Upside Down

  Cheap prices, quick service: the human machinery gasses up and goes right back to work. The German writer Günter Wallraff worked in one of those gas stations in 1983, a McDonald’s in the city of Hamburg, which is certainly innocent of the things being done in its name. He found himself toiling at a feverish pace without a break, spattered with boiling oil: once thawed, the hamburgers have ten minutes to live. After that, they stink. You’ve got to get them on the stove right away. The fries, the vegetables, the meat, the fish, the chicken, it all has the same taste, an artificial flavor dictated by the chemical industry, which also supplies the colorants that hide the meat’s 25 percent fat content. This garbage is our most successful millennial meal. Its chefs study at Hamburger University in Elk Grove, Illinois. But the owners of the business, according to well-informed sources, prefer elegant restaurants serving the finest dishes of what has come to be called “ethnic food”: Japanese, Thai, Persian, Javanese, Indian, Mexican … Democracy is nothing to laugh at.

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  Faces and Masks/1

  Only the poor are condemned to be ugly and old. The rest can buy the hair, noses, eyelids, lips, cheekbones, tits, bellies, asses, thighs, or calves they need to correct the errors of nature and slow the passage of time. The operating rooms of plastic surgeons are shopping malls where you can find the face, body, and age you seek. “Surgery is a necessity of the soul,” explains Argentina’s answer to Rodin, Roberto Zelicovich. In Lima, billboards offer perfect noses and white skin for every pocketbook that can afford them. Peruvian television interviews a young man who replaced his aquiline Indian nose with a little meatball that he proudly displays, full-face and in profile. He says now he scores with the girls.

  In cities like Los Angeles, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires, those with money can indulge in the luxury of going to the operating room the way the rest of us go to the dentist. After a few years and several operations, they all look alike. The men have faces like mummies without wrinkles, the women look like Dracula’s girlfriend, and they’re all bound to have trouble expressing themselves. When they wink, their belly buttons jump.

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  Faces and Masks/2

  Latin American cities also get face-lifts to wipe away their age and erase their identities. Without their wrinkles or long noses, cities lose their memory. They seem less and less like themselves and more and more like one another.

  The same tall prisms, cubes, and cylinders form the urban skyline, all crowned by the names of international brands in gigantic letters. In this era of obligatory cloning, advertisers are the real urban planners.

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  The consuming masses take orders in a language that is universal; advertising has achieved what Esperanto could not. Every person everywhere understands what television broadcasts. Over the past quarter of a century, global spending on advertising has doubled. Thanks to that small fact, poor children drink more Coca-Cola and even less milk, and leisure time is eaten up by obligatory consumption. Free time, time imprisoned: the homes of the very poor have no beds, but they have TVs and the TV has the floor. Bought on credit, this little beast is proof of the democratic nature of progress. It listens to no one but speaks for all. Poor and rich alike thus learn the virtues of the latest car, and poor and rich alike discover the favorable interest rates offered by one bank or another.

  “A poor person is someone who has no one,” an old woman who talks to herself in the streets of São Paulo says repeatedly. People are ever more numerous and ever more alone. These crowded, lonely souls are then packed into big cities. “Would you please mind taking your elbow out of my eye?” they ask.

  Experts know how to turn merchandise into magic charms against loneliness. Things have human attributes: they caress, accompany, understand, help. Perfume kisses you; your car never lets you down. Consumer culture has found in solitude the most lucrative of markets. Holes in your heart can be stuffed with things—or with dreams of things, anyway. And things can be more than embraces, they can be symbols of social mobility, passports to get you by the border guards of class society, keys that open doors usually locked tight. The more exclusive, the better; things lift you out of the crowd and save you from being nobody. Rarely does advertising tell you about the product being sold. That’s the least of it. Advertising’s primary function is to compensate for frustrations and feed fantasies. Whom do you wish to become by buying this aftershave?

  Criminologist Anthony Platt observed that street crime is more than the fruit of extreme poverty. It is also the result of the ethics of individualism. The obsession with success, says Platt, plays a decisive role in the illegal appropriation of things. I’ve always heard that money can’t buy happiness, but every poor TV viewer has ample grounds for believing money can buy something so close to happiness that the difference can be left to specialists.

  According to historian Eric Hobsbawm, the twentieth century put an end to the seven thousand years of human life based on agriculture that started at the end of the Paleolithic age with the first farming communities. The world’s population is becoming urban, peasants are becoming citizens. In Latin America we have empty fields and enormous urban ant-hills. Driven off the land by modern export agriculture and the erosion of their plots, peasants invade the shantytowns. They believe God is everywhere, but by experience they know he keeps office hours in the city. Cities promise jobs, prosperity, a future for the children. In the countryside, the hopeful watch life pass by and die yawning; in the cities, life happens and beckons. Packed into slums, the newly arrived soon discover that there aren’t enough jobs for the many hands, that nothing is free, and that the most expensive luxuries are air and silence.

