You have to go behind the billboards to understand what’s happening in America. So said the novelist Nelson Algren, as sharp a social critic as H.L. Mencken ever was. Seems to me that the British author A. Robert Lee would agree with Algren. But he has taken it upon himself to cite the billboards themselves as diagnostic proof. In his new book BUY THIS! — composed entirely of commercials and slogans (little brothers of those billboards) — Lee draws from the widest possible array of sources to make us think . . . and, with a knowing wink, smile.
PROLOGUE
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
Norman Douglas
INTRODUCTION
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century. Advertising is all good news. A huge environment of surfaces.
Marshall McLuhan
ROLL THE COMMERCIALS
It is to be believed because it is absurd.
Tertullian
Lee puts his point like so: You might favor the view of McLuhan in “The Medium is the Message,” the panorama of idealized products so perfect that they give off solar beams.
You might equally favor the [Edward R.] Murrow of “Good Night, and Good Luck” and the 1940s wartime and other broadcasts so crisp and un-commercialized they cut into the ear.
Either way there’s no getting round, or even off, the ever accelerating superhighway of goods, eats, services, and not least, news.
And no escape from U.S. PRESIDENTIAL COMMERCIALS:
John F. Kennedy
We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier.
Ronald Reagan
It's morning in America.
Bill Clinton
Bring hope back to the American Dream.
George H.W. Bush
[Inexplicably, not listed.]
George W. Bush
America is turning the corner.
Barack Obama
We've come too far to turn back now.
Donald J. Trump
Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you're a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it's true! . . .
Lee’s book calls to mind the work of another (but dirtier) social critic, my ol’ friend, the late, great collagist Norman O. Mustill, whose visual take on the culture is a kind of match.
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