Bush, Gatsby, Oprah and Hip Consumer Culture

[Jcrowley]

In a more literate age, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, limned characters emblematic of his era. Yet the words he wrote in the 1920s still resonate today as a powerful indictment of those who created and enable men like Bush -- the corrupt corporatist classes of the present time:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . ." (Pg. 180-181)

Carelessness is the manner by which extroverts manifest despair. Being a nation that considers introspection a loser’s gambit, carelessness has been our national mode d'être since the country's inception. Bush is only its latest manifestation.

And the mess is piling up by the hour. As was the case with Gatsby, beneath the carefully constructed image and manic consumption of the UberCulture, the American empire is doomed. Although, we, unlike Gatsby, for all our cunning artifices and desperate subterfuge, are not flaming out and falling amid the glittering debris of frenetic, jazz-imbrued bacchanals -- we have only managed shopping spree debt, overpriced coffee jags, McMansion-enclosed anomie and porn habituation.

Gatsby remains an emblem of the hollowness howling beneath the convivial veneer of capitalist man. An updated version of the model is Oprah Winfrey.

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1286.shtml

Madison Avenue's favorite term for the counterculture was "the Now Generation," a phrase that implied absolute up-to-dateness in every sense. It also intimated what admen felt was the young's most important characteristic as consumers: their desire for immediate gratification, their craving for the new, their intolerance for the slow-moving, the penurious, the thrifty. Admen believed they had found an entire generation given over to self-fulfillment by whatever means necessary-which would, of course, ultimately mean by shopping. Grey's John Adams made what is perhaps the bluntest statement of this perception, having been reported by Advertising Age in 1971 to have said

     There is nothing to support the contention that the youth are anti-materialistic. "They are in the peak acquisitive years," he said, "and their relative affluence enables them to consume goods and services at a rate unheard of for their age level"

     In 1968, creative partisan Bob Fearon penned an impressionistic appreciation of the young for Madison Avenue. Written in a curious colloquial style that was probably meant to demonstrate his familiarity with the intricacies of youth culture, the article aims to enlighten advertising men about the tastes and anti-advertising predilections of the inscrutable young ("They talk to him. They tell him things like that. And he listens. He doesn't condemn.... And he ends up knowing.") Perhaps the most important feature of the young people Fearon discusses, despite their hotly professed antimaterialism and their suspicion of consumerism, is their heightened appetite for the new. Unlike their parents, the hip new youth are far more receptive to obsolescence; buying goods for the moment, discarding them quickly, and moving on to the next:
" When the new generation buys they want it for now. They're not interested in how long it will last."
These young people have a different idea about thrift. They have a new definition of value. They accept obsolescence. They want the new, improved version tomorrow. Very important words. New, improved. More than ever before. Everything is instant. Now. Everything is faster."

http://2003.memefest.org/shared/www/conquest_of_cool.html