Posted By BillHeise on November 9, 2010

In 1971, the same year that Alinsky published his Rules for Radicals, Gil Scott-Heron released ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised‘ as the B-side to his single ‘Home is Where the Hatred Is.’

This is a great song, but, 39 years later, we may ask why revolution has not come. Of course Saul Alinsky would give us a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is too much advertising on television. What we need now is more resistance to commercial culture, not less. Americans are a sheepish people who will not be led by those in the know who know what the people will not hear.

Mad Men

This is a cultural trope, one that is not limited to Saul Alinsky’s work. We find it in one of the best shows on television, Mad Men. In the opening credits, we meet a generic ad man (it’s a joke; did you get it?; ad men/mad men) who is falling. We can’t see who pushed him, nor why he’s not floating in space like ‘the floating man‘ but is being pulled down by some unknown, undescribed force, but the ground is coming up fast. Wikipedia tells us that the influence of Alfred Hitchcock is apparent here:

The titles pay homage to graphic designer Saul Bass’s skyscraper-filled opening titles for Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and falling man movie poster for Vertigo (1958); Weiner has listed Hitchcock as a major influence on the visual style of the series.

And yet at the end of the credits, he is sitting relaxed and über-cool in his perfect suit, as though everything is okay.

But the image of perfection hides the fact that in his actual life Don Draper—that’s the guy’s name; it’s like the clothes that men wear which drape over them; but everyone knows that the clothes do not make the monk (another reference to the Roman de la Rose)—is not so perfect, as we see in the famous scene in which Don is not only selling something trivial (a new device to store slides) but ties it in with his own failed of failing marriage.

Once again, it pays to actually listen to what Don is saying here as he sells his ‘Carousel,’ which is a device which can be used to relive memories of the past through photographs. He manages to position himself as the promoter of a circular ‘wheel.’

‘We know they’re not exciting, even though they are the original,’ says one one the happy-go-lucky executives who have come looking for help from the Master Draper. Don manages to give them an answer which had eluded them before.

He does so by positioning the ‘carousel’ between technology, which is a ‘glittering lure’ that appeals to people on the surface, and sentimentality, which represents something deeper and more permanent on which the consumer can ‘bond’ with the product.

Don goes back into his own memory and pulls out a memory of an old Greek guy named Teddy, who told him that the ‘most important idea’ in the world of advertising is ‘new.’ ‘It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a sort of calamine lotion.’

This is a nice image. The consumer, too, is stuck in a world of consuming, which is a horizontal world filled (apparently) with poison ivy. The remedy for this horizontal world is to take refuge in the vertical and ironic structures which offer a more permanent relief to life’s problems. It’s like an Alka-Seltzer that permanently cures your indigestion. (Wait, that’s like the calamine lotion analogy). It’s like taking a photograph and living in it as though time has stopped and only the happy moments of life are real, while the sadness of the world passes away. The deep irony of this scene is that Don is facing the deeper truth of his life as he’s presenting his ironic position as a cold businessman. Surface and depth, get it?

Are You Buying This?

But do we really buy this? I don’t mean the a posteriori conclusions we draw from Don Draper’s speech but the a priori conditions on which he builds his proposition. Is there really nothing in the world but a deep but schmaltzy sentimentality by which we combat the superficialities of technology? And where is where is reason in Don Draper’s world? It appears to me to be part of the ‘superficial’ world that brings us technology but which does not go deep enough to permanently satisfy the itch that it produces. This leads Don simply to ignore my concern with a priori and a posteriori things, since neither can permanently satisfy ‘that itch.’

That is the position that the medieval poet Jean de Meun takes on Reason. She provides no permanent solutions, so the Lover can do without her and come to God through other ‘morally reprehensible’ means. With the decline in academic beliefs in God, modern thinkers started reengineering their positions to use ‘other than rational’ means to achieve what reason alone could not. And from this, we get schmaltzy sentiment. We don’t need reason, which leaves us falling through relative space (like Don Draper).

