The Conquest of Cool

...They "empower" us, they "provide" us with jobs, they even "'rebel" for us, encouraging our every "creative," "rule-breaking" act of material consumption as an assault on the Bastille of "conformity...

...Emboldened by new management theories that celebrated "flexibility" and "'empowerment" and demonized hierarchy and bureaucracy, and determined to break the creative and accumulative shackles of "conformity" and soulless routine, admen in agencies such as DDB and BBDO overthrevr the three-martini culture by challenging clients and founding the apparently free-wheeling symbolic order that now defines American advertising...

...OSA Workshops: VJ S(z id [sswes lr/arkshops (21tholic Social Teaching ~md U.5 Public Pu]icy...

...There were many regions in that still largely uncharted historical terrain--communal living, organic farming, and ecological awareness, to name a few--and they housed more genuinely provocative minds than Reich--Theodore Roszak, Ivan Illich, and E. F. Schumacher, to name a few...

...Bultmann said it: There is no understanding without a pre-understanding...

...They indicted the c u l t u r e of consumption, not so much for its inequality and "materialism," b u t more for Rs fostering abstracting and utilitarian practices toward ourselves and the rest of creation...

...Bruce Nieli, Past Director of Evangelization, NCCB "In the 38 years I have been a priest, I have not seen or experienced a more powerful m i s s i o n . " . . . Rev...

...My main quarrel with Terrcnce Gordon's very fine book is that he elides the contradictions implicit in McLuhan's work...

...W A S H I N G T C) N T H E O L O G 1 C A I U N I O IN 6' f $1=$$10N I M&Y 1"1-~, "1996 : : - , , SESSION n JULY 6-3,, 199~ CARMELITE JULY 6-31,1998 Workshop: § ~lirfislr-~ofBa.qoralSuper~ision...

...While written primarily for Benedictine oblates, this simple yet elegant prayerbook also gives the unfamiliar user a starting place from which to progress into a more intense practice...

...Gordon is an unabashed admirer of his subject, so naturally wants McLuhan to appear in complete control of his insights...

...July 13 31 5'~'6~1 TheDlog~ofti~e(;hurch...

...Thus, far from demolishing capitalism, the moral revolution of the 1960s inaugurated a new phase in its cultural history, with consumption repackaged as "rebellion" and daily life choreographed as a "self-perpetuating pageant of workplace deference and advertising outrage...

...The story begins in the gray-flanneled 1950s...

...And, when Gordon discusses the frequent critics of McLuhan's work, he--more hagiographer than biographer now-always assumes that they just "didn't understand" what the man was saying...

...But along came an energetic band of visionaries advancing an in-house critique of corporate culture every bit as pungent as the more celebrated attacks on mass culture by David Riesman, William H. Whyte, and Vance Packard...

...Patrick McMahon O Caryll Treat Your Parish to an Isaiah Mission...

...Personally, I was delighted by Origen on the Song of Songs, b u t married Catholics will resonate more to the interpretation of the Song as inspired love poetry between a man and a woman--gremted that this does not exh a u s t the meaning of the Song, as illustrated by the Spiritual Canticle of the Carmelite friar, Saint John of the Cross...

...Or is ONI there an alternative H;~,~,~hy view of hierarchy...

...Should not one expose the spiritual experience o f / i n the text (for example, psalms) as more compelling and fruitful...

...Today's barons have recast themselves as democrats, philanthropists, revolutionaries...

...and otherwise resist the nailing of America to a cross of gold...

...B Eugene McCarraher, when not drinking c@ fee at Starbucks, teaches history at the University of Delaware...

...Their counterparts in menswear (especially the young turks at Gentleman's Quarterly) sparked a parallel rebellion in numerous design offices...

...McLuhan could probably not have been, and surely was not, a systematic thinker...

...Linda M, Maloney, ~. Translator God is self-revealed as "through a window" re those who look to God in faith...

...July 6-i0 IO Pastoral h~lHicatior/5 uL@lerican Popular Culture...

...Taking us into boutiques, boardrooms, and executive suites, Frank chronicles two contemporaneous transformations: the "Creative Revolution" in advertising and the "Peacock Revolution" in the menswear industry...

...Dominic Mon:L OFM John Burkhard, OFM Cony Michael ScanJon, OSA 13auiel Giigassy, OFM Sam ,~qtllony Murello, OCI) E leen Simon, DMi...

