Buying Brand Obama
by Chris Hedges
Monday, May 4, 2009
TruthDig.com

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel
good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our
elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of
corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia
and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about
being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our
president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun
out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being
duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our
interest.

What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His
administration has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer
dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to reinflate
the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will
leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand Obama has allocated
nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our
doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate
that 70,000 troops will remain for the next 15 to 20 years. Brand Obama
has expanded the war in Afghanistan, including the use of drones sent on
cross-border bombing runs into Pakistan that have doubled the number of
civilians killed over the past three months. Brand Obama has refused to
ease restrictions so workers can organize and will not consider
single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. And Brand
Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including
the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws or
restore habeas corpus.

Brand Obama offers us an image that appears radically individualistic and
new. It inoculates us from seeing that the old engines of corporate power
and the vast military-industrial complex continue to plunder the country.
Corporations, which control our politics, no longer produce products that
are essentially different, but brands that are different. Brand Obama does
not threaten the core of the corporate state any more than did Brand
George W. Bush. The Bush brand collapsed. We became immune to its studied
folksiness. We saw through its artifice. This is a common deflation in the
world of advertising. So we have been given a new Obama brand with an
exciting and faintly erotic appeal. Benetton and Calvin Klein were the
precursors to the Obama brand, using ads to associate themselves with
risqué art and progressive politics. It gave their products an edge. But
the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a
brand with an experience.

"The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women's and
civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called
political correctness successfully trained a generation of activists in
the politics of image, not action," Naomi Klein wrote in "No Logo."

Obama, who has become a global celebrity, was molded easily into a brand.
He had almost no experience, other than two years in the Senate, lacked
any moral core and could be painted as all things to all people. His brief
Senate voting record was a miserable surrender to corporate interests. He
was happy to promote nuclear power as "green" energy. He voted to continue
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reauthorized the Patriot Act. He
would not back a bill designed to cap predatory credit card interest
rates. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law
of 1872. He refused to support the single-payer health care bill HR676,
sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers. He supported the
death penalty. And he backed a class-action "reform" bill that was part of
a large lobbying effort by financial firms. The law, known as the Class
Action Fairness Act, would effectively shut down state courts as a venue
to hear most class-action lawsuits and deny redress in many of the courts
where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporate challenges.

While Gaza was being bombarded and hit with airstrikes in the weeks before
Obama took office, "the Obama team let it be known that it would not
object to the planned resupply of "'smart bombs' and other hi-tech
ordnance that was already flowing to Israel," according to Seymour Hersh.
Even his one vaunted anti-war speech as a state senator, perhaps his
single real act of defiance, was swiftly reversed. He told the Chicago
Tribune on July 27, 2004, that "there's not that much difference between
my position and George Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in
my mind, is who's in a position to execute." And unlike anti-war stalwarts
like Kucinich, who gave hundreds of speeches against the war, Obama then
dutifully stood silent until the Iraq war became unpopular.

Obama's campaign won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and
marketing-services vendors gathered at the Association of National
Advertisers' annual conference in October. The Obama campaign was named
Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out runners-up
Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a
marketer's dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you
to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy
or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you feel.

Celebrity culture has leeched into every aspect of our culture, including
politics, to bequeath to us what Benjamin DeMott called "junk politics."
Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. Junk
politics personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them.
"It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's
optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain
language and gesture," DeMott noted. The result of junk politics is that
nothing changes - "meaning zero interruption in the processes and
practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic
advantage." It redefines traditional values, tilting "courage toward
braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect,
identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains." Junk
politics "miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing
threats from abroad. It's also given to abrupt unexplained reversals of
its own public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems previously
miniaturized." And finally, it "seeks at every turn to obliterate voters'
consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in their midst."

