Is It Really Hip to be Hype-Happy?

Abstract

My proudest claim of maturity and sensitivity to manipulation is that I've not seen Saving Private Ryan, Titanic, the last program for Seinfeld, and a host of other offerings. Why? Simply because I knew them to be products of hype.How can a nation so savvy about so many things and processes allow itself to be led by the nose from one event to another? How can we, even in the name of thrill-seeking and self-pleasuring, permit ourselves to be dollardonating dupes of the business culture of which we admittedly are a part?Although in my journalistic career (I am now retired) I have worked for a PR agency, a government bureaucracy, and civic organizations with project success as top priorities, I have been hype-clean for years. This, ever since I became aware of the part hype was playing and did play in my own life.Since then I've shunned herdism, nose-ring reaction to the come-ons extended me in TV, radio, the print media, billboards, ad nauseum. And I'm convinced my course is right and righteous.I first found out about the insidious uses of hype while a Jaycee in Anchorage decades ago. To raise money we Junior Chamber of Commerce members put together an air show for display at Elmendorf Field at Fort Richardson. The public was invited to shell out its funds for tickets at the field the day of this thrill-fest. The program: A few air-jockeys in their civvie planes were to fly around a few hazardous routes. Nothing spectacular. No advance sales but plenty of advance plugging by me via local radio and TV and newspaper stories. Week after week after week before the event. Merciless, strident, promising end-of-the-world chills and chaos. On and on.The day of the show thousands stormed the field. Some even bought tickets. (A klutz colleague Jaycee had merely put up velvet theater ropes and standards, and the crowd nonchalantly knocked them down and entered free.) But they came. Oh, how they came. All because of my sterling push and PR pressure. A victory for hype!Another time I served as gardener at an environmental farm owned by the Community Renewal Society north of Chicago. I raised tomatoes, carrots, squash, everything, for the kitchen of the farm's staff and clientele. One season we had a lot of leftover vegetables, unused and unusable. I painted a huge sign and put it up on the state highway a few hundred yards from the hidden site where I'd piled the remaining produce I either had to sell or destroy as inedible. But drivers turned off their high-speed journeys and swarmed into VEGE CITY ... deflated by what they saw, but I sold and sold. Again, hype did it. …