American Immoderacy
Consumerism, stimulated by advertising and marketing practices, thus
became finely knit into American economic, social, cultural, and
political institutions—and ... into foreign policy as
well. American advertisers, business executives, and labor leaders
generally endorsed ever higher levels of consumption and mass
production as the economic counterparts to American democracy. They
touted a system of broad-based participation in which purchasers,
in effect, possessed the power to elect and to reject products—a
system in which the right to buy seemed as fundamental to civic life
as the right to vote. Appealing within and across lines of
ethnicity, region, gender, and class, consumerism forged communities
around rituals of purchase and of leisure. It became the terrain
upon which personal identities and rituals of belonging could be
performed and reinforced. Within this “democracy of goods,” by the
second half of the twentieth century most Americans, regardless of
their actual incomes, could imagine themselves as “middle class”
and “free."
In this sense, the “American Way" of mass consumerism had both an
economic and a cultural dimension. As an economic system,
consumerism commodified the natural bounty of the rich North
American continent and used technology to mass-produce goods. From a
cultural perspective, it stoked always-elusive desires for
self-fashioning and belonging within a highly diverse nation. Here
was the American Century, which began to emerge decades before Henry
Luce coined the phrase and reached its zenith and global reach in
the decades following World War II: a mass production and
mass-marketing system that imagined an ever-widening abundance of
goods within a culture that emphasized buying and selling, desire,
glamour and flexible, purchase-driven identities.
p. 44
↑
No comments:
Post a Comment