An image-based culture, one dominated by junk politics, communicates
through narratives, pictures and carefully orchestrated spectacle and
manufactured pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs, hurricanes, earthquakes,
untimely deaths, lethal new viruses, train wrecks - these events play well
on computer screens and television. International diplomacy, labor union
negotiations and convoluted bailout packages do not yield exciting
personal narratives or stimulating images. A governor who patronizes call
girls becomes a huge news story. A politician who proposes serious
regulatory reform, universal health care or advocates curbing wasteful
spending is boring. Kings, queens and emperors once used their court
conspiracies to divert their subjects. Today cinematic, political and
journalistic celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and
scandals. They create our public mythology. Acting, politics and sports
have become, as they were during the reign of Nero, interchangeable.

In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional
gratification, we do not seek reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is
boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to
be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes and inspirational
messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the
greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and
physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and
prosperous, either because of our own attributes, or our national
character, or because we are blessed by God. Reality is not accepted as an
impediment to our desires. Reality does not make us feel good.

In his book "Public Opinion," Walter Lippmann distinguished between "the
world outside and the pictures in our heads." He defined a "stereotype" as
an oversimplified pattern that helps us find meaning in the world.
Lippmann cited examples of the crude "stereotypes we carry about in our
heads" of whole groups of people such as "Germans," "South Europeans,"
"Negroes," "Harvard men," "agitators" and others. These stereotypes,
Lippmann noted, give a reassuring and false consistency to the chaos of
existence. They offer easily grasped explanations of reality and are
closer to propaganda because they simplify rather than complicate.

Pseudo-events - dramatic productions orchestrated by publicists, political
machines, television, Hollywood or advertisers - however, are very
different. They have, as Daniel Boorstin wrote in "The Image: A Guide to
Pseudo-Events in America," the capacity to appear real even though we know
they are staged. They are capable, because they can evoke a powerful
emotional response, of overwhelming reality and replacing reality with a
fictional narrative that often becomes accepted truth. The unmasking of a
stereotype damages and often destroys its credibility. But pseudo-events,
whether they show the president in an auto plant or a soup kitchen or
addressing troops in Iraq, are immune to this deflation. The exposure of
the elaborate mechanisms behind the pseudo-event only adds to its
fascination and its power. This is the basis of the convoluted television
reporting on how effectively political campaigns and politicians have been
stage-managed. Reporters, especially those on television, no longer ask if
the message is true but if the pseudo-event worked or did not work as
political theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how effectively we have
been manipulated by illusion. Those events that appear real are relished
and lauded. Those that fail to create a believable illusion are deemed
failures. Truth is irrelevant. Those who succeed in politics, as in most
of the culture, are those who create the brands and pseudo-events that
offer the most convincing fantasies. And this is the art Obama has
mastered.

A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left
to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of
data and trivia are used to bolster illusion and give it credibility or
are discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality
becomes - the more, for example, foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket -
the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot
be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to
determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the
events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain,
the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe
what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and
why pseudo- events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not
explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality.
Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators.
These creators, who make massive profits peddling these illusions, have a
vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control.

The old production-oriented culture demanded what the historian Warren
Susman termed character. The new consumption-oriented culture demands what
he called personality. The shift in values is a shift from a fixed
morality to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural values of
thrift and moderation honored hard work, integrity and courage. The
consumption-oriented culture honors charm, fascination and likability.
"The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was
that of a performer," Susman wrote. "Every American was to become a
performing self."

The junk politics practiced by Obama is a consumer fraud. It is about
performance. It is about lies. It is about keeping us in a perpetual state
of childishness. But the longer we live in illusion, the worse reality
will be when it finally shatters our fantasies. Those who do not
understand what is happening around them and who are overwhelmed by a
brutal reality they did not expect or foresee search desperately for
saviors. They beg demagogues to come to their rescue. This is the ultimate
danger of the Obama Brand. It effectively masks the wanton internal
destruction and theft being carried out by our corporate state. These
corporations, once they have stolen trillions in taxpayer wealth, will
leave tens of millions of Americans bereft, bewildered and yearning for
even more potent and deadly illusions, ones that could swiftly snuff out
what is left of our diminished open society.

© 2009 TruthDig.com Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com
. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two
decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author
of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What
Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian
Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion:
The End of Literacy and the Triumph o

WAR IS BAD!!

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