Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 29, 1995 TAG: 9506010029
SECTION: EDITORIALS PAGE: A-7 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: MICHAEL F. JACOBSON AND LAURIE ANN MAZUR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Today, commercialism - particularly in the form of its chief harbinger and handmaiden, advertising - pervades our society to an extent not imagined several decades ago. Consider just a few recent examples:
8 million students are required to watch a 12-minute daily ad-filled telecast in school.
Makers of everything from spaghetti sauce to luxury cars are invading the Internet.
New York City's cash-strapped Board of Education is considering plastering schools and school buses with billboards.
Ads are stuffed into media as disparate as novels, movies and the bottoms of holes on putting greens. They are pumped into subway stations and grade-school classrooms, and snuck into computer programs and arcade games. It seems that marketers won't be satisfied until every square inch of space, every moment of time, is filled with the message ``Buy.''
Americans are bombarded with more than $150 billion worth of advertising a year. The average person will devote about three full years of his or her waking life just to watching TV commercials! While those ads may amuse, annoy or bore, they have effects of far greater import than those fleeting emotional reactions.
Commercialism, of course, goes far beyond advertising. It is stores that are open seven days a week, 24 hours a day. It is shops and vending machines filling nooks and crannies of schools, museums and airports. It is nonprofit organizations that serve as vehicles for marketers.
When confined to appropriate limits, the business side of life can coexist with family, religion and other facets. But when it grows without restriction like a weed, commerce adds an ``ism'' and becomes a philosophy - ``commercialism'' - that destroys the previous balance.
The old-fashioned ideals of simple living and moderation in the marketplace are foreign to the modern idea of commercialism. Frugality was a key word in the founders' civic vocabulary. ``Commerce without commercialism'' is how Benjamin Franklin might have put it. He and his generation recognized that there are values outside the marketplace, worthy aspirations beyond profit and pleasure, and joys in the simple life of modest consumption and friendship with others.
We consumers have learned our new lessons well, even to the extent of 900,000 of us going bankrupt in 1993 - triple the rate of a decade ago.
Business executives solemnly maintain that commercialism has led to unprecedented levels of material comfort. Advertising, said Editor and Publisher magazine, ``has been responsible for our high standard of living.'' The former head of the American Advertising Federation talks about ``the vital role advertising plays in sustaining and fueling our free-market economy, as well as its pro bono contributions to our social well-being.''
Poppycock! Continually assaulting every man, woman and child with commercial messages corrupts the very essence of our society:
nPutting an exclusive priority on personal consumption undermines the community's welfare.
nOur feverish consumption of material goods leads to serious environmental problems.
nMarketers skillfully foster feelings of insecurity just to sell their shampoos, clothing or cars.
nConsumers waste billions of dollars a year when they buy low-quality, over-priced products.
Commercial messages too often supplant important noncommercial information, such as promoting volunteerism, using libraries and saving money.
Commercialism appears to have a solid, perhaps ineradicable, grip on our society. Still, there is time to right the balance in our own lives, and perhaps even rein in some commercial excesses, if only we open our eyes and raise our voices.
Change can begin with small, personal decisions. We could buy what we need, not what marketers tell us we need. Most importantly, particularly for kids, we should participate in community activities; we should read, play, create and relate outside the marketplace.
Schools should help students to understand and resist the marketplace manipulators. Every student should participate in a community-service program (many private schools and several public school systems already have such programs). Environmental education, which spurs thinking about how a profligate lifestyle degrades our planet, should permeate the entire curriculum.
We also need laws to constrain the commercial sector, beginning with protection of young children from seductive television advertising. Cigarette and alcohol advertising should be sharply limited. Then, to reduce the sheer volume of all advertising (and raise tens of billions of dollars), the federal government should stop allowing promotional expenses to be tax-deductible.
And, yes, despite the current political winds, taxes on commercial broadcasters should be used to support public broadcasting.
While our proposals will not be embraced by the current leaders in Congress, many conservatives, as well as liberals, truly are disturbed by Americans' preoccupation with materialism. At bottom, they know that the very quest for a nation in which the public's welfare is paramount is subverted by marketing madness.
Michael Jacobson is the founder of the Center for the Study of Commercialism. Laurie Ann Mazur writes on issues of environmental and social justice.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune
by CNB