...His books are hardly books at all, but collections of aphorisms, insights--'probes," he liked to call them...

...But it ain't so...

...Both testaments have their "otherness," but especially is this true of the Old, which is often reduced to a Christological meaning (see also "the Bible II," as in your cartoon on page 3...

...Thomas Frank tries to explain in his brilliant, polemically charged, though ultimately unsatisfying account of business culture in the 1960s...

...The new managerial ideologies antedated countercultural and New Left calls for "participatory democracy," while the irreverence and irony extolled by the new advertisers preceded the "new morality" of self-fulfillment and open-ended commitment...

...Frank McConnell, Commonweal's media critic, teaches English at the University qf California, Santa Barbara...

...his edginess is almost the content of his work (the medium being, after all, the message...

...Jul} 20 24 Two Week Courses (2 cre, Lqv) PS 767A Th6'~?se of Lisieux: I)octor oHhe (;hutch...

...Rubin, and Charles Reich...

...He's the CEO of the Virgin Group of companies...

...EORRESPONDENCI (Continued from page 4) mission statement called "actualization" of the biblical text...

...Jul} 6 10 Faifl3 Through Artis~.ic l'xpressiun...

...In an age of layoffs, weak unions, and the hypermobility of capital, "hip" is the latest souped-up cultural vehicle of corporate authority, "the public philosophy of the age of flexible accumulation...

...as Frank cracks at one point--"Have we got a car for you...

...He also provides a needed (if not altogether original) corrective to "cultural studies" mavens who see "subversion" in every market-researched epater of the bourgeoisie...

...He looked unflinchingly at new modes of communication that increasingly define our sense of self, and tried to read them as what they are, and what they imply for our common, and spiritual, life...

...Must hierarchy mean 'Itt AT A~ L dominance, patriarchy, MA, V ,qE and oppression...

...Still, in his laudable eagerness to "hold the beloved counterculture to the harsh light of historical and economic scrutiny," Frank blinds himself to its variety, complexity, and endurance...

...Yet the robber barons also moved millions to join unions, form farmers' alliances, and vote for radical parties...

...It dictates, Frank notes, that we inhabit a cultural landscape strewn with liberated prudes, horrified church ladies, and healthy hedonists whose counterfeit resistance-throughconsumption merely augments and ratifies the wealth and power of business...

...IHM James Scuniun, OFM arnes Coriden, Ph.D...

...Yes, it is "indispensable...

...Frank's portrayal of cooptation is now fairly common on the Left...

...a prayerful selection of Hildegard's visionary and prophetic writings, encourages us all to look through the "windows of faith" 2448-0 Hardcover, 104pp.,5%x87a.$13.95 That All May Be One Hierarchy and Participation in the Church Terence L. Nichols...

...A contributing reporter to the Nation, In These Times, and other periodicals, Frank is also the editor of the Baffler, a Chicago-based journal that features some of the most biting and well-written cultural criticism of the present day...

...Spiritual Renewal * Clergy/Lay Team * Personal Witness * Sacrament Based * Training for Evangelization "Since 1984, Isaiah Parish Missions have invited thousands of Catholics to reconciliation, on-going conversion, social justice and evangelization.., creative, positive, inspiring...

...From the now-classic Volkswagen ads to the "Pepsi Generation" campaigns, the masters of "hip" addressed desires for freedom, novelty, and variety as matters, not of political and creative power in the workplace, but of purchasing power in leisure time...

...Does it retain a certain primacy...

...Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they the status quo...

...David Efroymson...

...Wolburga Starch, O.S.B., Editor...

...Yet by eschewing the bogus populism of business elites to focus on their moral and symbolic power, Frank makes an important contribution to the cultural history of the 1960s...

...In offering itself as the antidote to business routine, business transformed "the strategies of consumerism, the ideology by which business explained its domination of the national life...

...These three pointed toward technologically decentralized, ecologically senCommonweal 2 8 February 27, 1998 sitive, and spiritually informed ways of life...

...Nichols details his notion of participatory hierarchy, grounding it in Scr pture and in Christian tradition...

...and John Raines, Editors This collection of essays honoring Father St0yan Open by his colleagues, friends...

...Thanks for a lively and thoughtful article...

...Einstein, King, Gandhi, Branson, Isadora Duncan, Ted Turner--rewind that, please...

...6. Are Catholic biblical scholars influenced by academe...

...Jul} 6-24 CL-%l Introduction It, C, ar:on I,aw...

