The Ad Council's "Campaign for Freedom"
The Ad Council

In the months since Sept. 11, ad execs have started to worry that our instant-gratification culture may have a downside: the tendency to take for granted hard-earned American freedom. To help us remember that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, the Ad Council, an industry-funded public relations group, has created a series of 30-second spots entitled "The Campaign for Freedom." Astonishingly, Madison Avenue may not be entirely consistent in the way it shakes Americans from their engorged complacency.

In one of the spots, "Choice," Americans are reminded of our freedom through images of the bounty of American supermarkets. While this association between liberty and consumer choice may be as easy a target for cultural critics as Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood is for film critics, "they" probably don't hate us because of it.

In fact, the spot is admirably direct in a way: It makes sense that people who commit their lives to advertising would believe that consumer choice is an important part of freedom. If the Ad Council wants to take its gloves off and try to persuade its audience that an activity where one's participation is directly determined by one's wealth and where one's range of choices is entirely preselected by other people represents a central American value, it's hard not to welcome their contribution to public debate. In an indirect and extremely wrongheaded way, they are, after all, contributing to democracy.

Much more disturbing is "Library," which presents a scenario where a boy tries to find certain books in a public library. The boy is informed that the books "are no longer available" and then asked to go with government agents "to answer a couple of questions." The ad's tagline asks us to ponder "What if America wasn't America?"

Well, actually, America isn't America. Under the provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act, pushed through Congress on the heels of the terrorist attacks, the FBI has the power to force libraries and bookstores to turn over purchase and checkout lists to the government. Librarians and booksellers can be placed under a permanent gag order that forbids them from telling citizens when their records are being checked.

If American freedoms are under real assault, however, the "Campaign for Freedom" is curiously silent about the matter. Rather than fight for the freedoms it professes to admire and uphold, the Ad Council seems content to assume they will always exist — because, after all, this is America. When pressed on the point by NPR's Brooke Gladstone, ad director Phil Dusenberry (also responsible for Ronald Reagan's" Morning in America" ads) responded that he had no opinion on the issue and, besides, the advertisements were only intended to "inspire" Americans to appreciate their country. Fair enough, but one can forgive the cynical Mexican or Italian for suspecting that the Ad Council's "American freedom" bears the same relation to real freedom that masturbation bears to real sex.

— Peter Norman (peterminorman@hotmail.com)