David Mamet once told a story about how he got a funny feeling listening to talk radio during the sometimes very strange commercials. It doesn’t matter which program – Glenn Beck, Dr. Laura, Tom Hartman – they all do this same thing. You’re listening away with the chat and gossip and so on and then the show host will suddenly go into pitching some product. Mamet calls it snake oil. Gold shares or gold bonds, unkinkable garden hoses or socks in any size, debt consolidation, aluminum house siding, life insurance, vitamin drinks or whatever it is – it’s basically gussied up snake oil.
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There’s some version of snake oil in pretty much everything. There are snake oil cars, snake oil tvs, snake oil pots and pans, snake oil beer, soda, and uniformly processed fast food. Most consumer products lined in plastic pouches, padded in Styrofoam, cardboard boxed, canister contained, cargo shipped, Chinese factory produced, are snake oil. Items meant to have brief shelf lives, break easily, and be replaced by more snake oil consumer products cheaply processed with cheap foreign labor. Walmart and Dollar General the main sellers of snake oil products – the disposable, the cheap, the breakable, the ephemeral.
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Of course there’s the original snake oil – the realm of medicine. The appropriated, the trademarked, the patented, the packaged, the bubble-packed. The claims of health, rejuvenation, hormonal reinvigoration, energy-packed health options for happier holier you. The loads of supplements, additives, powers, pills, rubs and ointments aren’t only physical – there’s also mental snake oil. Schemes of getting happy, rich and fit line magazine shelves. The message is the same as the hook of the snake oil sale: imagine your way to happiness, the mesmerizing mantra of boot-strappers everywhere.
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This pervasive snake-oiling of consumer culture and the wealth cult of radical individualism dives deeply into our personal lives and fantasies. There’s no shortage of any kind of snake oil idea, snake oil dream, snake oil story or snake oil fantasy.
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Television itself is the hooded spitting cobra of the most heinous venomous varieties of snake oil. It’s the medium itself that seems prone to endless streams of the snake oil product. It’s not just the noxious commercials interrupting your program every ten minutes, but the programs themselves. Ninety nine percent pure snake oil. Endless varieties of soap operas with formulaic plotting and characters, stilted on-the-nose dialog and exposition. False personalities with false emotions.
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All of this phoniness that is so ubiquitous that to question it is like a goldfish questioning water, is enough to make one become a holy roller, to cast out the iniquities of the greedy, selfish and false. A holy raging fire to purge the sins of capitalism. Yet this tradition itself is among the illusions of snake oil salvation. The Elmer Gantry-fication of authentic religion. Genuine religious feeling replaced with its inept saccharine twin. The worst is the televangelist scheme, which combines the powers of three snake oil cons – personal salvation, individual prosperity, and television commercials.
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The snake oil society is of course capped by snake oil politics. The pay-to-play variety, governments for sale, donor class manipulation lining the pockets of their congressional representative. Snake oiling the polls, the tv, the ballots, and finally snake oiling the minds of the masses with fear, ginned-up nostalgia, and hokum. It’s a system made by and for the King of Cons to ascend to highest office. The mass media age juiced on snake oil magical thinking and a heap of gaslighting, is made for mediocrities. We all know the dice are loaded, that everyone’s a liar and cheat, and so have given up all hope under the weight of such galactic mendacity.
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What is one to do in this unsinkable snake oil society? Sometimes our first instinct is the correct one.
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Imagine you’re listening to the radio and – boom – it doesn’t even break to commercial, which is bad enough, but your favorite suddenly veers off and wants you to buy gold. You’re like “I was enjoying that program, and now this guy I like and trust is selling me something.” It’s like going to your dentist and while you’ve got your mouth pried open he begins to tell you about that once-in-a blue-moon investment opportunity. They hooked you with one thing, then slipped in another.
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Within the pitch itself is a betrayal. How dare they! It’s a betrayal of our trust, a betrayal of a different kind of relationship. It’s no shame in calling this out, or defiantly shaking your fist at the endless waves of bullshit and snake oil inundating social reality. Within the scorn is freedom.
A Fragile Dignity 