US AS GLOBAL OVERLORD

Dumbing down, American-style

The projection of United States' power abroad has much to do with the way in
which its internal consensus is formed. Ever-present advertising,
ideological bombardment by institutions that challenge the very idea of
public policies for the common good, isolation and cultural protectionism:
this is the heavy price Americans pay as their tribute to the god of
business.

by HERBERT I SCHILLER Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University
of California, San Diego.

For at least half a century, the global theatre has had one dominating
actor - the United States of America. Less in total direction of the stage
now than 25 years ago, the American presence in the world economy and
culture remains commanding: a gross national product of $7,690 billion in
1998, the home base of the majority of the transnational corporations that
scour the world for markets and profits, the overseer of the many facades of
international decision-making, the United Nations Organisation, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World
Bank, the World Trade Organisation and others, the cultural-electronic
Goliath of the universe. Its supremacy is recognised universally and with
increasing resentment, to judge by the comments of a British diplomat
reported by the American academic, Samuel P Huntington: "One reads about the
world's desire for American leadership only in the United States. Everywhere
else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism" (1).

Yet how the world sees us may not be as revealing as how we see ourselves.
How do those who live in this globally pre-eminent territory understand
their own and their country's situation? Is it, in fact, so obvious to
everyone, as they go about their daily routines, that they are part of a
dominating global order? When, if at all, do people in this ruling core
society express indignation at, or resistance to, the burdens their order
imposes on others - and frequently on themselves as well?

This is not an awareness that can be taken for granted or that inevitably
surfaces. Indeed, the far-reaching enterprise of being the global overlord
requires not indignation but support, or at least acquiescence, from the
people who inhabit the home territory - some 270 million of them. Up to the
present time this has been achieved in a complex way, one that combines
heavy indoctrination that begins in the cradle with a system of selection
and/or omission of information that reinforces the enterprise's maintenance
and growth. Along with intense, though often veiled, efforts of persuasion,
and equally extensive exclusion of potential discordancies, there is a
well-graded arsenal of coercions that begin with admonition and end with
incarceration. There are almost 1.8 million people in prison in the USA, a
world record per head of population.

Together, to date, these instruments of social control have been remarkably
successful in producing, if not enthusiastic believers, at least general
acceptance at home of the US control apparatus and its procedures for
running the world. In justification of this endeavour, there are continual
reminders by the governing class of how blessed everyone is, at home and
abroad, with the present arrangements. The refrain of America's greatness
has echoed throughout the land in the post-second world war years. One
president after another tells Americans how wonderful they are. Not only at
the present time but apparently since Neanderthal days, the country is
without peer. Madeleine Albright has even described it as "the indispensable
nation" (2). How can anyone not recognise the bliss of living in the US at
this time? Yet many do not. Assertion, apparently, is not enough. More
comprehensive methods of securing popular adherence, never absent in the
past, are being refined and calibrated for the millennium ahead.

One of the most tested and effective means of keeping order in the ranks
comes from definitional control - the ability to explain and circulate the
governors' view of reality, local or global. Its practice is dependent on a
reliable national instructional system. Schools, entertainment, the media
and the political process are enlisted. The basis of definitional control is
the informational infrastructure that produces meaning and awareness. When
the infrastructure is in place and performing routinely, it needs no
prompting from the top of the social pyramid. Americans absorb the images
and messages of the prevailing social order. These make up their frame of
reference and perception. With few exceptions, it is this framework which
insulates most from ever imagining an alternative social reality.

Let us take an example, the use of the term "terrorism". In the US the issue
of terrorism - at home and abroad - has become a high governmental concern
and the justification for enormous military and police expenditures. And
well it might be. It is no surprise, indeed it is to be expected, that
resistance to oppressive conditions will erupt from time to time in one part
of the world or another. How are these outbreaks - which may be bloody and
violent - to be explained to the US population? Simple. They are presented -
particularly when the oppressors are friends or clients of Washington - as
acts of "terrorism". In the 1990s, the label was attached to the Iranians,
the Libyans, the Palestinians, the Kurds (3) and numerous others. In an
earlier time, it was the Malaysians, the Kenyans, the Angolans, the
Argentinians, and, no less, the Jews resisting the British Mandate in
Palestine. In the last half century, US forces and their accomplices have
been burning and slaughtering "terrorists" in Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua,
Iraq and elsewhere.

