Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  23. The Nobody Beats the Wiz chain thus runs a major advertising campaign featuring the schlock-shock MTV cartoon figures Beavis and Butt-head wearing MTV T-shirts while selling their Death Rock album. This anthology album assembles a morbid collection of death songs aimed at self-destructive youths who are killing themselves and each other at record rates. The ad ran in major media markets before Thanksgiving of 1993 under the headline “Huh, huh, huh, This ad is cool!” with large cartoon figures of the two MTV cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-head. These blatant morons had just a month earlier been relegated to a late-night hour, after children watching the popular MTV series in prime time had set fire to their rooms in imitation of their cartoon pranks. Songs on the Beavis and Butt-head Experience album include “I Hate Myself and Want to Die” (Nirvana); “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” (Anthrax); “99 Ways to Die” (Megadeth); “Search and Destroy” (Red Hot Chili Peppers); and “I Am Hell” (White Zombie).

  24. Seabrook, “Rocking,” p. 75.

  25. Citation from Seabrook, ibid., p. 69. A number of rap artists have had run-ins with the law, including Tupac Shakur whose 1991 album “2pacalypse Now” raps about “droppin’ the cop!” He allegedly did just that in October 1993, and was himself the victim of a shooting in late 1994; the rapper Flavor Flav of Public Enemy was arrested around the same time for attempted murder after reportedly shooting at a neighbor. But the real profiteers here are not the rappers who have found in the glamorization of ghetto life a paying hustle, but the record companies and the corporations that own and quietly earn considerable profits from them. For background see, for example, Toure, “Snoop Dogg’s Gentle Hip-Hop Growl,” The New York Times, November 21, 1993, Section 2, p. 32.

  26. Lyrics and reality get all mixed up in MTV’s savage version of McWorld. “Gangsta rap” often is the work of authentic gangsters. In 1993 alone, in addition to the Tupac Shakur arrest for allegedly shooting two cops noted above, Flavor Flav allegedly shot at his girlfriend’s lover; Snoop Doggy Dogg was charged for carrying two guns and has a murder charge pending; and assault and rape charges have been brought against sundry other denizens of MTV. For one report see Nathan McCall, “The Rap Against Rap,” The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, November 14, 1993, p. C 1; and the Newsweek cover story “Rap and Race,” Newsweek, June 29, 1992, pp. 46-52.

  27. Robert Scheer remarks that the handlers and profiteers who lived off Michael Jackson never seemed to notice that “there was something profoundly wrong with elevating someone so maladjusted to the status of universal spokesman for children in the sacred precincts of Disneyland and Pepsi commercials.” “Mega-Michael,” The Nation, October 11, 1993, pp. 376-377.

  28. Michael J. O’Neill, The Roar of the Crowd: How Television and People Power Are Changing the World (New York: Times Books, 1993), p. 110.

  29. Adrian Lyttelton, “Italy: The Triumph of TV,” The New York Review of Books, August 11, 1994, pp. 25–29.

  30. Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 81.

  31. Mark Crispin Miller, Boxed In: The Culture of TV(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 19.

  32. Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Business, 1990), p. xiv.

  33. Moisi is deputy director of the French Institute for International Relations; cited in Roger Cohen, “The French, Disneyed and Jurassick, Fear Erosion,” The New York Times, November 21, 1993, p. E 2. Moisi links Jihad and McWorld (without calling them that), noting that “one minute it’s dinosaurs [Jurassic Park], the next North African immigrants, but it’s the same basic anxiety.”

  34. The object is to send great quantities of data, pictures, and sounds to every home on an interactive basis. The old “new” technology required fiber optics that carry thousands of signals and permit broadcasting centers to send information to everyone. Integrated Services Digital Network’s new switching technology permits a particular home to get only those data it requires (just the way each home receives only the calls placed to it by phone rather than every phone conversation in America). It is this switching capacity that makes the new mergers between phone and cable broadcasting companies so potentially profitable. To rewire American homes with fiber optics would cost upwards of $400 billion; by using the ISDN system, existing wires can be employed at a fraction of the cost.

  35. Formerly owned by Whittle Communications, and now in the hands of K-III, a firm specializing in education and publishing for profit whose chairman H. Kravis is also a key player in public broadcasting.

