The Big Drench

No need to prove we're soaked, everyone can see it.

The rains are falling hard here in the Midwest today, drenching the gridded streets and flooding the basements of all of the Vape Shops and Pizza Huts and WE BUY GOLD stores along what used to be a main artery of this city. Dilapidated gray buildings form a line of decay from my sideview mirror all the way to the vanishing point of the horizon ahead. Gray, gray, nothing but gray. It’s hard to not feel sad on a day like this. It’s a nice sad though, the kind of sad that you’re supposed to feel from time to time while engaged in the business of being alive. The kind of sad that makes you a more empathetic and even-minded person, and reminds you that…well…sometimes there are rainy days, too.

Stuck in traffic, I switch on an AM station that I listen to when the fatigue of “streaming-music too perfectly catered to my tastes” sets in. The radio is a parallel universe, advertising to people who are a strange combination of paranoia and credulity. In other words, to older people.

Getting old makes me feel sad, too. Which is also a worthwhile kind of sad, but more dutiful and generous than the seductive sadness of rain. You hear enough old people lament about “youth wasted on the young,” that eventually it only feels right to occasionally pay that wisdom a tithe. I choose to pay it by thinking about how awful it must be to hate your job for forty years, only to be sold catheters and commemorative coins on the radio while you sit stuck in flash flood traffic.

Rainy City Street by Frank Coburn

Things weren’t better here before. These shops along this row are closed for business, and some of them have been closed for business for a decade. Perhaps there were no closed businesses on this street when I was a kid in 1989, but that’s only because the economy hadn’t yet boomed hard enough to convince people to give an “All You Can Eat Pot Pie Buffet” restaurant a chance. I’ve been alive 40 years, and this street has always been kind of sad and shitty. But there’s something uniquely demoralizing about this it today, and it has nothing to do with the buildings or the rain. It’s the billboards.

There is barely a thriving business in miles other than liquor stores and gas stations, but the ads refuse to read the room. Unlike dour radio commercials focused on diapers and pool cleaning supplies, the billboards soar skyward to bring glad tidings of the many delights just 1 mile ahead on your right. Each heralds the multitude of treats that our colorful march toward the “Forever-Pleasure-Future” will bring us: bright reds and oranges that promise to satiate and titillate, soft yellows and beaming whites that whisper of linen-lined afternoon dreams, and blues so deep they make you yearn to leave your car and walk forever into great blue beyond.

Even so, the “great blue beyond” looks decidedly gray today. Even the airline ads - vicious little things that suggest going on vacation is a transaction on par with buying produce - are failing to stick their quixotic landing today. The sumptuous colors are dulled, and even my normal Pavlovian response to close up shots of Quarter Pounders with cheese isn’t hitting like it usually does. But it’s not all so bleak. Where “They Live”-level sensory programming falters, cleverness and quirkiness take center stage.

In between these more sensuous ads, there exists others that make their appeals via the lowly human poisons of sarcasm and snark. Some would even claim to be “funny,” but are usually only funny to those who a) still watch SNL, b) hate men or c) think jokes you have to explain are the best kind of jokes. Actual humor is rarely achieved, and even less often tolerated. Mostly this is because only a very narrow range of humor is even allowed these days. As most jokes require an easy-going personality, a lack of self-seriousness, and an allowance for small social tensions that feel good when released, most of what many people would consider funny is strictly verboten. To color outside of those lines is to trigger a rapid and mindless boycott. Even the most spurious of accusations can put your “funny” brand in the graveyard forever.

The exception to this, of course, is ads that pretend to be provocations but really only serve to convince their targets that they are part of some sort of resistance movement. For example, this ad in an NYC subway train pretends that a single man currently living in New York has enough testosterone to disagree with a woman about anything:

Yeah cool.

What is the point of this sort of advertising? It is easy to understand why commercials can no longer rely on mere recommendations by “9 out of 10 dentists,” but why did they advance in this specific direction? Media and technology has lead to a more self-aware and culturally adept population, yes. Advertising had to evolve along the same curve, yes. But why did it evolve into this? Why do ads seem to conform to ideas of beauty that no one thinks are beautiful, ideas of humor that no one thinks are funny, and ideas of honesty that no one thinks are true?

Why did it become something that has little if nothing to do with the actual product?

Well, because of ideology, of course.

