiefdom he runs a virtual monopoly in association with Rede Globo, the Brazilian television giant. Lidice da Mata, the mayor of Bahía, was elected by the voters of the Workers Party, a powerful force that is a party of the left and, what’s worse, is proud of it. In 1994, the mayor complained that she was never able to get on Magalhães’s stations, not even with paid ads or when there were floods, mud slides, strikes, or other emergency situations that required urgent communication with the public. Bahía’s television, a magic mirror, reflected only the face of its owner.

There are channels that claim to be public in many Latin American countries, but that’s just one of the things states do to run down the reputation of the state. With a few heroic exceptions, state programming goes over like a lead balloon; thanks to Paleolithic equipment and ridiculous salaries, the picture is often fuzzy. Only private television has the means to capture a mass audience. Throughout Latin America, this prodigious source of money and votes lies in a few hands. In Uruguay, three families own all private TV. This family oligolopoly swallows money and spits out advertisements, buys canned programming from other countries for a pittance, and rarely gives work to local artists or runs the risk of producing a quality program of its own; when that miracle occurs, theologians claim it as proof of the existence of God. Two big multimedia conglomerates control the lion’s share of Argentina’s television. In Colombia two groups hold television and most other important media in their hands. Televisa of Mexico and Rede Globo of Brazil are absolute monarchies barely disguised by the existence of other minor kingdoms.

Praise for Imagination

A few years ago, the BBC asked British children if they preferred television or radio. Nearly all favored TV, a finding on the order of saying that cats meow or that dead bodies don’t breathe. But among the few children who chose radio, there was one who explained, “I like radio better, because I see prettier pictures.”

Latin America is a very lucrative market for the U.S. image industry. It consumes a lot of television and produces little other than a few news shows and successful soap operas. Soap operas, which the Brazilians do wonderfully, are Latin America’s only TV export. Once in a while they take up topics from this world, like political corruption, drug trafficking, street children, or landless peasants, but the president of Mexico’s Televisa put his finger on what makes soap operas so big when he explained at the beginning of 1998: “We sell dreams. We have no intention of reflecting reality. We sell dreams like Cinderella’s.”

A hit soap opera is generally the only place in the world where Cinderella marries the prince, evil is punished and good rewarded, the blind recover their sight, and the poorest of the poor receive an inheritance that turns them into the richest of the rich. These “big snakes,” as they are called because of their many episodes, create an illusory space where social contradictions dissolve in tears or honey. Religious faith promises you a ticket to paradise in the afterlife, but even atheists can get into the soap at the end of a workday. This other reality, that of the characters, takes the place of ordinary reality for as long as each episode lasts, and during that magical time television is a portable temple that offers escape, redemption, and salvation to souls without shelter. Someone, I don’t know who, once said, “The poor adore luxury. Only intellectuals like to see poverty.” All poor people, no matter how poor, are invited into the sumptuous settings of the soaps, becoming intimates of the rich in their moments of pleasure as well as their bouts of misfortune and tears: one of the most popular Latin American soap operas of all time was called The Rich Cry Too.

The intrigues of millionaires constitute the usual plots. For weeks, months, years, or centuries, the people in the telebalconies bite their nails, waiting for the mistreated young servant girl to learn that she is really the daughter of the company president and to beat out the nasty rich girl for the hand of the handsome young man of the house. The poor girl’s endless suffering, her unrequited love, her lonely tears in her servant’s room are interspersed with entanglements on the tennis court, at pool parties, on the stock exchange, and in the company boardroom, where other characters also suffer, and sometimes kill, to gain a controlling share. It’s Cinderella in the time of neoliberal passion.