SPACE BOOSTERS:Reflections on the Marketing

DAVID LAVERY* of

The Pythia of Delphi has now been replaced by a computer which hoversabove panels and punch cards. The hexameters ofthe oracle have given wayto sixteen-bit codes of instructions. Man the helmsman has turned the powerover to the cybernetic machine. The ultimate machine emerges to direct ourdestinies. Children phantasize flying their spacecrafts away from a crepuscularearth.

Ivan Illich, DeschooUng Society (1)

When I returned to Milan I stuck up in my study a huge map of the moonthat had been sent to me by the advertising office of Nestle's Powdered Milk.On the Mare Copernicum was printed: Feed Your Babies on Nestle's PowderedMilk, but it looked beautiful to me.

Orianna Fallaci, If the Sun Dies (2)

THE BRITISH PHILOLOGIST and thinker Owen Barfield has observed thatduring the writing of his History in English Words (1926)-a meticulousreconstruction ofthe "evolution of consciousness" buried in the etymologyof common words-he made a startling discovery: "I recall very well beingastonished at the ubiquitous appearance ofthe clock as a metaphor shortlyafter it had been invented. It turned up everywhere anybody was tryingto describe the way things work in nature." Eventually, Barfield concludes,"the clocks stopped-but the metaphor went on." And the world itself thuscame to appear, albeit unconsciously, clock-like, mechanistic, not becauseit really was, but because a metaphor had become an idol. (3)

* David Lavery is Assistant Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University.

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In a precisely similar fashion a contemporary observer, inspired by Bar-field, might stand astonished at the way the conquest of space-space travel,exploration, and colonization-has become a ubiquitous vehicle formetaphor, appearing everywhere man now seeks to explain his role on earthand his place in the cosmos-indeed his whole destiny. Before suchinetaphors become, like those ofthe clock, so unconscious that we can nolonger see that we see ourselves and our world through them, before wemust resort only to etymology and historical semantics to discover theirplace in our present contribution to the evolution of consciousness, I pro-pose that we try to think out their origins, meanings, and implications.I propose we study the idolatry of space in our time. But since such a sub-ject is, in this "Space Age," an unwieldy oneone might be tempted tocall it infinitely complex-I will confine myself to but one manifestation:the presence of space metaphors in advertising, what I would like to call"Space Boosterism."

Henry A. Murray has shown that almost from his origin and nearly imiver-sally mankind has feUen prey to 'Ascensionism," the "general psychical orien-tation toward brightness, levitation, fiying, climbing, upward pointing, andmoving. . . ." (4) With the Copemican Revolution, which, as Hannah Arendtso persuasively argued in The Human Condition, inspired man to seek outan Archimedean Point, taken up beyond the earth, from which to viewall terrestrial life, our ascensionism, it would seem, has attained itsapotheosis. And the actual space program, which began in earnest in the195O's as Russia and the United States competed to see which superpowerwould be the first to unearth man and physically possess the Archime-dean Point, added the final touch to ascensionism's poiesis and techne. (5)

Writing in the June, 1966 Et cetera, Garrett Hardin argued prescientlythat "The space effort is founded on irony: the most sophisticated techno-logical effort ever made is repeatedly supported by a total rejection of ratio-nality." (6) These lapses "The Semantics of Space" then goes on to collectand criticize: pancrestons (empty statements which can be adapted to fitall possible cases), begging the question, Freudian slips, nonsequiturs. ClassIII truths ("truths that cease to be truths upon being verbalized"). But Har-din's fine analysis needs updating. The irrationalism he saw so clearly in1966 has since grown and prospered.

Consider the following passage from Gerald K. O'Neill's The High Fron-tier (1977), a book which seeks to convince us ofthe inevitability and necessi-ty of space colonization:

We are so used to living on a planetary surface that it is a wrench for us evento consider continuing our normal human activities in another location. If,however, the human race has now reached the technical capability to carryon some of its industrial activities in space, we should indulge in the mentalexercise of "comparative planetology." We should ask, critically and with appealto the numbers, whether the best site for a growing, advancing industrial

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society is Earth, the Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else en-tirely. Surprisingly, the answer is inescapable: the best site is "somewhereelse entirely."

