1997: More Ad Truths

NINETEEN ninety-seven, an odd number as the calendar goes, and occurring at the tail end of a century, it fails to enthuse despite what the advertisement tells us. And, before we get into this discourse, let's remind ourselves that ads are the prophecy and the advertised products the truth. This was the great wisdom the last half-decade was struggling to scienticise. As the visual complement of the prophecy, we were shown in an ad the customary female model, in partial undress, the face predictable, and the automobile in the background, the frozen speed and impatience brought alive by the visualiser at the ad agency. Pictures like these have been elevated to a civilisational thrust. The ad is today's revelation, and through it the copy-writer proclaims: feeling guilty driving down the slum? No need to be sentimental. Enjoy your automobile and drive on. We've conveyed the slogan in different words for mundane reasons, and kept back the brand-name of the car as well. But the message is clear. A new liberalised, globalised century is on the turn. Listen, and you will hear its hinges. Drive on!

The primitive and redundant men will call it insensitivity, but we see in the gag the elan of the new revolution. In the old revolution—the French one, for instance—this would have occasioned a visit to the guillotine. The guillotine has become part of the irresistible French chic. Even the gulag is getting absorbed into the in-things, they're turning into sauna baths and massage parlours. Don't let that child bother you, who told him to get in the way? He's the slum that needs to be taught to respect the 500,000 you've spent on this car, he's the dirty bulge on our slimming demograph, he's our representation without responsibility. I shouldn't have written at length about that damned automobile, it almost converted me to the state of the Third World vermin who tire themselves with driving in limos of fantasy. With the right socio-political hallucinogen you don't need a car to do that drive, there's no need for roads; in the end you won't even need yourself. 'Flower child,' said an earlier ad gag, 'for you, money grows on trees.' Let's complete the aphorism: 'Slum child fall by the wayside, let the beauty speed by, it was just the other day she walked bare-legged down the ramp so that you, vicarious wizard, could have a taste of both speed and beauty.' This is what 1996 had done to us, this is the mind-set it has made in advance for 1997.

The damned ad taunts me again.... Let's forget the car and its impenitent exhaust. That in part is the Arab's contribution to the slow but steady build-up of a global gas chamber. One small incident, a snippet in the press some years ago, comes to mind: that was a time of optimism in the world of energy, the Sun was overflowing! Quietly, Saudi Arabia cut the price of crude. A tiny dent but a fortune considering the bulk of the repriced oil. But it blunted all research into alternatives. It was driven back to where it had come from, to the dens of freaks and prophets. Where it's still confined. And think of the decades between that nasty deception and now, when the information on energy places the charge of planetary misuse on human aggression. Yet no one wants to associate the search for clean energy with mainstream science.

Because so much of the vaudeville rests on this unclean oil—the good life and greed. It's incredible how grown men with grown minds dedicate their lives to much frivolity, and tamper with the universe in the process.

1997 could well be seen as a landmark year if we reckon the dizzy proliferation of consumerism. It's the year of the cyber highway and human fallowness, of the cellular phone and other toys of similar flippancy. Little does the teenager in bed mumbling inanities into his cellphone realise that the energy waves of the toy around his tympanum are hardly at play. They are raising carcinogens, inside the defenceless jellies of his brain. 1997 is waiting for us, holding an immense trap.

IT doesn't matter if the vast historical correctives are neutralised by human amorality, by man's involvement with the trivial. One day in the life of homo sapiens is spent waiting for the next. The prophets of our times had sought to save this creature, a plaything of the most transient passions. The democracies, the proletarian dictatorships, other ascetic civil societies, all have tried patterns of liberation. Some were horrific, some liberal and loving, but all carried the jewel of freedom on their foreheads. They were united in this search; their contradictions within a single dialectic. The probing jewels failed to see this truth, and wore themselves down in half-a-century of attrition. They missed the awesome truth that stared them in the face—the web that tied them in the tragedy of a runaway civilisation. The flight from ideology to instant satisfactions was a shared malaise of every society—a struggle without its soul.

A half-century of strivings lie forgotten today. The International Brigade, the resistance of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin, the rout of the Kuo Min Tang, all have given way to the vaudeville. Perhaps one of the most poignant sites of resistance was the Berlin Wall. Yet it came down like any other piece of masonry, while the sinister Fuhrer-Bunker became another dumb monument. Czechoslovakia's invasion was undone only to take that country to disintegration. The Afghan resistance was debased as tribal wars and fanatical uprisings. Over all this, the collapse of the Soviet empire led not to humane socialism but to weird political formations. And Africa seems to have fallen back on its most horrendous atavisms.

1996 has seen all this flow by. Witnessed the collection of the silt of history. It has been a passive witness. It is this passivity that it has transferred to 1997 and that's no good augury.