Definitional control can also work by omission. The annual special issue of
Time magazine that features "the most influential people in America 1997" is
richly illustrative. Time's roster of most influential Americans begins with
a new golfing star and includes, among others, Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, US Senator John McCain, a radio talk show host, a black scholar, a
film producer, an economist, a product designer, a pop musician, a
television talk show host, a mutual funds manager and the editor of the
National Enquirer. To complete the list, there are two individuals with
significant ties to real power: Richard Mellon Scaife, the heir to part of
the Mellon money and financial angel to many ultra-conservative
organisations and causes; and Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury and
former co-manager of the powerful Wall Street firm Goldman, Sachs. Yet these
two exceptions are individuals now separated from the power clusters that
gave them their personal wealth.

Time's listing confers authority mostly on service providers, not on the
sources and wielders of genuine power in the country. From this list,
readers can feel informed while actually remaining ignorant of the realities
of power in the US. Far more useful for getting a sense of this reality, for
example, was a table published a month later in the back business pages of
the New York Times, listing the ten largest US goods- and service-producing
corporations, by market capitalisation. Heading the list was General
Electric, followed by Coca Cola, Exxon and Microsoft. How much more
enlightened Time's readers might have been if these corporations headed its
list of influentials. The briefest descriptions of what these companies do,
where they are located, what decisions they make about investment and
labour, and how these decisions affect people in and outside the US, would
offer a critical dimension for assessing the real distribution of power in
America and overseas.

But such information in context is precisely what definitional control is
employed to prevent. Besides, there has emerged in recent decades a new
galaxy of information producers and analysts whose task is to obscure and
shield the wielders of power from public attention. These are the very
conservative institutes, research organisations and think tanks (4) that
prepare studies on legal, social and economic issues from a propertied and
corporate perspective. This is to be expected because the corporate sector
is the source of their funds. These organisations turn out a sizeable
quantity of studies and reports which are given full credibility in the
national and local informational circuits. Right-wing think-tankers enjoy
wide and hospitable access to local radio as well as national television,
and they lobby quietly with local, state and national officials.

The Manhattan Institute in New York City is such an outfit. Its mission, as
described by its president, is "to develop ideas and get them into
mainstream circulation - with the help of the 'media food chain'".
Accordingly, the institute hosts "discreetly lavish public-policy lunches
... to which it invites hundreds of journalists, politicians, bureaucrats,
business people and foundation staff members to hear a speaker on a subject
the institute likes". This kind of cosy forum, reports the New York Times,
has "nudged New York to the right" (5). The institute has had plenty of
backup and reinforcement from other like-minded organisations. But the
essential point about this and dozens of similar organisations - the top
four cited in the media were the Brookings Institution, the Heritage
Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute - is
that they provide public conduits for the corporate voice. As a result, the
public's information well becomes polluted at the source.

Yet these are visible structures of ideology creation and dissemination. Far
more effective, and not nearly as visible, in achieving definitional control
are the dynamics of the market system itself, especially as they relate to
the consciousness-creating cultural industries. These industries have
provided incalculable support to US corporate influence domestically and its
expansion globally. Here, the focus is not on their external impact, but how
their economic strength, political authority and cultural power, utilising
market rules and values, have affected the American public. And it is a
grotesque irony that the nation whose leaders pronounce it "the greatest",
and who regard other countries as pathetic examples of information and
cultural deprivation, is prevented from sampling the world's diverse
creative output - not by fiat, but by "market forces".

Ninety six per cent of the films Canadians see and 80% of the magazines they
read are foreign, in the vast majority of cases American - a fact that has
not passed without comment in Ottawa (6) - whereas foreign films and videos
account for only 1-2% of American "consumption". No single explanation is
sufficient but the sweeping expansion of "free trade" is the central factor.
Foreign film production is at terrific disadvantage to US film producers who
enjoy a large, unified and relatively rich domestic market. The consequences
have been calamitous for foreign film industries, reduced and marginalised
in the global market. Foreign offerings, if they make it at all into the US
market, are increasingly made to satisfy audiences already shaped by their
long-standing film experience with the Hollywood product. In both
situations, domestic and foreign, the filmgoer suffers.

The familiarity of American readers with current world literature is no less
abysmal. In any given year, the PEN list of published translations, from all
the languages of the world, has not exceeded more than 200 to 250 titles.
The situation is hardly different as far as news is concerned, where foreign
television coverage puts the emphasis on breaking crises. Most of the
messages and images of the world come from still greater concentrated
private channels - with the temporary exception of the Internet. Given these
arrangements, it is hardly surprising that most Americans' knowledge of the
world and its problems is less than microscopic. "Weapons of Mass
Distraction" is how film-maker Larry Gelbart has described the functioning
of the media system, television in particular, in the US today. Gelbart, who
earlier wrote about the depredations of the tobacco industry in Barbarians
at the Gate, explained his new film: "Tobacco executives are only dangerous
to smokers but we all smoke the news. We all inhale television. We all
subscribe to what these men are putting out. They're much more dangerous"
(7).