In a roundtable TV interview Isaac Asimov and I were asked why science-fiction writers have, almost without exception, failed to point us toward thatdevelopment. Dr. Asimov's reply was a phrase he has now become quite fondof using: "Planetary Chauvinism." (7)

These words appear in a chapter the Princeton physicist chose to call "ThePlanetary Hang-Up," a title which betrays the influence of the 1970s'"psychobabble" (8) on O'Neill's proselytizing on the behalf of the "extra-terrestrial imperative" (the phrase is Krafft Ehricke's). (9) Man's need fora planet on which to live seems, to this radically post-Copernican man,a mere "hang-up," like guilt over sexual promiscuity, or shyness, or modes-ty, and thus can be overcome by free thinking, devoid of "PlanetaryChauvinism" and old fashioned commitments to the earth as a home. Theyare, in effect, a Freudian slip, disclosing O'Neill's own "space-cadet" men-tality, a slip which Timothy Leary, former "high-priest" ofthe drug scenein the 196O's, has at least owned up to. (Now a booster for SMI2LE-"space migration, intelligence increase, life extension," Leary has insistedthat the "high" frontier is a natural extension of the drug culture's ownLSD enhanced "ascensionism." (10)

Such a slipthe admission that man's mind is now on space and thathe finds the earth beneath himhas likewise become part ofthe not-so-subliminal message of a great deal of recent advertising. Never slow tocapitalize on the tacit tendencies of the cultural psyches, the advertisingindustry has, it seems, realized that virtually anything can now be soldto us through appeals to our unearthliness.

nFrom March through July of 19811 lived and taught in Shanghai, People's

Republic of China. When I left with my family on a long Pan Am flightto what was then to me an alien world, space shuttle Columbia, then onits maiden voyage, orbited the earth. It touched down soon after our arrivalin Asia. In the Far East edition of Time, I read that the successful missionhad given post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America "a mighty lift"; and Presi-dent Reagan, convalescing from an assassination attempt, waxed eloquentlyto the Columbia's heroes, telling them (I learned) that "Through you, wefeel as giants once again."

Upon my return to the United States later that summer, badly culture-shocked from my time in the People's Republic, I struggled to acclimatemyself again to the frenetic, spacey American way of life. More than ordi-narily attuned to its peculiarities and absurdities, I began to notice a newkind of advertisement appearing with surprising commonness on televi-sion (and, I might note, I watched TV with open-eyed wonder after months

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without it in Shanghai). I saw (a partial list merely): the three-ply lamina-tion of "Glad Bags" fusing together, set against the backdrop of interstellarspace; "Maybelline Dial-a-Lash" tubes shot off from launching pads; lipstick(Revlon) said to exhibit "out of this world colors," worn by a fashion modelstanding on the limar surface; a United Negro College Fimd appeal, showingBlack scholars in graduation robes and mortar boards (whose minds it wouldbe " a terrible thing to waste") set against yet another cosmic backdrop(for, after all, the solicitation for contributions informs us that the humanmind is as "vast as space"); "Taster's Choice"-like "Tang" before it-offeredto us as the choice of astronauts (the shuttle astronauts in this case); a spotfor Home Box Office showing a family in its living room fiying throughspace, watching H.B.O.; cartoon children being carried into space by "Bub-blicious" balloon bubbles ("It tastes so imreal it'll blow you away."); a vacuousblonde, female astronaut in a lunar lander, proclaiming to her companions"Go ahead without me. I've got a run!" ("She would have been the firstwoman on the moon if only she'd worn Sheer Business Panty Hose."); Timexwatches, linked together to form Star Wars-type spacefighters, accompaniedby a montage of images of a man and a woman in space suits on an alienworld, while a voice-over tells us that "Timex performs with all the accu-racy and beauty of the cosmos"; a Levi's ad in which a youth, dressed inthe famous jeans, is launched toward distant skies while a voice explainsthat in Levi's "the mind knows no limits"; Chevrolet ads (for trucks andcars) which instruct us not to "leave earth without it" (a pick-up truck)and insist that a new model has "brakes so good they're almost extrater-restrial"; McDonald's "Spaceship Happy Meals" promoted in a commer-cial in which children look up at the sky with true cosmic yearning (animage plagiarized from Close Encounters of the Third Kind), fantasizing,no doubt, about "fiying their spacecrafts away from a crepuscular earth");Albert Einstein plugging the "genius" of a "Sony Betamax" while ensconcedin an armchair in a living room fioating in the cosmos.