Settling on any foundation in such a universe would be like settling on something impermanent. The only answer (they say) is to forgo reason and live in a universe of knowing that we don’t (and perhaps can’t) know anything. Those who live without irony in such a world are the deluded.

Back to Gil Scott-Heron

This is why we get Gil Scott-Heron’s advancing his revolution in terms of superficial images of advertising. His revolution will be effected by those who forgo the distractions created by technology (and who doesn’t want that?) but live in the unmediated world in which ‘the revolution will be live.’ Just as in Alinsky, a concentration on language leads us beyond ‘images’ and ‘figures’ to something more permanent.

This last proposition I find difficult to accept as any more ‘real’ than the ‘superficial images’ they are supposed to be ridding us of. We are still talking about language here. And, as Derrida says, language can be turned over and over again without finding a permanent vertical bottom to our inquiry. Instead, it travels ‘from word to word’ in an endless horizontal cycle of words without ever reaching a static definition at which time words stop referring to other words and refer instead to ‘nature.’

Take the image of the ‘theme song’ of the revolution, which Gil Scott-Heron informs us ‘will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.’ Jimmy Webb wrote several of the (schmaltzy and sentimental) hits sung by Glen Campbell.

One of his most famous songs was ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.’

She looks in the mirror and stares at the wrinkles that weren’t there yesterday
And thinks of the young man that she almost married
What would he think if he saw her this way?

She picks up her apron in little girl-fashion as something comes into her mind
Slowly starts dancing rememb’ring her girlhood
And all of the boys she had waiting in line.

Okay, these lyrics must be on the mind of the creators of Mad Men, because Betty Draper (Don’s wife) is living her life as a stunted girl, rather than growing (as she should) into adulthood. Don, meantime, is a hard-drinking man’s man. Don looks back fondly on the picture-perfect life he had with her, but he knows that he cannot escape into a picture-perfect world. He, like Serge Gainsbourg, is tempted by the powers of the flesh. The draw of these powers is too much for him to resist, and so he lives ironically in the (moving and horizontal) flesh world of Jane Birkin, rather than the (fixed and vertical) pre-adolescent phase of France Gall’s ye-ye twilight. We may look back on our dreams, but we know that we are permanently exiled from having our dreams realized in actuality.

Gil Scott-Heron is similarly afflicted by the adolescence of the 50s dream life in which ‘the little woman’ stays home and waits for her ‘big, strong man.’ The problem in Jimmy Webb’s song is that same one we find in Don Draper’s life and Saul Alinsky’s work: time keeps passing on. Though we can freeze it, we can’t make it stop.

The photograph album she takes from the closet and slowly turns the page
And carefully picks up the crumbling flower
The first one he gave her now withered with age

She closes her eyes and touches the house dress that suddenly disappears
And just for the moment she’s wearing the gown
That broke all their minds back so many years

She lives in a tableaux. Gil proposes a revolution of thought which will take us from transitory images of things into a more permanent life of things that matter.

The Rolling Stones’ Answer to Jimmy Webb

The Rolling Stones offered an answer to Glen Campbell’s ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife’ in their ‘Mother’s Little Helper.’

The song starts out with the lyrics, ‘What a drag it is getting old.’ This is a great message if you’re a god (like Lucifer), but it doesn’t do you much good if you’re a human being on account of the permanence of the aging process.

Now I am absolutely not saying that I agree with Jimmy Webb here. Cooking fresh food for her husband probably is ‘a drag.’ But the the Rolling Stones don’t necessarily deal with the permanent state of the aging process. Instead, they sing a song about how women cope with the aging of their bodies in a civilization in which ‘beautiful people’ like Serge Gainsbourg exploit the only gift that woman have to offer: their bodies, which are transformed from vehicles of mere physical pleasure into mystical temples of worship in a ritual known only to the few, the proud. They take ‘little yellow pills’ to deal with the pain of no longer being young. Being young is better than being old. That much is clear.

To the uninitiated, this looks like nothing more than sexual exploitation (‘No, no, no,’ says my friend Gnarbel . ‘You, [meaning I] ‘have completely missed the point of the sexual exploitation of the women. We value their bodies when we worship at the temple.’ Okay.) without a real plan for dealing with the inevitable process of aging.