And what they are putting out is so commoditised that it chooses most of its
content for its entertainment value, in quest of the large audience. This
situation is by no means confined to the US (8), though it has probably
reached more critical dimensions there than in any other developed country.
So much so that the Norwegian political scientist Johann Galtung has
described it as the "television idiotisation" of Americans.

Yet national ignorance cannot be accounted for solely by the trivialisation
and withholding of news. It has much deeper roots. The structural foundation
of the media system, financed exclusively by those who can afford to buy
time and messages, assures a continuing cultural impoverishment of the
audience - this despite the best efforts of a few talented people who have
been trying for decades to promote a non-commercial culture. The giant
corporations account for the bulk of all the media's financial support and
it is their messages, $40 billion worth annually in television alone, that
create the all-embracing commercial atmosphere in the country. No other
people in the world are subject to as heavy a barrage of commercial imagery
and messages as are Americans. Few have attempted to measure the impact of
this incessant flow of commercials. No studies have been made, or at least
none have been published.

The commercial pummelling of the American mind begins at a very early age
and no-one is really concerned with the consequences. The situation is so
gross that Business Week, a publication not known for its hostility to the
market economy, was prompted to publish a cover story chronicling the
depredations imposed on the country's infants: "At 1.58 pm on Wednesday 5
May, a consumer was born ... by the time she went home three days later,
some of America's biggest marketers were pursuing her with samples, coupons
and assorted freebies ... Like no generation before, hers enters a consumer
culture surrounded by logos, labels, and ads almost from the moment of birth
... By the time she's 20 months-old, she will start to recognise some of the
thousands of brands flashed in front of her each day. At the age of seven,
if she's anything like the typical kid, she will see some 20,000 TV
commercials a year. By the time she's 12, she will have her own entry in the
massive data bases of marketers" (9).

The cumulative effects of unbridled commercialism, however difficult to
assess, constitute one key to answering what is the impact of growing up in
the core of the world's marketing system. Minimally, it suggests
unpreparedness for and unconcern with the world that exists outside the
shopping mall. Now radio, and to an increasing extent television, have been
taken over to express the views of a hard-line conservative element,
supported by numerous foundations, that is against any form of social
organisation, national or international.

One of the primary targets of these extremist groups is government. The
interventionist policies of the US government have in fact been pursued in
the interests of the governing corporate class but the currently vociferous
opponents of government do not mention these activities. Instead they claim
that government as a form of political organisation is intolerable. This is
not the principled position of anarchism but thinly veiled apologetics for
private, corporate direction of the country. In expressing these sentiments
in hundreds of channels daily, the public cannot possibly begin to
understand, much less deal with, the urgent issues of either local, national
or international existence.

In international affairs, the public is exposed to ceaseless tirades from
large sections of complicit media against the very idea of the United
Nations. The invective penetrates the mainstream media as well. The result
has been a decades-long campaign against the UN and related international
bodies, for instance, UNESCO and the World Health Organisation. It is not
that the UN and its related bodies are above criticism. But it is that their
functions are attacked as threatening and unnecessary, it is that the
principles of international solidarity are condemned. And it is not only the
UN and the international community that suffer. Americans too turn away from
their own weak and poor and adopt the rationales of those who see no need
for social protective networks.

The acceptance - though there are some points of resistance - of the
American consumerist, privatised model abroad strengthens the prevailing
mind-set in the US. Only the most profound shocks in the global and domestic
economies will be sufficient to shake the beliefs and values that now
prevail in the minds and consciousness of most Americans. This is not a
comforting thought. But the machinery of mind management is so entrenched
and pervasive that nothing less than seismic movements can be expected to
loosen or weaken its pernicious authority.

(1) Samuel P Huntington, "The lonely superpower", Foreign Affairs,
March-April 1999.

(2) Quoted by Huntington, op.cit.

(3) In particular by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in a speech
given at the National Press Club, Washington, on 6 August 1997 and quoted in
the New York Times on 8 August 1997.

(4) See Serge Halimi, "Les "boEEtes E0 idE9es" de la droite
amE9ricaine", Le Monde diplomatique, May 1995.

(5) See Janny Scott, "Promoting its ideas, the Manhattan Institute has
nudged New York rightwards", New York Times, 12 May 1997.

(6) See Anthony De Palma, "US gets cold shoulder at a Culture Conference",
International Herald Tribune, 2 July 1998.

(7) Quoted in the New York Times, 8 May 1997.

(8) See Ignacio Ramonet, La tyrannie de la communication, GalilE9e, Paris
1999.

(9) Business Week, 30 June 1997.