With the same kind of amazement at the new openness with which man'sextraterrestrial urges were displayed, I watched Carl Sagan on PBS ven-ture forth into the universe in his Cosmos series in a spore-like, thistledownspaceship ofthe imagination, and it seemed so natural, so effortless. Why,he was even wearing the regulation college professor uniform-a corduroyjacket with patched sleeves-instead of those ugly and cumbersome spacesuits. Space travel, Sagan's image made clear, is easy, natural. Space is ournatural environment, Sagan is telling us. Often without our being awarethat we are hearing, it is our true home. (The same message, I noted, iscommunicated through many Saturday morning cartoons, in which accessto space is so simple and effortless that everyone from Batman to BugsBunny can journey there, often without needing either a space suit or ship,and certainly without any cares about "space adaptation syndrome."

I took note, too, of all those fantastically popular "space operas" of recent

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years-the Star Wars trilogy, the Star Trek TV series and films-andwondered if their success has not been in part the result of a recasting offamiliar, earthly themes in extraterrestrial settings, thus making us believe-as do all the ads-that life in space won't be so different after all, that achiev-ing "warp speed" is just a quantitative extension of driving on a freewayat rush hour.

Even the immense popularity of Steven Speilberg's E.T. would seem topartake in the marketing of unearthliness. Ironically enough, this touching,powerfully moving story of the triumph of the values of the heart maywell be promoting in many of its viewers, against its own better wisdom,not that supreme value which E.T. himself cannot live withoutthe needfor a place, for a home-but rather extraterrestrial urges. The desire tobecome precisely that which tortures E.T, robbing him eventually of hisvery life (at least momentarily), extinguishing his heart-light, the longingto become homeless ourselves, extraterrestrial space-cadets, is so promi-nent now, so much an everyday search-image in our culture fostered bythe media, (11) that it would not surprise me if many, perhaps most, viewersofthe film might replycould they trade places with Elliottaffirmative-ly to E.T's petition at movie's close to "Come."

In a theater in Huntsvilie, Alabama (a city which, because it is hometo N.A.S.A.'s Marshall Space Flight Center, takes pride in its nickname:"The Rocket City"), where I had gone to see E.T. a second time, I watchedwith interest a commercial for Atari (whose screening, I surmised, themanagement had evidently sold to the advertiser because it would appealto the kind of audience expected to pack E.T). In the ad-which exhibitedspecial effects not unlike iron's-a young man sits, his back to the camera,dreaming up ideas for video games, and the games he invents miraculous-ly materialize around him, filling the screen. As his dreams become wilderand wilder, as he imagines "Asteroids" and "Space Invaders," he fmds himselffioating-as does the audience-in interstellar space. The image is a com-mon one now, of course; I'd seen it all before. But it struck me that dayin that context that it presented an ironic counterpoint to the evocativetale of homesickness I was about to watch. Here, during a single afternoon'sentertainment, I was being asked to imagine myself as unearthly, and thento feel the pathos, the nostalgia of a poor, alien creature trapped far fromhis home. Surely this was a puzzling contradiction, but a contradictionwhich lies at the very heart of contemporary life.

IllSpace has, no doubt, been sold to us along with our meat and potatoes

for some time now. But why, in this decade of the space shuttle, whenthe space program is, nevertheless, at low ebb, has the pace and intensityofthe pitch increased so prominently? In 1965 the Italian journalist OriannaFallaci found the possibility that space might be marketable beyond belief.