Ideology is the reason why so many ads feature what they’d like us to think are “average Americans,” but are really humans who could only possibly exist in Austin, New York, Portland, and Los Angeles. It is why every single commercial now features a majority of non-white actors despite Caucasians still comprising 59.3% of the US population. It’s why so many commercials feature non-heterosexual partnerships despite only 8.6% of the population identifying as LGBTQ. Less than 1% of the population is transgendered, and yet - well, I don’t even have to make a case for the strangeness of that imbalance in the cultural conversation.

Ideology is the reason that so many of these ads feature snappy slogans that conform to the modern values of “cruelty as empowerment” and “self-centeredness as self-care,” despite the fact that most people cannot stand this sort of delusional self-regard. Advertising can only tell you that “cool people” buy their stuff. Ideology has the power to tell you that “good people” do what they’re told.

After all, the people in the ads are just like you right? Just like you, they want, need, and deserve treats. Just like you, they have selfish and petty thoughts about how stupid and annoying other people are. Just like you, they lament how no one else realizes just how stressful and thankless their day has been. Unlike you, however, they are assertive enough to demand their treats pronto. And you just know they deserve it. How do you know?

Because they are being themselves.

To be one’s self is the ultimate cultural currency of this country. To be one’s self means to present externally in a way that aligns with each and every internal whim that you have, accommodate each and every internal desire that you feel, and verbalize each and every private thought you have. Most importantly, it means to enjoy the satiation of your internal needs without being subject to any external restraints. Unfortunately, the predominant external restraint in the US is the demand for conformity. How can one sustain a culture that compels us into simultaneous drives toward individualism and conformity? Obviously, it can’t. Not without employing a certain level of dissociative schizophrenia. This is a feat only possible if your society goes mad.

Fortunately, it is in this madness where Ideology thrives. Ideology is the only force strong enough to compel a person to willfully lie to themselves and everyone else without laying a single hand on them. We used to only be able to do this through violence; everyone will confess with their head in a vice. Then advertising made it possible to do this through rewards, i.e. “participate in the lie and you’ll get a treat.” Ideology combines reward and punishment and elevates it with magic.

This is the specialty of Ideology, and the vector point in which advertising and ideology converge. While classical models of advertising assumed their efforts were being directed at rational and self-interested consumers, modern advertising knows better. It is from ideology that advertising adopts the more cynical understanding that people make decisions based primarily on their feelings - especially their feelings of anxiety and fear. And especially the anxiety and fear that you will fail to conform.

So what does one do, then, if they are stuck in the uncomfortable position of desiring to conform and yet unable to square their individuality with that conformity? What if you think the things that other people like are stupid? What if you don’t like the musicians and celebrities you are told to worship? What if you commit the crime of not totally agreeing with something as much as someone else and you have, say a…nuanced…position? How do you avoid being put to death for a crime such as this?

Advertising is here to save the day - sponsored by Ideology. If Ideology tells you what to think, then advertising tells you what you need to signal to others what you think. As others can’t actively read your thoughts, your appearance, language, habits, and - yes - purchases will signal that for you. If you can’t conform to the mandates of two opposing cultural ideas, just change the ideas but keep the same words.

Case in point: the other day I hate-watched a Youtube video in which a smarmy “Breadtuber” smirked and rolled her eyes through a discussion of “the propaganda of conservative children’s books.” I don’t want to link it on the principled choice to not knowing drive up her views - but you can just type those terms into search I’m sure it will come right up. But I forced myself to sit and watch as she un-ironically “exposed” the “twisted conservative ideology” of “warping children’s brains” without for a moment considering that - other than the five books she discussed - literally EVERY OTHER CHILDREN’S BOOK IS LIBERAL IDEOLOGY. If you have not gone into a bookstore recently to buy your kids a book, it is fucking astounding. Almost every single book contains some core component of the core tenets of liberal ideology. Do we think this is because “the toddlers have spoken” and they want more books about genderqueer Lisandra who is collecting butterflies to save up for her big surgery date in 12 years?

Probably not, but then again - who knows? How would those enraptured by this deep cultural trance know the difference? They are being spoon-fed the ideology that they then spoon-feed second hand to scared children, providing their kids with new boogeymen who cancel them instead of eating them for dinner. But it is far more likely that these consumers aren’t actively suppressing their abilities to observe this ideology-in-action. Instead, they are blind to it. How? Because the word “ideology” has been shifted to mean “ideology that is not my own,” i.e. “any remotely socially conservative ideology.” The same wave-of-the-hand trick has been used to great effect recently, even growing in power to the point that one can declare a black person “not black” should they fail to conform to the ideological expectations of what “blackness” is.

