the man who SOLD the WORLD

"Advertising is the very essence of democracy."

-- Bruce Barton

In his 1925 best-seller The Man Nobody Knows, advertising baron Bruce Barton (whose other main claim to fame was conceiving the "Betty Crocker" character) portrayed Jesus Christ as the greatest salesman in the history of the world. Far from the antinomian heretic such a characterization might suggest, Barton was in fact a Bible-thumping servant of God and Adam Smith, and a champion of laissez-faire capitalism as a divinely ordained manifestation of spiritual progress. His insistence that Jesus was only successful at propagating his faith because he sold it so well proved tremendously popular among masses of Americans from plucky Horatio Alger bootblacks (Alger's books experienced a posthumous resurgence in this period) to Madison Avenue magnates and other captains of industry. Take Emerson's head out of the clouds, bring him to Massachusetts by way of Tennessee, stick him in post-industrial, pre-Depression American society, and you'll get the idea.

Which is not to say self-justifying twentieth-century industrialists were the first to reconstruct Jesus' message in their own image. But it's a peculiarly twentieth-century gift to conflate vision and salesmanship to such a corrosively cynical degree. And it's even more odd that as we near the new millennium, the American public's tolerance for visionary talk seems to vary in inverse proportion to the substance behind it, and in direct proportion to the crass commerciality of the message that "vision" is selling. Can you imagine any president today--OK, bad example--any political figure in any office pitching platitudes about "what you can do for your country" and drawing anything but horselaughs? Is someone like John F. Kennedy that much more inspiring a figure than any leader today, or do we simply not live in times where "vision" works as a vehicle for conveying meaningful messages?

But it's going too far to say that this waning century's visionaries are entirely absent from the current public consciousness. They're all around us, actually. Right where Bruce Barton might have plastered a glowing artist's rendering of Jesus (the blue-eyed, blond-haired version, of course) selling the virtues of godliness, we have Apple Computer's Steve Jobs billboarding Gandhi, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, and the Lennons, inviting us to join them--and him--and "Think Different."

What's Steve Jobs' definition of different-thinking? Selling you a watch with a counter-clockwise second hand to convince you he's imparting, therein, the secret of the universe. And telling his equally revered and reviled competitor, Bill Gates, that he ought to drop acid and/or visit an ashram. If you could spend a week in an ashram meditating with Gandhi, John Lennon, or anybody but Steve Jobs, who would you choose?

It's a tribute to the man's alarming pomposity that his over-the-top advertising even invites such comparisons. But there's also something ultimately democratic there, not so much in the imagery of the advertising, as in the way the products advertised are presented. Steve Jobs knows as well as anyone he can't change history, or turn back time, but he can make a watch run the other way. And he knows he has nowhere near the prophetic power of Martin Luther King to envision a time when people will see content of character before color. But he can sell a computer like the iMac almost entirely on the basis of color. Which is not to say there isn't some pretty cool stuff going on inside there. But forget content of character; it's those fun, fruity colors--strawberry, tangerine, lime, grape, and blueberry--and those TV ads with iMacs spinning to the tune of the Rolling Stones' "She's A Rainbow" (totally trumping Bill Gates and his "Start Me Up" Windows 95 campaign) that gets these machines dancing off the shelves.

It's just that kind of lowest-common-denominator product campaign that make the techno-snobs among us want to turn up our noses and wash our hands of the whole thing. But we would be fools to do so.

I bet I can tell you exactly what your first reactions to the iMac were: #1, That idiot forgot to put in a floppy drive! and #2, This thing doesn't even have a SCSI port! But the fact is, these "Internet boxes" are a potential bonanza (read: new market) for removable storage.

It seems crazy at first, given any traditional notion of data interchange and intergenerational continuity, but what better way to cash in on a cheap "Internet box" than cutting corners on removable storage? And what better way to sell companion products like color-coordinated Zip and high-density floppy drives with special packaged deals, than eliminating the old standby 1.44MB alternative?

It gets even better than that. Not only did Jobs deliver consumer users from the shackles of those aging floppy drives; he also (with the iMac and higher-end G3s) liberated CD-R-wise Mac-heads from feeling attached to their cumbersome SCSI drive investments (because they won't even connect). The first company to cash in here should be Adaptec, as they rush to market a SCSI-to-USB converter to connect existing drives to the new Macs. After that, the list is endless; what CD-R manufacturer (besides, say, Plextor or Kodak, whose target market is primarily professional duplication and production) doesn't stand to benefit from soldering an IDE-to-USB switch into every unsellable 2X/2X drive in their warehouse and calling it an iMac recorder? Or taking it two steps farther, like CD-R giant QPS, Inc. (?) and peddling a 4X USB recorder (though most experts doubt that USB will ever support 4X in most recording circumstances) decked-out in iMac colors?

Jobs and QPS' Pierre Abboud could be the prophets of a new age in color-coordinated consumer CD-R for any new iMac user who knows how to accessorize. Who knows, one day maybe we'll see mid-eighties bubblegum pop pin-up Tiffany resurrected on the shopping mall circuit, hawking grape and tangerine iMacs and CD-RW drives alongside Swatches in between "I Think We're Alone Now" and "Sugar Sugar."

If that ain't democracy, what is?

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