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In her If the Sun Dies, she contemplates the thought that the astronautsmight be commercialized, but is told by a N.A.S.A. spokesman that theidea is ludicrous: "Can you imagine a billboard in Times Square with aphotograph of Cooper smoking a certain brand of cigarette. The cigaretteof space! Up in space Gordon Cooper smokes only . . . Inconceivable! Noneof them . . ." This was, of course, years before an astronaut became headof a major airline, or famed test-pilot (and hero of Tom Wolfe's The RightStuff) Chuck Yeager lent his image in support of his favorite spark plugs.By 1970, when Norman Mailer published his Of a Fire on ihe Moon, ithad already become apparent that "a new species of commercial was beingevolved. N.A.S.A. was vending space." (12) But only now, in the 198O's,has the vending become truly blatant, a prominent feature of our culturallandscape.

In their 1952 novel The Space Merchants, Frederik Pohl and C M . Korn-bluth imagined a huge Madison Avenue advertising agency given the taskof convincing the human race that it should migrate to an uninhabitableVenus. In Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, we see a 1990s' Los Angeleslandscape in which a huge fioating video-billboard passes overhead spoutingpromises that "A new life awaits you in off-world colonies." Neither of thesescience fiction prophecies has yet come true. But they now hardly seemfantastic to us, for though we are not yet being sold real estate on Venus,we are being sold unearthliness. The space boosters are selling us a mindset in preparation for selling a cosmic bill of goods. John Berger observesin his Ways of Seeing that implicit in most advertising is the following hiddentransaction: "The spectator-buyer is meant to envy the person he will becomeif he buys the product. He is meant to imagine himself transformed bythe product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justifyhis loving himself. . . ." Thus, Berger concludes, the "publicity image" ofan ad "steals love of oneself as one is, and offers it back for the price ofthe product." (13) Is it too much to say that advertising such as I have dis-cussed here, which sells-in a package deal-not just mascara, or a Betamax,or Big Macs, but a longing for space, steals, or seeks to steal, not just ourlove of ourselves, but our very earthliness? But it does not, as in the normaldialectical exchange Berger describes, then offer it back. In a "bait andswitch" duplicity it would rob us of it permanently.

In his The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, the great historianDaniel Boorstin offers the following concise estimate of the Americanwill-to-illusion:

When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect-we even demand-that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on thecar radio as we drive to work and expect "news" to have occurred since themorning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect ourhouse not only to shelter us, to keep us warm in the winter and cool in thesummer, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and

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interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect ourtwo week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expecta faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everythingto be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. Weexpect new heroes every month, a new literary masterpiece every week, a raresensation every night. . . .

We expect everything and anything. We expect the contradictory and theimpossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars whichare economical. . . . We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on themove and ever more neighborly . . . to revere God and to be God.

Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet neverhas a people been more deceived and disappointed. For never has a peopleexpected so much more than the world could possibly offer. (14)

The ravening expectancy ofthe American mind, which Boorstin so con-summately describes here, has engendered "the thicket of unreality whichstands between us and the facts of life," the "national self-hypnosis," whichhis book's investigation into "pseudo-events in America" seeks to dissect.

It gives rise as well to what Boorstin elsewhere describes as "Booster Talk:The Language of Anticipation," a way of speaking about things in which"what may be is contemplated as though it were in actual existence" (Boorstinis here quoting an early nineteenth century British observer). Booster talkis not misrepresentationor at least it does not seem that way to Ameri-cansbut rather a kind of clairvoyance, "not exaggerating but onlyanticipating-describing things which had not yet 'gone through the for-mality of taking place." " (15)

An extension of such "language of anticipation," space boosting is, ina sense, nothing new. But now the "boosting" has been literalized; nowthe boosting has been given a mighty lift; now there are booster rocketsto make that which the talk taimts-the unearthing of man-a real possibilityfor a people which has always "expected so much more than the worldcould possibly offer." When Boorstin wrote those words in 1961, he thoughthe was speaking figuratively.

