T A B L E+T A L K Were you a fan or a friend of recently deceased writer Kathy Acker? Remember her in the Books section of Table Talk R E V I E W S Truman Capote By William Georgiades (12/22/97) R E C E N T L Y Save these books! By Dwight Garner (12/04/97) The art of life By Jay Parini (11/19/97) The Gospel according to Paul By Mark Hertsgaard (11/12/97) The Salon interview: Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) The man who took sex out of the closet By Scott McLemee (11/05/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the BOOKS ARCHIVE The Conquest of Cool Commodify your dissent		W E R E_ T H E '60s a fraud? ____THERE NEVER WAS A COUNTERCULTURE, SAY ____THE BAFFLER'S ANGRY YOUNG REVISIONISTS, ____AND THERE STILL ISN'T -- WE'RE ALL ENSNARED ____IN THE SEAMLESS WEB OF CAPITALISM. THEN AGAIN, ____MAYBE THEY'VE JUST BEEN WATCHING TOO MUCH TV. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism" By Thomas Frank University of Chicago Press, 287 pages "Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler" Edited by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland W.W. Norton, 287 pages BY GARY KAMIYA | Pass the Thorazine, dude! The '60s are having a dreadful flashback. It isn't enough that the paisley decade has been bashed for years by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Allen Bloom and the increasingly demented Robert Bork. Now comes a band of young idealists, lefties and aficionados of radical music who should be its rightful heirs -- but instead of singing the praises of the Age of Aquarius, they are even harsher on it than the croaking elders of the right. It would appear that soon the only defenders of the '60s faith will be a handful of graybeards with old Captain Beefheart albums in their closets, and most of us dropped too much acid to remember what went on back then anyway. For these youthful critics of the '60s counterculture, led by Thomas Frank, éminence grise of a feisty Chicago culture-criticism magazine called the Baffler, author of "The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism" and co-editor of the Baffler anthology "Commodify Your Dissent," the decade was about as "transgressive" as that ad in which vaguely loaded-looking young dudes with long hair merrily push a cart loaded with Budweiser across a golf course. The '60s, according to these new revisionists, were a fraud, a celebrity-driven media spectacle in which spoiled middle-class kids "kept the establishment gasping in collective outrage" at their "mock-threatening antics." The decade's much-vaunted music was "pleasantries" and "liberationist pap," its fabled politics "posturing" and "rosy bromides," its spirituality about as profound as a soak in a Marin hot tub with a doobie. Like the Holy Roman Empire, of which it was famously said that it was neither holy, Roman nor an empire, for Frank the "revolutionary counterculture" was neither revolutionary nor countercultural. As he writes in "The Conquest of Cool": "From a distance of thirty years, its language and music seem anything but the authentic populist culture they yearned so desperately to be: from contrived cursing to saintly communalism to the embarrassingly faked Woody Guthrie accents of Bob Dylan and to the astoundingly pretentious work of groups like Iron Butterfly and The Doors, the relics of the counterculture reek of affectation and phoniness, the leisure-dreams of white suburban children like those who made up so much of the Grateful Dead's audience throughout the 1970s and 1980s." But this dubious era did have a point, according to Frank, although not the one that its participants, enslaved by a particularly giddy variant of false consciousness, thought it was. What the '60s really did, he says, was roll out the mandala-shaped waterbed upon which a permanent orgy of capitalist hyper-consumption could take place. "The counterculture may be more valuably understood as a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class, " Frank writes, "a colorful installment in the twentieth century drama of consumer subjectivity." How did the '60s counterculture, with its anti-materialistic, tune in-turn on-drop out ethos, end up abetting the consumer capitalism that now rules the world? The answer is unexpected: The capitalists were hipper than the hippies! Cutting-edge businessmen, Frank argues, far from trying to repress the counterculture, actually welcomed its allegedly "subversive" teachings -- and used them to extend the dominion of business into every nook and cranny of American life. As Frank writes, "Many in American business ... imagined the counterculture not as an enemy to be undermined or a threat to consumer culture but as a hopeful sign, a symbolic ally in their own struggles against the mountains of dead-weight procedure and hierarchy that had accumulated over the years." In "The Conquest of Cool," he shows in fascinating and often hilarious detail how certain sectors of American business -- particularly advertising and men's fashion -- embraced countercultural ideas, shaking up their own ossified corporate structures and absurdly scientific notions of advertising and creating a hip, irreverent capitalist revolution. Rebel admen like Bill Bernbach, who created the self-mocking Volkswagen ads, tied into and even helped form this new, ironic Zeitgeist of Cool. Frank goes so far as to say that hipness was "the magic cultural formula by which the life of consumerism could be extended indefinitely." Frank has hit upon an original and counterintuitive notion here, and much of what he says rings true. But his larger claims about the influence and persistence of hipness in business culture seem overblown. Does anyone really believe that consumerism, that unchallenged economic juggernaut that doth bestride our little world like a Costco Colossus, would have died without the intervention of a few "advanced" ad men in the '60s? As for his assertion that hipness now utterly reigns in advertising, Frank must either be tuned to a really slammin' station or be working with Lawrence Welk's definition of "hip." The commercial enticements on my tube, for the most part, are as cornball as they ever were -- for every Nike ad with William S. Burroughs, there are five United "Fly the Friendly Skies" manifestoes; for every unshaven-hipsters-in-the-hood Lucky Strike ad, 10 "Like a rock" Chevy truck appeals. As for Frank's denunciation of the '60s counterculture, it isn't self-evident why the mere fact that some businessmen embraced certain countercultural ideas means those ideas weren't genuinely subversive. Wasn't the process Frank depicts simply co-optation -- The Man ripping off authentic hip culture for his own plastic purposes? Frank allows that a certain amount of co-optation took place, but he largely rejects what he calls "the co-optation theory" because he doesn't believe that '60s culture was either authentic or revolutionary to begin with. You can't co-opt something that was superficial, celebrity-driven, middle-class and apolitical. We'll examine this argument later; for the moment, what's important to understand is that Frank and his colleagues' unflattering appraisal of the '60s is inextricably bound up with their utter contempt for contemporary American society. In truth, '60s-bashing isn't their main aim: They enjoy pouring the skanky water out of the countercultural bong as much as the next ambitious young turk, but their real target is less a 30-year-old myth than today's consumer culture, which they savage with a contempt that recalls H.L. Mencken's attacks on the "booboisie." (It also recalls the purpler revolutionary pronouncements of the '60s, a fact to which they remain oddly oblivious.) America, they intone, is a "botched civilization" to which "the last twenty years have brought a ... physical and social decay so unspeakably vast, so enormously obscene that we can no longer gauge the destruction with words." There is no escape from the smiling nightmare: "Our collective mental universe is being radically circumscribed, enclosed within the tightest parameters of all time ... We will be able to achieve no distance from business culture since we will no longer have a life, a history, a consciousness apart from it." Forget Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin: Wal-Mart and Disney are the real kings of thought control. Faced with this total horror, this seamless web of late-capitalist domination, Frank finds consolation only in total rejection: The "scream of torment is this country's only mark of health; the sweet shriek of outrage is the only sign that sanity survives amid the stripmalls and hazy clouds of Hollywood desire." Once your ears have stopped ringing, you realize that the shriek of Frank and his tormented colleagues may be sweet, but it is not exactly original. It's a round-the-clock Unhappy Hour at the Baffler Bar, but what they're pouring isn't exactly top-shelf stuff: two ounces of Generic Cultural Bile Mix, topped off with one watered '90s shot of Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance Liqueur. (The fact that Marcuse's post-consumer-society Marxism inspired many '60s radicals is somewhat inconvenient for Frank's thesis.) If this be Marxism, however, it is a Marxism that dare not speak its name, at least not in these two books. "Socialism," let alone "communism," are words that never pass the Bafflers' lips, despite their incessant savaging of business, the consumer society and capitalism itself. Frank and his colleagues prefer to speak of "solidarity," "grass roots," "a rich, collective public life that all can freely partake of" and other such meaningless left-scented pieties. (To be fair, I am told that the Baffler does frequently run pieces about concrete social and political issues: "Commodify Your Dissent," however, is all culture criticism.) The nihilistic logic of Frank's views rules out any hope: We're all trapped in an