This piece originally appeared in the inaugural issue of Caelum et Terra.
—
I walked into Wal-Mart the other day and one of the first
things I saw was a big cardboard crate full of Keebler cookies
being sold at some special low price. On the side of the crate,
in big letters, were the words FRESH FROM THE HOLLOW
TREE. As everyone knows, Keebler advertises its cookies as
being made by elves who live in hollow trees.
Well, of course the cookies are made in a factory, not in a
hollow tree, and if there are elves in the world they are most
likely not punching the clock at that factory. And, as happens to
me occasionally in the presence of this sort of commercial
falsehood, I was momentarily outraged.
It might be said, and certainly the folks at Keebler would
say, that I am a bad sport. The slogan is only fiction in the
service of commerce, they might say, and I have no more grounds
to complain of its falsity than I would have to complain that
Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County cannot actually
be found in Mississippi.
But I say it isn’t the same thing at all. A novelist
creates an imaginary world as a means of illuminating the real
one, or at least to entertain. An advertiser does it in order to
manipulate, distract, and deceive. The fact is that the people
who run Keebler do not want us to think accurately about where
the cookies come from or why they are made.
ONLY A FEW WEEKS OUT OF THE FACTORY is not a
description likely to entice cookie-buyers into the Keebler fold;
nor is MANUFACTURED BY WAGE-EARNERS The cookies
are made and marketed by a huge corporation which is, if it is
like most huge corporations, much more interested in impressing
Wall Street than in cookies. Keebler cookies, like many of the
goods offered to us, are produced by a system, and for reasons,
which most of us instinctively feel to be dreary at best. And so
the advertisers make up stories which they hope we will like
better—they show us Mr. Kraft in a horse-drawn wagon
delivering cheese on a sunny morning, or a white-haired old lady
baking bread in a wood-burning oven.
These falsehoods surround us; they are part of the mental
climate in which we think and act. We take them for granted as a
necessary or at least inevitable component of our way of life,
and most of us do not think it strange.
But it is strange. And it does us no good. What does it
mean that the sails of our economy must be filled with a wind of
lies? If that does not frighten us, the fact that our political
life is conducted according to the same rules ought to.
If these lies do not deceive us they are bound to make us
cynical, on the one hand—unable to recognize truth when we
see it—or, on the other hand, gullible, confusing
sincerity, when at last we meet it, with possession of truth. And
worst of all, as God is truth, lying is the essential and
fundamental accomplishment of the devil.
Light On Dark Water 