A few years ago Anacin ran a series of intriguing commercials, vignettes of working people -- a welder, coal miner, waitress, school teacher, truck driver -- talking for 20 seconds on how they needed to get rid of their headaches to do their jobs well. A single face and voice speaking to the audience: it was quiet elegant and affecting.
Why? Vance Packard one said that commercials are our society's mini-myths. Commercials in this country generate at least two myths. One is that commodities can do what liberal democracy can't. Orientals, Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, women have all been mixed into the capacious world of advertising, implying that buying, selling, and hungering after material success have finally brought about equality.
The other myth asserts that the middle-class world created by this fraternity of products is the real and only world, a world towards which everyone aspires (if, of course, they are in their right minds).
But not everyone can be let into the club. Think about who is not included in this middle-class world of commodity democracy: no poor people, no homeless people, no homosexuals, most new immigrants: in short, no one who would offend. That's why the Anacin commercials were so important. How many times on TV have we seen and heard from simple people out of a Studs Terkel book? For a moment television opened a crack in the myths, and another world -- reality -- popped through.
And that world, for many, is a frightening one, not only for the marginal people in the Anacin commercials, but for the millions below them. The fact that poverty has increased in the last six years (along with its attendant hunger, disease, and humiliation), and that the present Attorney General once blithely said that there weren't any hungry people in this country should make us all pause in disgust and worry. That a good many aren't disgusted by such information is in part a testament to the power of the commercials' world on our imaginations: what we don't see does not exist.
But we compound this social and moral dishonor if we believe even for a second that people actively want the degradation and marginal survival that a life of poverty brings. A world of pain and starvation, just underneath the commercials' veneer, just outside the fake walnut cabinet of the TV set, walks silently and angrily through our streets. It is a world to which we will have to pay attention, either by choice, and thus redeem our ethical selves, or by force of circumstance, when the comfortable life is bought at a price too dear for those who do not have.
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