IV

Concluding Semi-serious EpilogueIn an enigmatic prose-poem/parable entitled "The Three Disguised In-

vasions of Earth," British writer Cecil Helman tells of a strange, new "warofthe worlds," in which the Martians implement novel strategies for con-quering our planet. First, they imsuccessfuUy attempt to disguise themselvesas dentists, but are immediately discovered and defeated. In a secondattempt, they invade earth masquerading as chickens, but landing in thewilderness are overcome (and eaten) by wolves. A third attempt proves tobe more successful. Having learned much about the ways of earthlings.

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they execute a Trojan-horse style deception, stocking fifty story high cansof "SPITZ'S BAKED BEANS IN TOMATO SAUCE" with their troops.

At first, humans are suspicious, and the Trojan beans (and the Martianswithin) find themselves "surrounded by screams, shouts, tanks, and planes."But "envious advertising executives saying to one another-Not bad, notbad at all!', 'Gee, wish I'da thought of that gimmick myselfl", diffiise publicconcern over the strange objects. Spiro P. Spitz III lays claim to the giantcans, denies that they were the product of some advertising agency s genius,and insists the idea was his all along. Helman concludes his piece withthese words:

And while the shares of Spitz's Canned Goods, Inc. snake upwards on thestock-markets, the first purple tentacles snake out ofthe little portholes underthe words-'SPITZ'S BAKED BEANS IN TOMATO SAUCE'. . . . (16)

No Martians can be seen on the horizon these days, neither Wells', norWelles', nor Helman's. But in the Thriftway Supermarket in HighlandHeights, Kentucky and, indeed, all over the United States, two relativelynew offerings may be foimd: Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee's "Cosmic Kids" ("MacaroniProduct with Meat Balls in Tomato Sauce") and Franco-American's "UFO'swith Meteors" ("Outer Space Pasta Shapes with Meat Balls in a Rich TomatoSauce"). Television commercials for these two competitors in the unearth-ly junk-lunch market attempt to outdo each other in their space boosting.In one, children manning a spaceship search for "outer space pasta"; inanother, a boy and a girl in a typical American kitchen welcome aliensbringing them the gift of food with "out of this world" fiavor.

I do not mean to imply that these cans contain anything more than pseudo-food. I do not think Helman's Martians lurk within. "Cosmic Kids" and"UFOs" are the instrument not of an invasion but a proposed departure.If we took their message seriously, and the message brought to us by thewhole marketing of unearthliness, there would not even be anyone herefor the alien forces to conquer. For his boosting, his unquenchable expec-tation would have taken man already "anywhere out of the world."

NOTES AND REFERENCES1. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 115.2. (New York: Atheneum, 1965), pp. 135-37.3. The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University

Press, 1977), pp. 73-74.4. Quoted by Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace,

Jovanovich, 1970), pp. 34-35.5. See the chapter entitled "The Vita Activa and the Modern Age" in The Human Con-

dition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), pp. 248-325.6. Et cetera, 23, No. 2 (1966), pp. 167-71.7. (New York: Bantam Books, 1977), pp. 34-35.8. See R.D. Rosen's book of the same name (New York: Avon Books, 1977).

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9. "The Anthropology of Space Flight," in The Coming of the Space Age, Arthur C. Clarke,ed. (New York: Meredith Press, 1967), pp 255-68.

10. See, for instance, Lear/s Neuropolitics: The Sodobiology of Human Metamorphosis (LosAngeles: Starseed/Peace Press, 1977).

11. Another example: in a McDonald's in Georgia two years ago, I was interested to finda large poster (advertising a space age calendar) which instructed parents to "Helpyour child into outer space!"

12. Fallaci, pp. 135-37: Of a Fire on the Moon (New York: New American Library, 1970),p. 45.

13. (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 134.14. (New York: Atheneum, 1961), pp. 3-4; my italics.15. The Americans: The National Experience (^&N York: Random House, 1965), pp. 296-98.16. In The Prose Poem, Michael Benedikt, ed. (New York: Dell Books, 1976), pp. 578-80.