What was Target up to?   We all know that their primary motive is to make a profit, but why had they chosen this particular adornment for the interior of their store?  Wouldn't other more direct messages like "Low Prices!" or "Consistent Quality" be more effective in persuading people to buy?  It occured to me that something other than singing the virtues of the store was at work here. 

"Want" and "need" are, of course, what all advertisement strives to convince you you have.  If an ad is able to get anyone with the ability to pay to believe that he or she wants or, better, needs a product that it is promoting it has succeeded.  The problem for advertisers is that most of their products are things the buying public hardly needs and, in many cases, wouldn't even want, and so the trick is to create a sense in the buying public that their lives are incomplete, to, in effect, make them feel miserable about their lives; the product then represents a salve for blister the ad has caused. 

The pictures on the banners in the Target displayed ordinary people, who, while not the freakily leggy runway striders of Vogue magazine, were glowing, flawless, healthy, and wholesome; they were content, neither wanting nor needing.  I looked around me and I observed the real people one finds at the South San Francisco Target: a woman, her face careworn and tense, pricing bath towels while her baby, in the nearly full shopping cart, cried.  Two boys fired pretend bullets at one another using plastic semi-autormatic weapons.  An older man, his eyes bloodshot and weary, pushed a cart containing three cases of motor oil with a pink frilly dress draped over the top.  And I thought of myself, how in this place I was immune to the concerns of life, its disappointments, its sadnesses, its stresses.

None of us, I thought, resembled these happy folks unfurled above us like celestial visions, like angels of capitalism, whose freedom from want taunted us up there, just out of reach as we shoppers reached for our wallets and paid, paid, paid.

What I saw in Target reminded me of what I saw in Soviet Russia twenty years ago. Enormous billboards, posters, statues, and murals promoting peace, honor, courage, and even frugality (there wasn't much to buy so this was, believe it or not, a virtue).  I was struck then by the crudeness of these attempts to influence behavior.  If you behave well, they exhorted, you will bask in the glory of the state.  They must see right through it, I scoffed.  Here, the images of steely-jawed factory workers staring, unblinking, into the sun, looked nothing like the gray-faced and depressed people I saw all around me as I rattled along in a Leningrad street car as it passed through weedy fields between dilapidated tenements.  Of course, these were messages backed by a totalitarian regime: You need nothing, you ARE happy!  And, the ubiquity--like the ubiquity of commercial propaganda in our country--had its desired effect: keeping people from acting in their own best interest.  Confronted with propaganda, day in and day out, everywhere, anyone will start to believe the unbelievable if only just enough to keep the masses from doing anything drastic.

In practice, has the high ideal of freedom in our culture and society made us any more happy when few of us will ever be free to purchase whatever we want and yet we are told constantly of new things to want?  Isn't this desire for more stuff its own kind of oppression? 

Don't worry, your teacher is not a communist.  I do hope you will reflect on how commercial propaganda attempts to corrupt your priorities by, in effect, distracting you from your own definitions of happiness and replacing them with materialistic fantasies.  If you don't resist the assault of consumer culture, you are only nominally free.  Your contentedness, your satisfaction is the enemy of the advertiser.