  At the dawn of the fourteenth century, Father Giordano da Rivalto of Florence offered an elegy to cities. He said that they grow “because people take pleasure in being together.” Being together, meeting. Now who meets whom? Does hope meet up with reality? Do desires meet up with deeds? And people, do they meet other people? If human relations have been reduced to the relations among things, how many people meet up with things?

  The world is becoming a huge TV screen: look and listen but don’t touch. Merchandise on display invades and privatizes public spaces. Bus and train stations, until not long ago meeting places for people, are being turned into commercial bazaars.

  The shopping mall, a store window to top all store windows, lords it over us with its imposing presence. Multitudes make the pilgrimage to this, the grandest of all temples, for celebrating the mass of consumption. Most of the devotees contemplate in ecstasy the things they can’t afford, while the buying minority submits to the withering bombardment of relentless sales pitches. Going up and down the escalators the crowds travel the world; they watch mannequins dress in fashions from Paris or Milan and listen to stereos that sound as they would in Chicago, and to see and hear all this you pay no fare. Tourists from the hinterlands or from cities still free of this blessing of modern happiness pose for pictures beside the best-known international brands the way they used to pose in the plaza beneath the statue of a national hero. For poor residents of the outskirts, notes Argentine sociologist Beatriz Sarlo, the traditional weekend trip downtown has been replaced by an excursion to one of these urban oases. Spruced up and dressed in their Sunday best, the guests arrive at the party well aware they can only be wallflowers. Entire families board the space capsule to tour the universe of consumption and contemplate the hallucinatory display of models, brands, and labels served up by the aesthetics of the market.

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  The Days

  We don’t know if Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus or of Mercury, god of commerce, but surely it’s Mercury who thought up mandatory shopping days: Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Children’s Day, Grandparent’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Friendship Day, Secretary’s Day, Policeman’s Day, Nurse’s Day. Every year there are more Somebody Days on the commercial calendar.

  At this rate, soon we’ll have days to honor the
Unknown Scoundrel, the Anonymous Corrupt Official, and the Last Surviving Worker.

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  The Great Day

  They live off garbage amid garbage, eating garbage in garbage houses. But once a year, the garbage collectors of Managua star in the show that draws the country’s largest crowds. “The Ben-Hur Races” were the inspiration of a businessman who came back from Miami to do his part for “the Americanization of Nicaragua.”

  Riding their garbage carts, fists in the air, Managua’s garbage collectors salute the president of the country, the ambassador of the United States, and the other dignitaries who grace the dais of honor. Over their everyday rags, the competitors wear broad colorful capes, and on their heads sit the plumed helmets of Roman warriors. Their dilapidated carts are freshly painted, the better to display the names of their sponsors. The skinny horses, covered with open sores like their owners and punished like their owners, are corsairs that fly to the finish line for the sake of glory, or at least a case of soda.

  Trumpets blare. The starting flag drops, and they’re off. Whips beat down on the bony haunches of the sorry nags, while the delirious crowd cheers: “Co-ca-Co-la! Co-ca-Co-la!”

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  Consumer culture, ephemeral culture, condemns everything to immediate obsolescence. Everything changes at the dizzying pace of fashion, at the service of the need to sell. Things grow old in the blink of an eye, only to be replaced by other things no less short-lived. When only insecurity is permanent, merchandise made to wear out is as volatile as the capital that finances it and the labor that produces it. Money flies at the speed of light—yesterday it was over there, today it’s here, tomorrow who can say—and every worker is a potential recruit for the vast army of the unemployed. Paradoxically, it’s shopping malls, the kingdoms of fleeting fashion, that offer the most successful illusion of security. They seem to exist beyond time, ageless and rootless, without night or day or memory, and outside of space, apart from the turbulence of dangerous reality.

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  The Global Field

  In its current form, soccer was born over a century ago. It was born speaking English, and it still speaks English everywhere it’s played. But now you hear it singing the praises of a good “sponsor” and lauding the virtues of “marketing” with as much fervor as it used to commend a good “forward” and the art of “dribbling.”

  Tournaments are named for those who pay, not those who play. The Argentine championship is called Pepsi-Cola. Coca-Cola is the name of the world youth soccer tournament. The intercontinental club tournament is called the Toyota Cup.

  For the fan of the most popular sport in the world, for the fanatic of the most universally fanatical passion, a team’s shirt is a sacred mantle, a second skin, his other breast. But the shirt has also become a walking billboard. In 1998, players for Rapid of Vienna wore four advertisements at once. On their shirts were ads for a bank, a company, and a brand of cars, and on their shorts they advertised a credit card. When River Plate and Boca Juniors play each other in Buenos Aires’s soccer classic, it’s Quilmes against Quilmes: both teams wear the name of the same brand of beer. In this era of globalization, River also plays for Adidas and Boca for Nike. In fact, you could say Adidas beat Nike when France defeated Brazil in the final of the 1998 World Cup.