  36. Colgate-Palmolive has test-marketed a teen perfume called Maniac, while Randy Pernini of Miami has created a designer fragrance for “discriminating” (not) boys between three and ten. See Chapter 4, note 34, above.

  Chapter 8. Teleliterature and the Theme Parking of McWorld

  1. I speak here as someone who has been engaged in a number of major educational projects for television—for example, with Patrick Watson, the ten-part series The Struggle for Democracy (the book accompanying the series is from Little, Brown and Company, 1988). As we achieved television success, we risked educational failure.

  2. Robert Lynch, a McGraw-Hill director, quoted by Meg Cox, “Electronic Campus,” The Wall Street Journal, June 1, 1993, p. A 5.

  3. The Authors Guild, Electronic Publishing Rights: A Publishing Statement, October 18, 1993.

  4. User’s Guide for Great Literature, Personal Library Series, Bureau Development, Inc., 1992. English-language originals are cut but otherwise untouched, but translations from foreign classics are ancient and the principle of selection obviously has more to do with what was available free than with scholarly or editorial judgment.

  5. Cox, “Electronic Campus.”

  6. Stern’s Private Parts passed the million mark in sales in its first several weeks in print.

  7. See John Lahr’s telling essay on celebrity, “The Voodoo of Glamour” (with Richard Avedon), The New Yorker, March 21, 1994, pp. 113-122.

  8. Ornstein is cited in an article by Jennifer Senior, “Hollywood on the Potomac,” placed ever so appropriately in the “Style” section of the Sunday New York Times, December 12, 1993, Section 9, p. 1.

  9. English publishers buy far more books from the Americans than American publishers buy from the English. Ditto more or less every other country in the world. Japanese writers are emulating hot (cool) Americans writers like Jay McInerny, which compels them to incorporate McWorld into the fabric of their characters’ nominally Japanese lives. Haruki Murakami’s protagonists in The Elephant Vanishes smoke Marlboros and get high to Bruce Springsteen or Woody Allen while playing out story lines in high-tension rendezvouses at McDonald’s—I mean the actual Honshu burger franchise, not just the metaphoric world it embodies. Murakami quotes American films like The Wizard of Oz as if they were pillow books of Japanese civilization on the doorstep of the twenty-first century.

  10. Nadeshda Azhginkhina, “High Culture Meets Trash TV,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 1993, p. 42.

  11. German Information Service, The Week in Germany, November 26, 1993.

  12. Bagdikian tracks media monopoly but also follows an equally alarming development, “the subtle but profound impact of mass advertising on the form and content of the advertising-subsidized media.” Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, fourth edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. xxx.

  13. Ibid., p. 4.

  14. Ibid., pp. 21-22. The German firm Bertelsmann launched a $100 million joint venture with America Online in 1995.

  15. Cited by Bernard Weinraub, “A Hollywood Recipe: Vision, Wealth, Ego,” The New York Times, October 16, 1994, p. A 1.

  16. Cited in M. Meyer and N. Hass, “Simon Says, ‘Out!’, Viacom Ousts Simon & Schuster’s CEO,” Newsweek, June 27, 1994, pp. 42-44.

  17. Sarah Lyall, “The Media Business: Paramount Publishing to Cut Jobs and Books,” The New York Times, January 24, 1994, p. D 8.
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  18. Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, p. 19.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Paramount did so well selling Dancing with Wolves through McDonald’s that it did the same with The Addams Family and the Wayne’s World series as well as Ghost and Charlotte’s Web. McDonald’s as a film outlet is a natural expression of its status as theme park. It’s a two-way relationship: Amblin Entertainment sold commercial rights for Jurassic Park products to over one hundred licensees including McDonald’s. Bernard Weinraub, “Selling Jurassic Park,” The New York Times, June 14, 1993, pp. C 11, 16. Movie critic Stuart Klawans notes the irony of the film itself, which features its own theme park and theme park store with Jurassic Park tie-in items identical to those being sold in the real world. Which world then is real? See Stuart Klawans, “Films,” The Nation, July 19, 1993, p. 115–116.

  21. 1992 Report to Shareholders, McDonald’s Corporation, Oak Brook, Illinois. McDonald’s 1992 U.S. sales were $13.2 billion; outside the United States it earned another $8.6 billion for a total of nearly $22 billion.

