Spin that makes fools of us all

 
Crying game: Halle Berry’s weepy Oscar speech “closed the book on the problem of race in Hollywood”
16 March 2012

Get Real
by Eliane Glaser
(4th Estate, £14.99)

For me, the fundamental trouble with this book, about the mass-duping of the population by spin, marketing and pretty pictures, is that the author, writer and academic Eliane Glaser thinks that people don’t know what’s best for them, whereas I’ve always thought that people know exactly what is best for them and choose to do things that are self-destructive anyway.

So we were never going to get on, me and this book, although at times it did nearly hook me. I had more than one existential wobble as Glaser rants on about how pathetic and slavish we are to shopping, the internet and folksy adverts for giant corporations. And about how useless we are at “engaging” politically or generally giving a damn about the poor, about politics, about changing things for the better.

Glaser likes to paint a picture of a zombie population, reduced by their smartphones to fidgeting children. She is often compelling, but she over-eggs it by revealing that she personally dislikes “morons” who film gigs on their phones and wishes everyone would stop being so wretchedly thick.

According to Glaser, I — and probably you, too, you dozy mouthbreather — am experiencing “false consciousness”, which means I think I’m happy with my kitchen extension, my iPad and my boxed set of The Killing, but actually I’m not. I will say I’m happy, because I’m experiencing false consciousness, you see? Just as I was getting angry about that, Glaser goes on to say that talking about false consciousness is now banned because everyone gets terribly touchy and defensive about it.

While all this bullshit-cutting may be noble, Glaser ends up sounding really quite paranoid. For example, her take on Halle Berry’s weepy Oscar-winner speech was that “with Berry’s tears of gratitude, a generation of producers and directors breathed a sigh of relief, because they could finally close the book on the problem of race in Hollywood”. The cynicism she projects on to everyone is unconvincing, just from the perspective of the law of averages.

This book is terrific in some ways: the flipside of Glaser’s unappealing tendency to froth at the mouth and use such ridiculous phrases as “What gets my goat” is that when I agreed with her, as I happen to about the invidious practice of persuading women to give birth without pain relief, I feel she is really giving it hell on my behalf. And when she is pointing out horrible practices such as “fake environmentalism” and “greenwashing”, whereby companies like BP keep telling us how much they love the environment while doing terrifying things to it, she is unbeatable.

To be a better book, Get Real needs just the sort of PR and marketing overhaul to which Glaser objects: speak more softly, use fewer words per sentence, don’t screech. But to apply any sort of crowd-pleasing, synthetic sheen to her raw thoughts is probably anathema to Glaser, which is a shame, as I know there are truths in here somewhere.

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