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  In these sanctuaries of well-being, you can do everything without ever stepping into the dirty, threatening outdoors. In some, you can even sleep. The newest ones, in places like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, include hotels and health clubs. Oblivious to cold or heat, malls are safe from pollution and violence. Michael A. Petti publishes scientific advice in a syndicated column called “Live Longer.” In cities “with poor air quality,” Dr. Petti suggests that those who wish to live longer should “walk inside shopping centers.” Atomic clouds of pollution hang over Mexico City, São Paulo, and Santiago, and on the corners muggers lie in wait, but in this carefree world outside the world—with its filtered air and guarded walkways—you can breathe and walk safely.

  Malls are all more or less alike, in Los Angeles or Bangkok, in Buenos Aires or Glasgow. Uniformity, however, doesn’t keep them from competing for clients by inventing new come-ons. At the end of 1991, for example, Veja magazine praised a novelty from Praia de Belas mall in Pôrto Alegre, Brazil: “For baby’s comfort, they provide strollers to help these small consumers move about.” But security is the most important item offered by all shopping centers. A luxury on the outside, it can be had by anyone who penetrates these bunkers. In its infinite generosity, consumer culture issues safe-conduct passes so we can flee the hell of the streets. Surrounded by parking lots like vast moats, these island kingdoms provide closed and protected spaces where people cross paths drawn by the urge to have, the way people used to meet, drawn by the desire for companionship, in the cafés or plazas, parks or markets of old. The public police and the private police, the visible police and the invisible police make sure anyone suspicious gets tossed into the street or thrown into jail. Poor people who don’t manage to disguise their congenital malevolence, especially dark-skinned ones, are guilty until proven innocent. And if they happen to be children, so much the worse. Malevolence is inversely proportional to age. Way back in 1979, Colombia’s police reported to the South American Police Congress that their juvenile division had no choice but to give up social work so that they could “undercut the evil deeds” of dangerous minors and “avoid the nuisance of their presence in shopping centers.”

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  The Injection

  More than half a century ago, a writer named Felisberto Hernández published a prophetic tale. A man dressed in white and carrying a syringe boards streetcars in Montevideo and amiably injects the arms of all the passengers. Immediately they hear advertising jingles from the Canary furniture factory. To get the ads out of their veins, they have to go to the drugstore for Canary pills that suppress the effect of the shot.

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  These gigantic supermarkets turned into miniature cities are also guarded by electronic control systems, eyes that see without being seen, hidden cameras that follow the steps of the crowd wandering amid the merchandise. Electronics are useful not only for watching and punishing undesirables who might succumb to the temptation of forbidden fruits but for making consumers consume more. In the cybernetic age, when the right to citizenship is based on the duty of buying, large companies take X rays of every citizen’s habits, calling up data from credit card, bank machine, and e-mail use to discern a potential customer’s earnings and yearnings—and then pummel him with advertising. This happens more and more in highly developed countries, where commercial manipulation of the on-line world freely violates private life and places it at the service of the market. It has become increasingly difficult, for example, for a U.S. citizen to keep secret such things as the purchases he makes, the diseases he suffers, the money he has, and the money he owes. From such data it’s not hard to figure out what new services he might pay for, what new debts he might take on, or what sort of new things he might purchase.

  No matter how much we buy, it’s always little compared with what has to be sold. Over the past few years, for example, the automobile industry has been churning out more cars than the market can absorb. Latin America’s huge cities keep on buying and buying, but they’re caught between the orders the world market takes and the orders the world market gives, the contradiction between obsessive consumption, which requires higher wages, and the obligation to compete, which demands lower ones.

  Take the case of the car, which advertising portrays as a blessing within everyone’s reach. A universal right? An achievement of democracy? If that were true and every human being could become the happy owner of one of these four-wheeled good-luck charms, the planet would face sudden death by asphyxiation. Even before that, it would run out of fuel and grind to a halt. The world has already burned up, in a brief span, most of the oil formed in the earth over millions of years. Cars b
uilt one after another, at the rate of a beating heart, devour half the oil the world produces every year.

  Its owners treat the planet as if it could be discarded, a commodity to be used up, the way images flitting across a TV screen or the fashions and idols launched by advertising fade away shortly after they are born. But what other world are we going to move to? Are we all obliged to swallow the line that God sold the planet to a few companies because in a foul mood he decided to privatize the universe? Consumer society is a booby trap. Those at the controls feign ignorance, but anybody with eyes in his head can see that the great majority of people necessarily must consume not much, very little, or nothing at all in order to save the bit of nature we have left. Social injustice is not an error to be corrected, nor is it a defect to be overcome; it is an essential requirement of the system. No natural world is capable of supporting a mall the size of the planet.