GUEST BLOG: Far Out: My Life and Hard Times as an Academic Absurdist

Sunday, January 29, 2017

by Arthur Asa Berger, Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University

            It isn’t difficult to publish things that are absurd when you are an academic. Over the years I’ve had some “far out” ideas. Somehow, many of them find a way into print. Funny, because a colleague of mine at San Francisco State University once told me that my books were unpublishable. Presumably, he thought my ideas were too absurd.  I had published only six or eight books at the time (I now have over 100).  “You find naïve publishers who put out your work.”  When I asked him why he hadn’t published anything (even articles) he explained “my work is too good to be published.”  Those were his exact words.  I wrote a poem about people like him:

                        Good on  committees

                        For which he was cherished.

                        He never published

                        And he never perished.

In any case, I continued to find naïve editors and publishers and, as far as I know, he never published anything.  I doubt that he wrote anything.  Why bother writing when your work is too good to be published?

            Here is a sampler of some of the more absurd ideas I’ve invented that found a published home.

McDonald’s: The Evangelical Hamburger

In this article, published in 1964 in the Minnesota Daily, I suggested that McDonald’s had the attributes of an evangelical religion.  The McDonald’s near where I lived had twenty-food yellow arches (the church), a sign showing how many hamburgers had been sold (the congregation) and a hamburger costs something like fourteen cents (an offering).  Well before sociologists had been writing about the McDonaldization of America, I had suggested—sometimes in purpose prose—it had already begun.

Motelization Theory

I wrote an article for the San Francisco Chronicle in which I suggests that houses were becoming more like motels.  The kitchens in houses looked more and more institutional (like you find in restaurants and the homes of multi-millionaires) and adolescents in these houses brought their girlfriends and boyfriends home to shack up.  The parents’ role was relegated to little more than serving food and doing the laundry.  Their houses had become motels.

The Significant “He”

My article on this topic also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.  I asked why Hebrew and not Shebrew? Why Hedonist and not Shedonists?  Why Manishevitz matzo and not Womanishevitz matzo?  Why Menopause?  Why Menstruate?  Why does the significant “he” or “men” keep popping up in our language?  The answer, I suggested, was in a science of language—semantics.

ErosGOPanalia

My argument here is that the toilet training of children who became Republicans turned them into anal erotics—who lived only to cut the budget (except for military spending) and deprive poor people of everything.  Freud talked anal erotics in a famous paper.  He said they were orderly, parsimonious, and obstinate: a perfect description of a conservative Republican.  Trump, who wants to spend money, is not a Republican.  As Peggy Noonan wrote in  the Wall Street Journal, he is “a nut.”

I Stink Therefore I Am

This is a play on words on Descartes famous statement “I think therefore I am.”  I gained this insight when writing about deodorants and the notion, I had, that using deodorants was an attempt (unrecognized by those using them) to become saints and have no smell.

To Buy is to Be Perceived

I wrote this when dealing with the fact that nobody pays attention to us except when we’re buying things in stores.  Most of us spend our lives in a state of radical anonymity, so finding a clerk to actually look you in the eye was important to people.  This, of course, was before we had the Internet and Amazon.com.  Now we spend our time posting on Facebook to imaginary friends in virtual communities.  It’s not too much of stretch to say that we’re all disappearing.  I’ve written about consumer culture in books such as Ads, Fads and Consumer Culture and Marketing and American Consumer Culture.

White Bread and Political Ideology

When I was a kid there was something called “American bread.”  It was the white, semi-sweet mush that many Americans still eat.  This soft bread correlated with a lack of ideology in American politics.  Republicans and Democrats actually got along.  With the popularity of hard crusted breads, like bagels, sourdough breads and other similar breads, there’s been a major change in politics.  We’ve become more ideological. Now Democrats and Republicans hate each other, and Washington DC is dysfunctional.

Couthification

I was on a radio station show about consumption with Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus, the famous department store chain, and he explained to me that one of the main functions of his store was to help uneducated Texans who suddenly became oil millionaires to dress well and furnish their houses in decent taste.  They were uncouth and his department store, I would suggest, “couthified” them.  Most people have terrible taste and rely on who they see on television and other media (like films) and the ads they see in magazines to get a sense of what it is like to be “couth.”   Marcus was in his eighties at the time but was very sharp.  Between us, we answered all the questions raised, and I could see a really first rate mind at work in his answers.

Department Stores as Functional Alternatives to Cathedrals

I asked Stanley Marcus about my notion that department stores were very much like cathedrals and he said the idea made a lot of sense, since cathedrals in the Middle Ages were the centers of commerce and played an important part in people’s lives.  I have written about this in my book Media Analysis Techniques and in various other places where the topic is the sociological concept of functional alternatives.

Big Freezers and Infantile Starvation

How do you explain the fact that so many families with gigantic refrigerators also have huge stand-alone freezers?  My theory is that one or both members of the family experienced infantile starvation and the freezers are connected to unconscious fears and anxieties about running out of food.  Freud said that the child was the father of the man.  I’d add that the starving child is the father of the stand-alone freezer.

If you’re going to be an academic absurdist, it is a good idea to wait until you are a full professor since there are so many humorless and narrow-minded people in academia.

Editor’s Note: Arthur Asa Berger is emeritus professor of communication at San Francisco State University. He is author of over 100 books, many of them absurd. About a quarter of his published books are ones that I have sponsored, at Sage, AltaMira and Left Coast Press.  I have also rejected his book drafts so many times that he has labeled me The Great Rejector, a title I proudly embrace.  Arthur killed me off in one of his novels, an act for which  I have difficulty forgiving him.

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