Here's the Kerouac passage in the commercial: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing." It's a virtual declaration of postmodern consumer desire: the hunger to consume everything at once, to defy the commonplace stuff that other people consume or that we consumed yesterday. It's a line that all copywriters should paste above their doors; a line that belongs in the Norton anthology of great consumer fantasies.

W hen I say that this is an age of conformity on a level that far exceeds that of the '50s, I'm not saying that there is no cultural dissidence in America. In fact, we have a superabundance of it. Even oldsters who drive the safe, sensible Volvo recognize that the "only ones" are the "mad ones." And look around at other aspects of the media: We are an immensely cynical people when it comes to the culture trust. Media workers, their bosses, and suits in general are stereotypical villains in contemporary mass culture. Nobody except Newt Gingrich likes Rupert Murdoch. We all know bad things are happening to our political and social universe; we know that business is colonizing ever larger chunks of American culture; and we know that advertising tells lies. We are all sick to death of the consumer culture. We all want to resist conformity. We all want to be our own dog.

And yet we do nothing.

I want to suggest that our apathy has a specific relationship to liberation marketing. The market works not only to redefine dissent, but also to occupy the niche that dissident voices used to occupy in the American cultural spectrum. There's an inverse relationship between the prevalence of advertising and America's political apathy. Marshall McLuhan pointed this out back in 1957 in an essay, "American Advertising," describing a letter written by an American army officer stationed in Italy after World War II: "[The officer] noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you the names of cabinet ministers but not the names of commodities preferred by Italian celebrities. Furthermore, the wall space of Italian cities was given over to political rather than commercial slogans. Finally, he predicted that there was small hope that Italians would ever achieve any sort of domestic prosperity or calm until they began to worry about the rival claims of cornflakes or cigarettes rather than the capacities of public men. In fact, he went so far as to say that democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and worrying about the means of defeating underarm odor, scaly scalp, hairy legs, dull complexion, unruly hair, borderline anemia, athlete's foot, and sluggish bowels."