Can you see the trick yet? Watch closely. Or actually, don’t watch closely. Stare too long into it and you’ll go blind. Best to treat ideology more like a solar eclipse. Look at it from the side, or in its reflection. Only then can you behold the trick. Ideology drives everything, but is only visible when you turn away from it. Remember when they told us to stay woke? I think a lot of people should have taken that as their cue to get a little more sleep. Instead they followed every micro-transaction along the string of windy syllogisms, and lost sight of the meaning behind the whole thing.

This is the only way we could have gotten here. This is the only explanation for how the culturally progressive left has managed to create social board game in which the opening rules state: “put the good pieces over here, and the bad pieces on the other side over there, and you can tell which pieces are good because they are over here, and which pieces are bad because they are over there, and why else would they be over there unless they were bad, as that is clearly the bad side as we said at the very beginning! But you probably weren’t listening because you were too busy speaking instead of listening and no I will not explain again because it’s not my job to educate you, even if the job is to educate you about a game I unwilling drafted you into and barely educated you on and then insulted you for asking questions about my education so I will not repeat it even though one of the cornerstones of my childish social plan is to bolster education, but not to bad people, only to good people, and yes that includes the children of bad people because every person needs to be loved and respected as an individual and not judged on their past or where they came from unless they came from where you came from and had the past you probably did BECAUSE you are one of the BAD people AS EVIDENCED BY you being among THOSE who are BAD!”

Sheesh, what a racket! Who’s to blame?

While I can’t say advertising was the main henchman, they certainly did their part as something between a frontman and a fence. By presenting a ubiquitous full-frontal assault of prescribed culture through advertising, an ideological normalization of weird shit was bound to happen. The astounding thing about all of this is that all of this actually works. By creating an illusion of normalcy around contentious ideas, you can lure a huge chunk of the herd toward your side. After all, most people sit in hospital waiting rooms and watch MSNBC and CNN. Most people think “Trump is a jerk” and “Biden is a kindly old grandpa.” Most people laugh when “comedians” punish the audience with a story of their sexual assault and land “uhhh…try not being racist???” as a punchline. It is the supreme power of Ideology to convince people that everyone else thinks a certain way, even if that certain way is literally tabulated by a national vote count every four years, and shown to be opinions held by roughly half of everyone else. With such awe-inspiring psychological brainwashing technology, why wouldn’t advertising want to get into that kind of action?

The best way to convince someone to be a certain way is by first convincing them that everyone else is already that way. While both advertising and ideology play upon vanity and insecurities, the former has to sneak its charms past our cognitive defenses and delusions of sophistication. Advertising requires a leap; it asks the would-be consumer to trust that their product will make them into a person who is not only happier but also more socially adept. It insinuates to each of its victims that “you are one of the few who will see the value here that the rest of these slobs will miss.”

Ideology requires no such chicanery. Rather than casting a lure and waiting for fish to bite, ideology simply walks away from the dock. It looks over its shoulder only briefly, to suggest that no one is wasting their time being in water anymore. Everyone is still splashing about is…well…less evolved than the rest of us. Ideology does not ask us to make a change, it tells us that everyone else has already changed and that if you haven’t then you are going to be left behind.

The effectiveness of this is remarkable, for the simple reason that most people have no fucking clue what is going on. Those who read and write on Substack are among those constantly embroiled in the micro-shifts of culture. This makes us exceedingly sensitive to the smallest of ideological movements that possess massive potential for misdirection and harm. But most people have no sense of these things, and are not only content but enthusiastic and relieved to have simply latched onto a cultural change in time to not be labeled “different.”

---

Here is something we all know but we aren’t allowed to talk about: some people are not capable of levels of critical thought necessary to make fully informed decisions for themselves. I don’t know what the cutoff is, I’m not looking to herd them into some prison or big playpen, and I don’t even really want to bother them at all. But anyone who takes the time to read this essay knows that they cannot walk into whatever sports bar is closest to them right now and have a meaningful conversation about the content of this essay. To those who would say, “you never know - people can surprise you!” Yes, they can. It would surprise me if any of them had any thoughts on the permeation of cultural ideology through advertising. It would surprise me, because it is abnormal.

The truth is that most people are conveniently sponge-brained, ready to accept whatever version of reality is most plausibly offered to them. And by plausibly, I mean “most often.” Depending on their geography and parents, that might broadly swing one way or another, but for the most part, if sponge-brains see things often enough while flipping through their cable channels, they will assume that it is “normal.”