...Of course, b u t also by the Catholic church tradition and ethos...

...create a progressive tradition and preach a social gospel...

...July 13-31 TWO Week Courses (2 credJ~9 PH-412 Metal3kysic~audFpis*emolog3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . July 6 17 ~,~7 514 Introduction to ],Jtur D...

...5879-2 Paper,232pp.,Sxg,$19,95 The Windows o f Faith Prayers of Holy Hildegard Hildegard of Bingen...

...Surely, much of their vision of "the simple life" has been commodified into n u t r i b a r s and Birkenstock sandals...

...The menswear industry was a similar dullard's paradise, marked by sartorial b]andness and threatened by declining sales of suits, jackets, and trousers...

...There are many works of haute vulg, arisation that expose the spiritual value of the literal sense, and also succeed in applying it meaningfully to modem circumstances, "actualizing" it...

...Rejecting a straightforward "cooptation thesis"--the increasingly conventional wisdom that business "stole" an authentically oppositional movement against consumer capitalism--Frank argues that business itself anticipated and embraced the vaunted "counterculture" with the open arms of "hip" and "cool...

...and often their criticisms were right...

...From the Editors: Luke Timothy John son will respond to the Reverend Murphy and other writers in a future issue...

...CatholMsm and former students "n,~r,,auic,,,,a,~,~ probes the most crucial : : concepts in the Ca tholic * ;':'~ '~':~ tradition: God, Jesus, Church, ethics, liturgy, religious education, Catholic-Muslim relations, and Catholicism itself...

...Well: sometimes they did...

...Ju b 6 24 EH-532 Reforn!ationandModern(]huIcb Hislo7...

...strike the railroads and the coal mines...

...How did corporate Bourbons become our model Jacobins...

...And thank God...

...His lyrical ambivalence about the new media is, I think, his great value...

...Readers can go through the literal historical sense to arrive at a spiritual and responsib]e meaning for today...

...Jul} fi-lO Adult ])evelopmenr al3d Camaelite Spirituality...

...404 Isaiah Parish Missions, Abbeyridge Ct., Ocoee, FL 34761 T o l l - f r e e : 1-888-472-4241 Commonweal ~1 1 Februamy 27, 1998 Even more significant, the corporate avant-garde prefigured the "counterculture's" attacks on inflexible organizations, manners, and morals...

...indeed, it has a rather old and venerable pedigree, extending from Malcolm Cowley's account of Greenwich Village bohemianism in Exile's Return (1934) down to Herbert Marcuse's notion of "repressive de-sublimation...

...Commonweal 2 6 Februamy 27, 1998 Full of happy families enraptured by their standardized commodities, the imagery of postwar advertising was, in Frank's words, "fatuous in the extreme'--and, more to the point, "transparently so to much of the audience it aimed to persuade...

...1 p l Washing!:on For/~rltoermlbrmati(m...

...5. Johnson's examples are all from the New Testament, understandably for that is a n area of his expertise...

...For Hildegard el Bingen {10981179~ one ot the first and ~eatest medieval mystics, to pray meant to stand at the window of faith, to see, to hear, to respond and to be responsible, This book...

...July 6 ! 7 Juhn Welch, O.Carm PS-767B Edith Ste n:AModem Saint...

...5857-1 Paper, 368 pp., 6 x 9,829,95 Work o f God Benedictine Prayer - } :x Judith Sutera, O.S,B., Editor For those looking for an everyday grounding in Benedictine spirituality and who wish to pray according to the Benedictine style of Liturgy of the Hours, Wed< of God is an ideal resource...

...ROLAND E. MURPI IY, O.CARM...

...Cynthia l'ay/or-Ward Celeste Lauritsen Theresa Koemke...

...Jul,~ 20 31 lqedaObeu Ph.D...

...A montage of rebels, the ad pays homage to those brazen mavericks who have "challenged the status quo" and extended the bounds of possibility...

...Admen looked at the counterculture and saw themselves," Frank observes, and even hailed the young hipsters as comrades in a cultural revolution...

...They d o n ' t have two heads...

...Ma~ 11 I3 Br(d Long SSL 1.eu~: :: ~ O Studies in the Huh [.and . . . . . . . . . ~.l;t~ 15 26 Joseph ~Xrimlner...

...It vanquishes dissent by absorbing and defusing it--find your own road in a Saab, do some "independent thinking" with our investment firm--and deals with the memory of historical and contemporary injustice by removing it from the shelves of the cultural storehouse...

