APRIL 2004 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD
The location of the mouth of the Mississippi, the point where the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico, is well known, and you can go look at it if you wish. If you do, you may notice several things wrong. Set aside the bizarre picture of a river that, with human assistance, has advanced all the way to the edge of the continental shelf even as its delta land sinks beneath the waves. Also ignore, for the moment, the “dead zone” around that area where, mysteriously, no plants or animals are living. The question you might ask is, “Where is all the water?”
The reason you might wonder about this is that less than half of the flow of the river goes through its mouth. By the time you reach the mouth of the river, the “mighty Mississippi” doesn’t look so mighty anymore.
In fact, nearly as much Mississippi river water flows into the Gulf via the relatively anonymous Atchafalaya River off to the west. Engineers say the entire Mississippi would flow into the Atchafalaya, and the lower Mississippi would turn into a swamp, but for the Army Corps of Engineers’ floodgates that limit the flow of water from the Mississippi to the Atchafalaya. Critics of this project say it is just a matter of time before nature cuts a new channel or washes the floodgates away, as it has nearly done twice already. When that day comes, we will no longer be able to maintain the pretense about the mouth of the Mississippi. In the meantime, the stories you might hear about the mouth of the Mississippi are only half true.
Finding the main stream in cultural matters is even more tricky than finding the main stream of a river. For every Mississippi, it seems, there is an Atchafalaya, a parallel channel that is nearly as big, maybe bigger, but you don’t hear much about it.
You don’t have to look far for examples. I can illustrate this point if I ask an American audience what the most popular sports are. The immediate responses I hear include baseball, football (the American variety), and basketball, followed perhaps by such second-tier sports as hockey, golf, and auto racing. If you go by what you see on television or read in the newspapers, these are the most popular sports.
But the correct answer, the actual most popular sport in America, is swimming. Around 1 in 2 Americans are actively involved in swimming in a given year; no other sport comes close to that level of activity.
Of course, I will hear objections, and people can explain various reasons why swimming doesn’t count, but what the objections ultimately boil down to is that there isn’t enough money in swimming for it to qualify as a sport. Swimming doesn’t have its own cable channel, people don’t pay a hundred dollars for a ticket to watch swimmers, why, you can fully equip a swimmer for a season for less than that sum of money.
Swimming is not the mainstream answer simply because it’s not paid for. That’s the way it works with anything in mainstream thought. To make an idea the generally accepted mainstream answer, someone, or a corporation that is, has to spend millions of dollars to establish the idea. Corporations promote ideas to the mainstream by repeating the ideas in advertising and by behind-the-scenes actions to influence the media. When a business corporation is persistent enough and rich enough, a new idea can be built up to the level of mainstream acceptance.
That brings me to my most important point for this topic. If you commonly find yourself agreeing with mainstream ideas, ask yourself this question: how much are you being paid to think that way? Because chances are, it’s not enough to make up for the distance that the paid-for mainstream ideas have taken you away from the truth. And chances are, it’s not nearly as much as the corporations behind these ideas are paying television stations and other outlets to promote these ideas.
The corporations try to protect their investment in the so-called mainstream by labeling any other ideas as “alternative,” “fringe,” “experimental,” or anything else they can come up with that might persuade people that the true answer “doesn’t count.” It’s no surprise that they would want to do this. As an example, if you can cure your sore throat by using the “alternative treatment” of gargling with salt water (among many others you might try), the “mainstream” medical establishment has lost the $80 or more that you or your health plan might have paid for an office consultation and a prescription antibiotic.
The effort to buy a piece of mainstream thought starts with television commercials, but it goes far beyond that. Obviously, other forms of advertising carry the same messages. Then, the agenda extends to cover any media that carry these advertisements. On television, entertainment and news programming is slanted to support the commercial agenda. News stories that would raise doubts about consumer culture and the corporate way of working are routinely suppressed, or the story is morphed into something that is less threatening to commercial interests. No media outlet can risk offending the corporate advertisers who pay the bills. Entertainment programming shows a commercialized version of life that bears only a passing resemblance the way real people live. It is the same effect in radio, newspapers, magazines, and the major news web sites — all are predominately corporate-owned and funded mainly by advertising, and all provide a slanted view of the world. Even though I was trained as an economist and knew about this effect, I was still stunned the first time I looked at alternative news web sites such as that of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and saw how very many news stories there are that the “mainstream” corporate-owned media doesn’t dare to cover.
Music is affected in a similar way. This was never more obvious than in 2002 when a band called Boston released a new album and most music fans never heard about it. Boston’s previous albums had all been widely played on the radio, and the new album had much the same kind of music, but radio stations wouldn’t touch it. Why? The album was called Corporate America and its title song was sharply critical of the corporate mind-set and its effects on society. Almost all music radio in the United States is owned by large corporations now, and if they want to keep an idea from being heard, there is a lot they can do. Most music is not as openly critical of the corporate agenda as Corporate America, but corporate minds find most true artists and thinkers threatening in some way, even if it’s just that they make music that has a lot of energy. If you’re full of energy, you might change the station when those endless commercial breaks come on, so this is not the music you are likely to hear on the radio. Instead, corporate radio offers bland music that won’t, by any stretch of the imagination, inspire you to take control of your life.
It doesn’t stop there. Supposedly impartial books and documents are often messages that are bought and paid for, either directly or indirectly. If you’ve seen a poster explaining why you should get a flu shot, you might have thought it was just good medical advice, but in reality, those posters are written and paid for by the drug companies that make the vaccines, and the advice they offer is heavily slanted toward the benefits of their product. Did they mention that flu vaccines offer dangers of their own and are rarely more than 40 percent effective? I didn’t think so! One major corporation is infamous for its practice of paying people to pass themselves off as independent experts while they promote the corporation’s products in Internet chat rooms and message boards, but I am sure it is not the only corporation that does this.
Things get even more confusing when people hear and read these paid corporate messages, believe them to be true, and repeat them to each other as if they were true. The well-meaning advice of friends might be nothing more than the unwitting repetition of a corporation’s expression of its desire for revenue. Most peer pressure is really corporate pressure. Most fashion trends are really merchandising trends. And this process reaches its logical conclusion when you start to believe that the commercial agenda raises important questions and that the commercial advice you hear might help improve your life. That’s when you know commercial thoughts have taken root in your head and have supplanted your own thoughts.
Corporate executives talk openly about their strategies to plant ideas in your mind. When they succeed, they speak of your brain cells that they have taken over as something that they “own,” a corporate asset they call “mind share.”
Whatever share of your mind is considered corporate property at this point, you have an advantage that can tilt the ratios in your favor — the ability to make up your own mind. These are a few simple things you can do to reclaim some of your own mind share. Pick one, or think of one of your own, and have fun!
Next: Too Many Choices
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