September 27. 2008

South Bend Tribune

Halton unclogs Great Brain Suck

By ANDREW S. HUGHES
Tribune Staff Writer

Photo provided/EUGENE HALTON

University of Notre Dame sociology professor Eugene Halton dissects American culture and offers alternatives to its unexamined consumerism in The Great Brain Suck.

SOUTH BEND

For his 1961 farewell address as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the term military-industrial complex.

University of Notre Dame sociology professor Eugene Halton updates the phrase in the title essay of his new book, The Great Brain Suck: And Other American Epiphanies, to "the post-democratic military-industrial-academic-entertainment-sport-food complex."

"I like the way it rolls off the tongue," he writes in introducing the term.

Such humor punctuates Halton's incisive and provocative essays that explore how the centralization of power and the exponential growth of television and advertising-induced consumerism have stunted autonomous -- or "self-originated" -- experiences to create "automatic" -- or passive -- living, as epitomized by franchises and malls that have "de-localized" life.

From the 1950s on, Halton says, "there's the whole rise of the media machine of advertising and marketing that starts to propagate the message that you are only as adequate as your ability to buy something. People are leading lives of unquiet desperation, chasing stuff to find their selves, and losing themselves in the process."

With the bands Off the Wall Blues and The Dillon Brothers, Halton plays harmonica under the name "Jumpin' Gene" -- the nickname dates to his days as a record-setting high jumper at Princeton University -- and he knows how to entertain and inform on the page as well as he does on stage.

"The Great Brain Suck" contains conversational as well as formal writing, satire, parody, poetry, photography, and personal reflections in a seeming repudiation of insular academic writing but without sacrificing rigorous inquiry.

Topics include the '50s and that decade's atomic bomb testing that led to "Big Science," the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair -- here called "The Hunter-Gatherers' World's Fair" --, and a series of personal epiphanies that use Halton's personal experiences to illuminate earlier points.

Throughout the book, Halton uses "postdemocratic military-industrial-academic-entertainment-sport-food complex" interchangeably with "megatechnic America" to describe the culture of consumerism and materialism that mushroomed like the cloud from an atomic bomb in the economic boom of the 1950s.

And in "The Great Brain Suck," it had the same devastating effect on American life as the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki did on those cities. It just wasn't as obvious, or painful.

"I'm simply updating it as hyperbole to characterize other arms of the octopus that it is," Halton says about his amendment of Eisenhower's term. "It has the effect of transforming citizens into consumers, which is a much more limited thing to be. If you're a citizen, you're a citizen of a place -- your city, your region, your country -- but if you're a consumer, you can be anyplace or no place."

As opposed to the totalitarian brainwashing of the Soviet Union, Halton says, megatechnic America achieved the same results through a process of "brain rinsing" that trained people to want to buy things as a habitual condition of existence.

"Where the Soviet Union controlled people through brutal punishment or pain, the West found a better way to control people through pleasure, " he says. " (Brain rinsing) doesn't go for the whole soul at once. It nickel-and-dimes through the mini dramas of advertising and the lure of buying stuff. "

In doing so, Halton says, advertising installs "virtual emotions that function like computer cookies" that activate when cued again.

"In other words, I'm claiming that materialism is mentalism, " he says. "Materialism is a system that instills in people the desire to consume all the time, to always have something to buy. So it's not just the stuff per se, it's the mental desire to buy the stuff that's the focal point of advertising. When you really start looking at the way television works, you realize it is run by people trying to sell people the idea of buying stuff all the time."

In addition to advertising and television, he includes computers, video games and other devices from America's "pax electronica" as part of the "larger enscreening of consciousness" process.

Although he critiques mass-consumption and its means of "brain rinsing" citizens into consumers, he doesn't advocate an ascetic life. On the contrary, Halton says, it could be said that he argues people should be more materialistic, just not in the way they've been trained to be.

"It means start living from your whole self, desiring to live well by desiring good things to do and be, " he says. "Live and experience your circumstance and surroundings, not in some imaginary matrix of commodities that make you seem more than you are, but in the real people, relationships and simple activities that allow you to be yourself and become what you hold within you. The best things in life really are free, and all you have to pay is attention to them."

Halton also devotes chapters to a parody of television criticism that also examines the role of "reality TV" in American culture, to furniture maker Wharton Esherick and to Lewis Mumford, a writer who thought of himself as a generalist as he wrote about history, literature, public life and architecture.

"He spoke to my soul in his writings, " Halton says about Mumford. "He was someone who wrote clearly and eloquently and profoundly about a huge range of issues, who was unconstrained by academic artificial boundaries. He epitomized for me what Emerson meant by the 'American scholar, ' someone ready and willing to plunge into the 'resounding tumult. '"

Meet the author

Eugene Halton will make three appearances at the University of Notre Dame's campus bookstore in support of The Great Brain Suck: And Other American Epiphanies:

At 6 p.m. Thursday to talk about the book.

At 5:30 p.m. Friday in performance with The Dillon Brothers.

From 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Saturday for a book signing.