Nothing of substance to report from today, but I wanted to
share a passage from something I'm currently reading. The
passage in question is from Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney
World and America, by Stephen M. Fjellman. The book
discusses the Disney theme park's rewriting of history and
culture to suit corporate aims. Fascinating stuff. Anyway,
here's the quote, which has nothing to do with Disney at
all.
Joel Achenbach characterizes this turn as "creeping
surrealism" -- the
general fear, brought about by the manipulation of narrative
and
public discourse, that "nothing is real anymore." His
introductory
example of what people have come to understand as normal is
taken from
the back of a package of Pepperidge Farm "Nantucket"
chocolate chunk
cookies: "Only the bakers of Pepperidge Farm could pack so
much
scrumptious personality into classic American
cookies....They added a
heaping measure of fuss and bother. That meant making each
cookie one
of a kind, with an individual personality all its own. So
they gave
them rugged, irregular shapes, just as if someone had
lovingly shaped
each cookie by hand." Achenbach comments:
Each sentence lacks credibility, starting with "Only the
bakers of
Pepperidge Farm," etc., an absurd lie that, as trained
consumers, we
let pass. Beyond the quicksands of the language there are
several
levels of untruth: First, there's the Humble Down-Home
Multinational
Corporation affectation. Pepperidge Farm is a huge company
that is
itself owned by Campbell's, the world's largest soup
company, yet it
pretends these cookies are virtual Mom-and-Pop numbers.
Fine. We can
live with that. At least they don't claim that elves bake
them in a
brick oven in a hollow tree (as Keebler does).
What is more disturbing is that they have clearly designed a
machine
that makes cookies that look like a human being made them.
And then
-- astonishingly -- they confess the fakery right there on
the back of
the bag.
Not only has the line between realtiy and fiction become
attenuated in
the United States, but, says Achenbach, "Americans...no
longer think
the distinction matters...lies have been raised to an art
form in this
country, information manipulated so delicately, so craftily,
with such
unparalled virtuosity, that you can no longer tell the
genuine from
the fake, the virtuous from the profane."