...Ju13 6-10 Issues AiouM the Eucharist...

...Rev...

...July 27-29 -- ~cot:n erag heHolyThrough:Art.7~lusic, l)ance...

...The new breed's genius lay in directly incorporating public disgust with commercialism and consumerism into advertisements, conjuring "hip" as a cultural alchemy that converted the gold of popular skepticism into the dross of accelerated consumption...

...7. As for die "impasse facing the historical-critical method" (your summary on the contents page): There is no impasse, b u t simply the realization t h a t the "method" has (always had) limitations but is not to be blamed for something that it could never deliver...

...In the nineties--the 1890s, that is--the names of Morgan, Carnegie, or Rockefeller were as revered among the cigar-smoking classes as those of Gates, Geffen, or Murdoch are among their health-conscious descendants...

...OSA - PS 806 TheChurelaandtheltaitedXalions...

...d To Nichols the notion ~,~,*i6~.~,a,, of hierarchy as domina- in #It Church tion is distorted, because hierarchy's role is to preserve apostolic teaching and the unity of the Church, and to foster participation and integration...

...Branson...

...5210 _9 Fax 202 726-1716 Kenneth Hil:le~,, (]FM Joseph Dui:ders, M.Mr., David Bl'anchard, (].Carn~ Celeste Laurit~en, Ja'gqe Tra) ner-Rose...

...The key move in Frank's study--one that also turns out to be its key weakness--is to look at business rather than the "counterculture...

...co*,tacltbeO~keqfl:>~rolg,,e*,tS>ic~at: I ] Theolo~cal 6896LaurelStreeLN~.X _9 ~X'ashington [')C20012 ~ U l l i o n Phone SOO-aA4 9922 or 202 726-8800 exl...

...By no means is a "Catholic" approach to be identified (and Johnson does not say that it should) with the patristic and medieval use of typology and allegory...

...Ju ? 3- 7 The &m~lelite (]harisul 'loday...

...Frank usefully reminds us that criticism of mass culture was "if not populist, enormously popular...

...It contains a two-week arrangement of morning and evening prayer and essays that provide an introduction to monastic spirituality: 2431 6 Hardcover, 256 pp, 4 74 x 6 '~/< $19,95 Commonweal 2 9 February 27, 1998...

...Washington, D.C...

...You don't set off as many conceptual firecrackers as McLuhan did without having a lot of misfires...

...It also includes a brief "intellectual autobiography" by Father S]oyan and a bibliography of his writings published during the last terry-five years...

...Advertising then was, Frank tells us, a downright dreary business, staffed with ulcerated, creatively inhibited timeservers, and constricted by a corporate culture that dictated deference to clients and a rigid imaginative conservatism...

...Open Catholicism The Tradition at Its Best: Essays in Honor of Gerard S. Sloyan...

...M[@ 18-29 Jol;nSzura...

...TOO HIP FOR ITS OWN GOOD Eugene McCarraher ere's to the crazies," Oscarwinning actor Richard Dreyfuss shills in the latest Apple commercial...

...Typology and allegory are associated with reading "for wisdom and delight," but do they really appeal to the modern Catholic...

...The ad suggests just how untrammeled the cultural authority of corporate business is at the end of the twentieth century...

...It's all too common to remember "the counterculture" as a morass of sexual and pharmaceutical self-indulgence, and it's all too easy and misleading to yoke it to moral and intellectual lightweights like Timothy Leary, Jerry...

...Ted Turner, mogul of CNN...

...But some k i n d of " s i m p l i c i t y " - - o n e which, like the asceticism of old, aims at restoring a genuine love and pleasure in o u r relation to the material w o r l d - - remains an indispensable source of freedom from the t y r a n n y of cool...

...But there was more, much more, to the "counterculture" than Frank's Day-Glo caricature suggests...

...Alienated by the conformity and hypocrisy of mass society...

...Robert W. Blauvelt, Resurrection-Ascension Church, Queens, NY Over 800 missions given in 125 dioceses since 1984 . . . Why Not YOUR Parish in 1998, 1999, or 2000...

...July 2o-31 i! Workshops: Spiritua[ Guidance in the Carmelite Tradition...

...July 13-17 Three Week Co~rses ( ~ crrdl'ls): SS-524 Synoptic Gospels...

...A self-assured McLuhan is not a McLuhan I can use...