infinitely large Circuit City TV showroom forever, and the best thing we can do is scream until the boys from Official Culture come and unplug our brains for the last time. Like all Jeremiads delivered from the prophetic heights, this one is a bit intimidating. What if Frank is right? What if next week the brazen trumpeter announces that we've all been living in Consumer Sodom and the jig is up? It will be a bit late then to try to surreptitiously return that palm-sized CD player to the Good Guys! All K-Mart shoppers will be turned into huge boxes of Morton's Salt and used to flavor the simple, yet wholesome, repast of the Bafflers. So as I reclined in what I had previously taken to be contentment before my 27-inch Panasonic and watched a Budweiser Halftime Report, I asked myself: Has the consumer society taken over my soul? Has the world already ended with a whimper? Is my brain already enclosed within the tightest parameters of all time? I thought about it. I gave it my best shot. I considered the Poulan/Weed-Eater Bowl, and Channel One's classroom TV, and Rupert Murdoch's circus-and-gladiator programming, and "dramatic re-creations" of real events, and the increasing number of "real events" that feel like dramatic re-creations. I even thought about the unspeakable tragedy that Frank and Baffler co-founder Keith White say opened their eyes to the true evils of corporate culture and turned them into negative-dialectic-slinging rebels -- the fact that their favorite bands were prevented by "a smug alliance of hippies and businessmen" from signing major-label contracts. This last one staggered me, I admit, and I was ready to give up on this whole botched civilization. Then I said, "Nah." Totally pessimistic, sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-ad-agency sermons like Frank's require really good preaching to convince you -- and even then, the effect tends to wear off in the morning. But Frank's version of the cultural apocalypse is much too doctrinaire, too threadbare, too lacking in either alternatives or psychological depth, to ever feel like much more than an irate gesture by a smart young guy who really, really hates advertising. Frank has a thing about advertising. He seems to have been born without a mute button in his brain -- a serious defect in this age. Most of us are able to tune out the sales pitches, hard and soft, hip and square, smart and idiotic, that yammer incessantly from tube and magazine and peer down from billboards. We shrug them off as capitalism's 60-cycle hum, sometimes amusing, sometimes nauseating. We don't regard them as defining either our culture or our own lives. Not Frank; his vision is closer to the mordant imaginings of novelist David Foster Wallace, who in "Infinite Jest" conjures an America so hegemonically controlled by corporations that even the years are sponsored. The mechanical squeak of advertising, for Frank, is the sound of our culture's heartbeat -- and he wants to unplug the machine. There's something salutary in this, something refreshing about the Bafflers' categorical rejection of the major corporate power-conduits of our culture. Their problem is that their worldview is too Manichaean. They're constantly denouncing, in ways that ironically mirror the overblown rhetoric of archetypal '60s rebels like Mario Savio, the Panthers and the Weathermen, not just specific instances of corporate propaganda but Big Brother-like entities that don't actually exist: "official culture," "The Culture Trust," "official America," "the Architects of the Mind Industry," "the country's official collective identity." From these paranoid constructions, it is a logical step to imagining a Master Plan for Total Control, "the great cultural project of corporate America" -- and so they are led into sophomoric, vulgar-Marxist formulations like "They [record companies] seek fresh cultural fuel so that the machinery of stupidity may run incessantly." Well, actually record company moguls seek fresh cultural fuel so that their Mercedes may run incessantly, which is altogether a different thing. Moralizing attempts at corporate or governmental control pop up here and there in American life, usually ineffectively (see Time-Warner's dithering over gangsta rap) and are structural in certain sectors like television, but -- as the Bafflers well know and incessantly bemoan -- it's the Almighty Market that really rules. Those record moguls would sign the most "negationist" Japanese noise band that ever blew out a 200-watt Marshall stack if they thought they could make a few bucks. And this is really what bothers Frank: You can't fight the system because the system won't fight back. You scream and scream, and at the end of the day you're a celebrated Angry Young Man and rising literary star, interviewed in Details. N E X T+P A G E+| Baffled by the '60s: Confusing the TV version with the real thing - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID SCOTT SINCLAIR