I wish I could read this article, but all you can access without a subscription is the preview page.
The referenced article is "A House Divided," and unfortunately, my old GUNS & AMMO articles are not online. As they own the copyrights, I can't just post those column here, but this is the passage being cited:
Has NRA caved in on gun rights, or are its critics just too radical and naive to understand real world hardball politics?
"Look at what NRA has given up," some may say.
"Look at what where we'd be if they hadn't," others might reply.
I was really trying to be even-handed, but leave the success of that attempt to those of you who have copies of that issue.
Next we have "Men, Dogs, Guns and Cars," a screed that marries "rugged individualism" with "seven bipolar tensions."
Researcher Elizabeth C. Hirschman goes off on a tangent about "nonwhite racial identity" and "white male dominance" and "self-abnegation, altruism, multiculturalism and interpersonal harmony," and to tell you the truth, knuckle-dragger me can't figure out what the hell she's babbling about, but it doesn't seem like she'd know what to do with a real man, a real car or a real dog. She reminds me of nothing so much as "Rebecca" from the famous (or it should be) tandem story assignment. And I've never met a true "rugged individualist" who lets advertising form his opinions anyway.
Likewise, the referenced article is copyrighted and I can't give it to you here. It was an examination of the causes of rebellion against England, with a comparison to "Intolerable Acts" we endure today.
I just find it interesting that the eggheads have given my stuff a nod, however minor, particularly since I've never been one to let establishment schooling interfere with my edjoocayshun. But I guess I shouldn't let it go to my head--I understand some of them also study chimps in the wild.
Ah, Journal of Advertising. For once, I can offer something useful (I'm in the second year of my doctorate in marketing; advertising isn't really my field, entrepreneurship is, but I'm familiar with the literature).
ReplyDeleteJust looking at the first page, Hirschman quotes Foucault (king of the French postmoderns) and Triandis. Therefore, I think it's safe to say that Hirschman is offering a postmodern critique of the individualist ethos. David's quotes come from the concluding passages of the paper, in which Hirschman argues that the U.S. is edging from an individualist ethos to a collectivist one, basically, and she approves ("normative" is a term of social science corresponding to "ought," compared to "positive," which corresponds to "is"). Note also that she uses the term "socially stratified nativism," which pretty much confirms what you suspected Hirschman is saying: we white males are hierarchical racists all.
Finally, consider Hirschman's closing statement: "The reader is invited to reexamine the seven advertisements shown in the analysis. Revisualize them with female or minority consumers, and immediately, their rhetorical power is lessened and their meaning altered. The next task of research is to determine why."
As evidence to the contrary, consider the work of Oleg Volk.
I've never read that tandem story before, that was hilarious.
ReplyDelete