  22. Its stock has more than doubled since 1991 and it projects earnings of nearly $9 billion in 1995, up from $7.1 million in 1992. USA Today, June 2, 1994, p. 3B.

  23. Andrew E. Serwer, “McDonald’s Conquers the World,” Fortune, October 17, 1994, p. 104.

  24. From the McDonald’s Annual Report, 1992; ellipses in original.

  25. The soft drink industry understands this as well as anyone: “Coke Light is trying to extend the American cultural model in its international markets,” says Tom Pirko, a New York management consultant. “They’re saying refreshment is a lifestyle thing and there may be kind of a reverse chic in this approach.” Daniel Tilles, “Coke Light Gears Up for a Hard Sell,” The International Herald Tribune, May 18, 1994. Randal W. Donaldson, an Atlanta Coca-Cola spokesman supporting the nationwide move to bring fast foods and soft beverages into schools, states bluntly: “Our strategy is ubiquity. We want to put soft drinks within arm’s reach of desire.” Robert Pear, “Senator, Promoting Student Nutrition, Battles Coca-Cola,” The New York Times, April 26, 1994, p. A 20.

  26. Prince Consort Albert, May I, 1851, inaugural address, cited by Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park (New York: Noonday Press, 1992), p. 209.

  27. Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” in Sorkin, Variations, p. 4.

  28. Ibid., p. 14.

  29. As malls find their way to Eastern Europe and elsewhere, local investors insist with a mixture of self-interest and naïveté that what they are investing in is “American conditions without the American mentality.” The Week in Germany, German Information Service, October 8, 1993, p. 5. The problem is, the conditions are the mentality. These developments have led a group of politicians, writers, artists, clergymen, and professors to form a “Committee for Fairness” that, according to its founding statement, opposes “the destruction of our industry and agriculture, mass unemployment, unbearable rent increases, unfairly low wages, the closing of social, scientific, cultural and athletic organizations, the selling of what was once ‘peoples property,’ rejection of our right to occupy apartments, houses and land and demoralization of people in the East, especially women, [that] have destroyed many hopes that were raised by German unification.” Stephen Kinzer, “Group Is Formed to Defend East German Interests,” The New York Times, July 12, 1992, p. A 1.

  30. Cited and brilliantly analyzed in Edward W. Soja’s “Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County,” in Sorkin, Variations, p. 94.

  31. Linda Killian of the Renaissance Capital Corporation, quoted in Ann Imse, “Hang on for the Ride of Your Life,” The New York Times, December 12, 1993, p. F 6.

  32. William Booth, “Wayne’s World,” The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, August 29-September 4, 1994.

  33. From an article in Der Spiegel, summarized in The Week in Germany, German Information Center, November 5, 1993.

  34. Coldwarland has already come to pass, according to a peculiar and droll story that came out of Russia at the end of 1993. Russian aerospace entrepreneurs, working with American counterparts, leapt out ahead of the Germans by putting into practice an idea even the inventors of Ossi Park might have found far-fetched. MIGS Etc., Inc. of Sarasota, Florida, ran ads in major print media with the offer: “Fly a MIG-29 at Mach 2.5 in Moscow … You Need Not Be a Pilot”! The company promotes what it might profitably advertise as Evil Empire nostalgia rides in MIG-29 fighter planes and T-80 tanks for prices approaching $100,000 (for a two-MIG dogfight). The New York Times not only ran the ads but published a tourism piece by someone who took a ride and editorialized on the concept, musing about whether Lenin, Stalin, John le Carré, and Tom Clancy must not be somewhere “shaking their heads in collective amazement.” “Your Very Own Cold War,” The New York Times, October 25, 1993, p. A 18.

  35. Cited by Michael Sorkin, “See You in Disneyland,” in his Variations, p. 206.

  36. The Disney Annual Report, 1992, p. 14.

  37. Ibid., p. 8.

  38. In Florida, President Clinton delivers stirring words written by lyricist Tim Rice, the librettist for Jesus Christ Superstar and the Disney films Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, the latter now a musical playing at Disney’s Broadway theater in New York. Rice’s script has Clinton propose that national happiness “still evolves from liberty, from property.” See Jon Wiener’s understandably cynical account in “Disneyworld Imagineers a President,” The Nation, November 22, 1993, p. 620.

