The recurring bombardment of
advertising paper in the form of inserts, flyers, and catalogs accompanying the
local daily newspaper (the volume of which frequently exceeded the number of
actual "news" pages) was the basis for a Cascadia Artpost collage
created in August 2013 that we called "Commodity Civilization." Stock
advertising slogans, the always smiling faces of consumer individuals and
families, and a few pictures cut from news magazines were excised out of their
context and juxtaposed to portray the ahistoric reality that immerses
Americans. The cultural historian J. Jackson Lears frequently uses the term
"community civilization" in his history of American advertising, Fables of Abundance, A Cultural History of
Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994) to describe an
American Way of Life organized around the consumption of material goods. He
calls national advertising "the quintessential institution of the
developing image empire" where "Factual accuracy was less important
than making the truth sound true." Lears develops the context more fully
in his most recent book, Rebirth of a
Nation, The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York: Harper
Perennial, 2009).
The roots of commodity civilization
go back to the beginnings of U.S. history on the North American continent. American
historian Walter McDougall identifies hustling as the defining characteristic
of Americans. In his book Freedom Just
Around the Corner, A New American History 1585-1828, McDougall traces the
expression of individualism in multiple areas of American life and Americans'
penchant to hustle from the early days of the American colonies to the first
decades of the United States. McDougall clearly states he is not picking on
Americans as a somehow worse people than others in the world.
"To suggest Americans are, among other things, prone to
be hustlers is not to accord them a nature different or worse than other human
beings. It is simply to acknowledge American have enjoyed more opportunity to
pursue their ambitions, by foul means or fair, than any other people in
history. In Europe and elsewhere the privilege of manipulating the system to
one's advantage was either reserved to elites or severely constrained: the wily
peasant could not go far. In America, by contrast, all white males enjoyed full
freedom to hustle, white women had their own tricks, and even enslaved Africans
(we now know) played the system as best they could. No wonder American English
is uniquely endowed with [several hundred] words connoting a swindle ...."
The cultural historian Morris Berman
goes one step further in his Why America
Failed, The Roots of Imperial Decline (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
2012; paperback edition to appear under another publisher in spring 2014) to
describe how American materialism and the pursuit of personal gain without
regard for the effects on others are now the instruments for American decline
in the 21st century. The rise of the financial sector and corporate domination
of politics, along with the financial crisis of 2008-2009 were not aberrations,
contends Berman, but the logical outcomes of a hustler culture incapable of
changing direction.
At this juncture, it seems that the
defining American characteristic and the relentless drive of commodity civilization
are deserving subjects for artistamps, hence the Cascadia Artpost series
American Values. The large vertical format "Hustling" stamp
superimposes the image of a hand grasping U.S. dollars above a rolling field of
red stripes suggesting the U.S. flag. In the second stamp, simply titled
"More", an empty grasping hand emerges out of the stars and stripes
to represent the never satisfied consumer, or what the historian Lears says is
"The reduction of the moral to the financial..." What more can one
say?
