My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #7, August 23, 1999

PLANTING MEMES

Yesterday I couldn't get an insistently cheerful tune out of my head. It wasn't that I minded the tune. It's just that I was also stuck with its words: "Don't go chewing in bed/You might wake up with gum in your hair." I don't deny that, but it's kind of a dumb statement to be using brain cells on.

With that insidious little tune, the Super Furry Animals, planted a meme, which is kind of like a virus with cultural content. A meme can be as harmless as a pet rock, or as vicious as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Like any other virus, its first goal is to invade an organism and take it over; its second goal is to spread to other organisms.

As it happens, their irresistible tune carried no wider message, had no hidden agenda. Had they been more commercially minded, they might have used the tune to sing about the Gap, or Dr. Pepper, or Wendy's, in which case their meme would be about delightful lighthearted ways spend money. Had they been more politically minded, they could have planted environmentalist or anti-war memes like folk rock groups of the 60's and 70's.

A catchy tune is a really good way to sneak inside an organism. Tunes are how we came to associate Coca-Cola with world peace and harmony, and how in the fifties Dinah Shore made us associate Chevrolets with freewheeling vacations in gorgous American landscapes.

They have also been used powerfully for political purposes. When the Democratic Party, after years of decline, needed new themes, they used Neil Diamond's "They're Coming to America" to remind people that Democrats were US, the children and grandchildren of immigrants, who fled oppression and worked hard to achieve the American dream. When baby boomer Bill Clinton wanted to emphasize that he would break from old ways of doing things, he used Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking about Tomorrow." For the Democrats, music was how they inspired hope among the downtrodden.

One other powerful way to sneak memes inside us, though, is images. Why did we associate Ronald Reagan with hope? In large part because of the careful crafting of images in the 1984 "Morning in America" ad campaign. In images of America's spacious skies and amber waves of grain, loving families, hardworking people, we saw everything we valued: freedom, patriotism, opportunity, community, success.

Which suggests that it's always easier to sneak a meme into somebody's head if you're pushing buttons to activate memes that are already there, like a virus using a cell's own regenerating mechanisms to spread itself. "Don't Stop Thinking about Tomorrow" was a good song, but its power lay in what it let loose inside us -- thoughts of "hope," youth, "optimism."

That's why, the less time an ad has to sell you something, the more likely it is to push your buttons. It's why nuns and monks have been conscipted to sell computers, Fred Astaire has been used to sell vacuum cleaners, and the Beatles' song "Revolution" has been used to turn baby boomer rebels into dutiful consumers of expensive footwear. It's why our love of thumbing our noses at authority has been celebrated in ads -- come on, break all the rules, they tell us.

Of course they want us to break the rules, which include things like "A penny saved is a penny earned," and "A fool and his money are soon parted." Business, which profits if we believe "you can have it all," is inevitably at odds with rules that tell us we'll succeed by working hard and saving our money.

When we're saying, "Yessss!" and "Allll right!" is the time we should suspect our own beliefs and values are being used against us without our awareness or consent, that we have been seduced into short circuiting our reason.

At the same time, if we wish to change anything important, we have to plant a meme ourselves. Not only that -- we have to plant it in fertile ground, give it Miracle-Gro, and water it regularly. And we have to destroy the weeds by undermining competing memes.

Consider how rapidly smoking went from being an acceptable choice to a social offense. That couldn't happen without changing Americans' deepseated live-and-let-live attitude. So how did that happen?

It happened because a lot of people were already angry at rude smokers who had long since stopped asking "Do you mind?" before lighting up. Many of us suffered from eye irritation and disliked breathing the smoke; some of us even suffered serious allergic reactions. And when we politely asked the smokers to refrain, too many smokers insisted on their rights.

That was a mistake, because while "rights" are among the memes that resonate powerfully with us, we also believe our rights stop when they start interfering with somebody else. All that we needed was proof that smokers were interfering with our rights, which came in the form of studies suggesting nonsmokers could get cancer from second-hand smoke. People who wouldn't have dreamed with interfering with another person's right to smoke himself into an early death now had ammunition to defend themselves at last.

Something similar happened with drunk driving, which is no longer a slap-on-the-wrist offense because we have asserted a counter-meme: the right of victims not to die. A cultural meme planted in the 70's has flowered and become commonplace: the designated driver.

Many of our most aggravating social problems seem unresolvable because they are built into our cultural values. We have put up with an extraordinary amount of gun violence because for so many Americans guns are inextricably linked with freedom, rights, self-protection, "equalizing" of power, fear of crime, and fear of government. No matter how many thousands of innocent victims were sacrificed, their lives were not as important as the gun memes.

If things are changing now, it won't be because of law, Congress being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the NRA. It will be because of another powerful cultural meme: sue the bastards. The NRA continues to insist on unrestricted access to guns, allying itself with gun-toters even when they're criminals, terrorists, wifebeaters, or loonies. But the gunmakers are running scared, as state after state files suit against them; they are willing to deal.

We need to examine the memes people are trying to plant, not let them grow inside us unless we want them there. But if you want to change the world, change other people's memes. Spread a virus today. We don't have to live this way.