  39. The description is Michael Wines’s in “Yes, Virginia, the Past Can Be Plasticized,” The New York Times, November 28, 1993, p. E 4. Wines’s piece is less skeptical than his title, however; he cites James McPherson (Princeton University’s civil war historian and Pulitzer Prize winner and avowed preservationist) as having “mixed feelings” and notes that places like Williamsburg (which in 1994 ran a highly controversial mock slave auction) have already established the precedent for Disney at Manassas.

  CEO Eisner is certainly anxious not to be seen as ransacking history. In Florida, he hired Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and a prize-winning Civil War historian, as a packaging consultant. According to Jon Wiener’s account in The Nation, Foner had complained about the editing and context of the speech delivered by the Lincoln robot at Disney’s Anaheim Hall of Presidents, a speech that omitted any reference to slavery. Disney hired the critic. When Foner was finished, even a radical journalist had to acknowledge an “impressive” achievement: “In this park full of attractions that are calculatedly sentimental, sickeningly cute or crudely commercial, visitors to the redesigned Hall of Presidents will find a strikingly intelligent and remarkably progressive program.” Jon Wiener, “Disneyworld Imagineers.”

  40. For an account of the sad struggle of Dexter King to build a $60 million hi-tech King amusement center in time for the Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996, against the United States Park Service, which has to date overseen the King Historic District, see Ken Ringle, “A Dream Turned Nightmare,” The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, January 23–29, 1995, p. 9.

  Chapter 9. Who Owns McWorld? The Media Merger Frenzy

  1. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, fourth edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 19.

  2. Bagdikian’s top twenty-three, listed alphabetically, are Bertelsmann, Capital Cities/ABC, Cox, CBS, Buena Vista Films, Dow Jones, Gannett, General Electric/NBC, Paramount (now Viacom), Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Hearst, Ingersoll, International Thomson, Knight Ridder, Media News Group, Newhouse, News Corporation Ltd. (Murdoch), New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Scripps-Howard, Time Warner, Times Mirror, and the Tribune Company. Ibid., pp. 21–22.

  3. Jolie Soloman, “Hollywood and Vice: Here Comes a New Golden Age,” Newsweek, August 23, 1993, p. 51.

  4. Quoted by Cindy Skrzyki in her appropriately entitled piece, “Today, AT&T; Tomorrow, the Wireless World,” The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, August 30—September 5, 1993. Skrzyki comments: “It will make
it possible for customers to stroll into an AT&T Phone Store and order everything from a cellular phone (which AT&T makes) to cellular service (which McCaw offers) to long-distance calling (over the AT&T network). On the technical side, AT&T switches may handle the call and AT&T software will tell the network which calls to send, hold, or put into a messaging system. And the slice of radio spectrum that AT&T would acquire as part of the deal gives it a precious commodity that is vital to launching new wireless devices that send and receive voice and data signals over the air.”

  5. Quoted by Ken Auletta, “The Last Studio in Play,” The New Yorker, October 4, 1993, p. 80.

  6. Calvin Sims, “Synergy: The Unspoken Word,” The New York Times, October 5, 1993, p. D I.

  7. Ted Turner is chairman of the board and president of Turner Broadcasting, TNT, etc.; Sumner Redstone is CEO of Viacom and the feisty competitor for Paramount; for Barry Diller see text; Martin S. Davis is former president and CEO of Paramount; Michael Ovitz is chairman of the Creative Artists Agency and a key player in the MGM—Crédit Lyonnais deal; Bill Gates is the power behind Microsoft; and John C. Malone is president of Tele-Communication, part-time chair of Liberty Media, as well as a one-quarter owner of Turner Broadcasting, which makes him a major force beyond Barry Diller’s QVC Network.

  For a biography of one of the great masters of communications and entertainment who set the course for many of the men here, see Connie Bruck, Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

  8. Fortune says Malone is now worth over a billion dollars. His sobriquet as king of cable is reported by Allen R. Myerson, “A Corporate Man and a Cable King,” The New York Times, October 14, 1993, p. C 7.