The Consumer Consumed by J. G. Ballard
Could Ralph Nader, the consumer crusader and scourge of General Motors, become the first dictator of the United States? The question isn't entirely frivolous. Now in his sixth year as the most articulate and determined champion of the ordinary consumer, Nader already reveals an ominous degree of self-denying fanaticism that links him to the last of the old-style populist demagogues and may be making him the first of the new. Given that party and presidential politics in the USA are no longer flexible enough to admit any true outsider (the next five US presidents will probably come from a tiny pool of a hundred or so professional politicians), one would expect any real maverick with a headful of obsessions to home in on us from an unexpected quarter of the horizon.
The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates -- the inhabitants of marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with the ballot paper in the polling booth. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software. For most of us the styling and efficiency of a soup-mix or an automobile are far more real, and far more reassuring, than the issues of traditional politics: East of Suez, balance of payments, trade union reform. Anyone who can take a housewife's relationship with her Mixmaster or my own innocent rapport with my automobile and feed into them all his obsessions and unease is clearly going to be in business.
The son of immigrant Lebanese parents, Ralph Nader decided to become a defender of the common people, according to his own biography, at the age of eight. In the established tradition of populist leaders he took up his law books in their defense, but at Harvard Law School discovered that the young lawyers were being trained to defend the big corporations, not the small consumer. Nader's confrontation with the biggest of the big corporations, General Motors, contains the entire psychology of his method, and represents no mean achievement -- for the first time, he made Americans feel guilty about their greatest dream image and totem object: the motor car.
At the time, Americans were so busy worrying about their cars that few of them had a chance to look at Nader's book _Unsafe at Any Speed_ and the charged and emotive language he uses. This is the opening sentence: 'For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.'
From this point, Nader never looked back, tapping a huge fund of insecurity about modern technology which has mushroomed into the present concern for pollution and road safety (similar efforts are now being made in Britain to make people feel uneasy over the enormous advances in sexual freedom).
What is interesting about Nader is that this champion of the consumer is himself a non-consumer. His annual income is estimated to be more than $100,000, but he lives on a minute fraction of this in a boardinghouse room, without a car or a TV set. If one can divide dictators into smokers and non-smokers, Nader's potential for dictatorship is clearly of the puritanical, non-smoking kind. Described as harsh and almost unfeeling in his dedication, Nader insists over and over again that his only concern is with 'justice' -- love, needless to say, has no place in his scheme of things. 'If you want to be loved, you'll be co-opted.' None of us can say we haven't been warned.
Many of Nader's targets seem ludicrously puny -- did any of us, for example, ever regard breakfast cereals as anything but a good-humoured method of blocking the infant's trumpeting mouth as we recovered from our hangovers? The important point, though, is that Nader is unloading a powerful sense of anxiety and guilt on to a huge range of commonplace activities. Sooner or later, I would guess, these will crystallize around one major subject, a simple formula of antagonism, unease and wish-fulfillment that will play the same role in the technological landscape that cruder formulas played in the political landscape. Inevitably, I suppose, the consumer society must produce its own unique demagogue, but this sort of dictator may well be difficult to recognize and unseat.
As I've found to my own cost, Nader is already being taken more seriously than many politicians, precisely because the real motives at work are so hard to identify. A year ago my novel _The Atrocity Exhibition_ was due to be published in the United States by Doubleday, but two weeks before publication the entire edition was withdrawn and destroyed on the orders of the firm's boss, Nelson Doubleday, an old boy of extreme right-wing views who has donated a helicopter to the California police (a nice twist -- the rich man no longer bequeaths a Rubens to King's College but a riot-control weapon to keep down the student body.)
What had blown Nelson Doubleday's fuses was a section of the book entitled 'Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan'. The next firm to take the book, E. P. Dutton, were delighted with this piece, and thought seriously of using it as the book's title. That was last August. They were due to publish this month, but now they too have had cold feet. I was interested to learn that among the things that most bothered them were 'sixteen references to Ralph Nader'. In vain did I protest that anyone in public life attempting to involve us in his fantasies can hardly complain if we involve him in ours. In _The Atrocity Exhibition_ a large number of public figures -- Jackie Kennedy, Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Margaret, and so on -- are involved in the sexual fantasies of the hero. Although there have been threats and complaints about various sections of the book (the first publisher of the Reagan piece, Bill Butler, was tried and fined; the US Embassy put pressure on the Arts Council to stop its grant to _Ambit_, which published the Jackie sex-fantasy), these figures are generally regarded as open targets. Nader, significantly, is still considered to be on our side.
_Ink_
1971