This is the reason we have such bizarre and morally horrifying shows on television, why all movies and ever Disney cartoons seem to proffer a unified message. Oh, and of course advertising. In the rare moments I watch broadcast television, I am amazed by how vulgar and stupid these commercials are. I cringe at how they revel in their nastiness and selfishness, at how they no longer even hide the fact that they are baiting humans on the lowest rungs of our impulses. It’s not the same message, but it is a unified message. Unlike the past when that unified message was something along the lines of “support power structures and order, safety and functionality are more important than individuation,” there is now a unifying message of, “disrespect power structures and obey yourself, self-expression and leisure are more important than anything.” Even ignoring the blatant denial of any external threats outside of our country that could possibly require us to momentarily put our chores of self-discovery to the side, the more important question many might ask - and the one to be presumed flummoxing - is how could any authoritarian regime maintain control of a people who they are constantly telling to follow their own hearts???

How could any so-called power structure telling you to trust and love yourself be authoritarian? Wouldn’t they be telling you the opposite? Again, advertising. Advertising disconnects individuality from actual individualism. It replaces it with an aesthetic; one that is achieved by ritual, accouterment, consumption, and signaling behaviors. The current American is told to believe in themselves and “be an individual,” but this is a neo-definition that does not in any way include the hallmarks of meaningful individualism, i.e. thinking for yourself, expressing doubt or disagreement, heeding your own intuition and tastes, asking for proof before you accept something as fact, feeling comfortable with maintaining boundaries around what happens in your home and your head, etc.

In this way, it’s the same as if I told you to “be an honest person,” and then showed you various pictures of “honest” people performing honest robberies, honest tax evasion, and honest lies. They do all of these “honest” actions while wearing a pride flag-colored parka and they look, you know…cool…while doing it! How will the sponge brains react to that? Will they say, “hey! that’s not honest!” No, they are not interested in the platonic ideal of honesty. They are interested in conformity that allows for their individualism, and - in this hypothetical but not ridiculous case - in honesty that still allows them to cheat, lie, and steal. Perfect!

How can someone who says to be honest be an authoritarian? Well, they could only do that if they changed the meaning of the word honest. Ideology and advertising make a killer tag team in this venture. I can see it for myself on the billboards, each showing me pathways to poverty, despair, wastefulness, and confusion, and selling it to me as riches, joy, abundance, and meaning. Why send people to the gulags when you can build the gulags right there in their brains?

---

I am not writing this piece to bemoan the field of advertising. Such an essay would be a waste of your time and mine. We all know that advertising is a snake pit. This is a cultural truth we are more than comfortable with. Just like the cultural truths of politicians, ambulance chasers, and used car salesmen; we know what’s under the hood and we know these are not professions of the virtuous. Yes, we know some people who work in these fields are more or less culpable, but most of them - especially those who have risen to the top - are morally perverted scum. There are very few who think that a brand can actually be authentic or caring or endearing or virtuous. If we didn’t know this, then Mad Men would have had a very different cultural legacy than it does.

In the United States today, we are all savvy enough to know that the job of advertising is to extract value from us by playing on a variety of our biases, fears, hopes, doubts, and aspirations. In this way, we already know that advertising is a mere reflection or reaction to what is already happening in our hearts and minds. It is a sport of sniping; trying to find just the right tender points of our psyches to fire their shots. The venture has therefore taken on a virtual or proxy quality to it; advertisers are not rewarded for persuading us nor “sneaking one past us.” They assume that we are already onto them. Thus, they are rewarded not for convincing us of anything, but by successfully guessing who we already are.

And they always guess right…because you will become whatever they say you should become.

I look at these billboards strung along this derelict strip of the city I grew up in and there is no part of me that believes that I am going to be provided with a “strong product pitch.” While that is the core function of advertising, what is happening now is no longer actual advertising. It does not seek to convince me to buy something. It wants to convince me to be something. More precisely, it need not convince me of that; I already know what I am, and it is merely rewarding me for being sophisticated, aware, and clever enough to receive the coded message the billboard is sending.

That is the power of ideology.

I once wanted to say that I am someone who is sophisticated and clever and aware. I once wanted to say that I was plugged in, that I was part of the great big spin, that I was headed toward something good. Like all humans I wanted joy. I still do want joy. The problem is that they switched the meaning of that one too. Joy is now mandatory. What was once a little happy sprinkle that made a moment special is now a torrential downpour. We are drenched with joy and freedom and meaning, and none of it feels special anymore.

This stretch of buildings isn’t any worse than it used to be. It’s just that the world around it has become too bright. Too drenched in the light. Makes the dark things look darker. Makes the rain fall harder. Drenches everything.