We are simply to take the word of the knowing men (and women, if there are any) that the worship of beauty is itself an ultimate good. We, ‘the little people,’ take ‘little yellow pills’ (now blue, thanks to technology) to deal with the fact of our unhappiness, while the beautiful men and women pump away in their sacred temple.

I have the same problem with Gil Scott-Heron’s song. He tells us that he is in charge because he has accessed ‘the truth’ at the bottom of things, but on closer inspection the truth turns out to be nothing more than accessed though ‘words, words, words.’ And, as Derrida tells us (and I believe him to be correct on this point), words don’t ever get back to stable meanings. So this means that relying on ‘words’ to make perfect sense out of the world can never make perfect sense.

A Last Word on Revolutionaries

Rather than relying on the next best thing to being a god (like Lucifer), human reason, Saul Alinsky relies on his sense that ‘revolution’ can come through the permanent stopping of the endless cycle of time in a photograph-like image. After Derrida we live in a new age which doubts the power of reason to stop turning over and over again. Gil Scott-Heron was too optimistic in his view that reason could be stopped at the top of the cycle. But rather than reintroduce reason, which can serve as a temporary—note the etymology of time in that construction—though not a permanent fix, the authors on Mad Men take an ironic position of ‘nostalgia.’

This is an interesting moment in the drama of Mad Men, for Don doesn’t use the word as normal people do—to mean ‘a yearning for the past, often in an idealized from’ (Wikipedia).

His deus ex machina Greek friend has given Don a ‘more permanent’ definition of nostalgia which effaces the idealism of his usage from him. It is derived from the Greek for ‘the pain from an old wound.’ This is the ‘seam’ from my definition of fiction. But here the seam has the status of a permanent ending, rather than one which will need to be revisited when conditions change. It is the pain endures.

Having settled on a permanent definition—which I and Derrida would insist is nothing more than more words rather than a permanent reference to the world at large—Don Draper has only to make his peace with this permanent, inexorable, and necessary feature of all existence. The only thing to do now is to drift in a free fall universe, resting only on sentimentality. The author rests, rewriting the past in light of what we know now but didn’t know then, just a few years ago. Don Draper relies on his status as an ironic and knowing observer of his status as an exile in his life. He is a leader of men (a master), rather than a sheepish follower. He creates ad campaigns, but, like Alinsky, he doesn’t believe in them himself. He knows it’s all just ‘a game.’ This leaves Don Draper trapped in this life with no sure way out of his dilemma.

I find the inherent idealism of this position, which masks its idealism from itself, to be less than satisfactory. Rather than pushing through the illusion of words to a permanent reference to the world—as Gil Scott-Heron and Saul Alinksy do—or sitting back content with his Master status that comes from the recognition that he can never enter into the world that he sells to others, as Don Draper does (this is his greatest skill the writers tell us), I prefer to use my limited power of reason to situate myself within the universe, rather than grasping after the ungraspable status of Lucifer, who though he won a kingdom for himself and has a position outside of the universe may not be as happy as he appears in Milton’s epic poem, where he sits ignorant of his true state:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d
To that bad eminence; and from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain Warr with Heav’n, and by success untaught
His proud imaginations thus displaid. (Paradise Lost II.1-10)

There are other (and I would say better) options than continuing on the path of unreason. After all, Don Draper himself in his speech is talking about the switch from a progressive view of the world (through the slide tray) to one in which things suppressed come back around to the beginning (through the ‘carousel’). Here, I think he’s right. The return policy is better than the no return policy.

Even Gil Scott-Heron thought that Johnny Cash was part of the problem to which Gil had the answer (which it turned out meant turning away from Johnny Cash). But Johnny Cash was no dumb blonde either. He managed to get some satisfaction by living long (and hard) enough to be redeemed from his early association with ‘mere’ country music. He died as a true American music legend. Maybe reason can be redeemed from the margins of our circular world, as well, rather than suffering a permanent exile from the thought of man-(person)kind.

But then who am I?

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