As Michelle Alexander details in The New Jim Crow, her 2010 seminal study of the criminal justice system, the systematic mass incarceration of African-American men and other minorities since 1980 encompasses three discrete stages: 1) Targeting minorities for minor drug offenses; 2) Giving them onerous sentences for victimless crimes; 3) Stripping them of their civil rights and isolating them economically, even after they have served their time.

Alexander calls mass incarceration the “New Jim Crow,” comparing it to the system of laws and customs in the post-Reconstruction South and North that legally discriminated against freed African-American slaves. She draws a number of amazing parallels between the U.S. between the 1880s and the Civil Rights movement and today, revealing the extent that institutional racism, supposedly eradicated by Brown v. Board of Education and LBJ’s Civil Rights laws, was recreated by federal and state lawmakers of both major parties after 1980.

Here are the similarities Alexander finds between the original and the new Jim Crow:

• Both had their roots in the desire among wealthy whites to use the resentments and racial biases of poor and working class whites to install a legally-enforced racial caste system.
• Both legalized discrimination. Jim Crow discriminated against blacks in matters of housing, education, employment, voting and public accommodations. The New Jim Crow strips voting and employment rights from ex-cons, after jailing them for minor drug offenses, which the authorities enforce only in minority neighborhoods.
• Both involve political disenfranchisement, exclusion from juries, racial discrimination and separate treatment in the criminal justice system.
• Both define the meaning and significance of race in the United States. The original Jim Crow defined blacks as second-class citizens. The New Jim Crow defines black men as criminals. In the original Jim Crow, the mass media and popular myths conflated blackness with inferiority. The New Jim Crow conflates blackness with crime.

These parallels make us realize that whatever the original intent of the developers of the Draconian laws and discriminatory police practices that define mass incarceration, we have created a system that legally defines a caste of humans with lesser rights based on their color.

Alexander also details a few differences between the original and the new Jim Crow:

• The New Jim Crow displays an absence of racial hostility, except at the margins, e.g., rogue police officers. The laws and policies express no overt hatred of blacks.
• Whites are also victims of the laws, although Alexander does make clear that the criminal justice system nationwide has stopped, arrested, charged and convicted many more blacks than whites and has given more jail time than whites received. None the less, because the laws and policies do not expressly single out blacks by race, whites also fall victim to the mass incarceration system.
• Many blacks have supported the “get tough” policies that formed the rationale for all the activity of the mass incarceration system, from stop-and-frisk programs to three-strike-you’re-out laws.

Many forces are converging at the current moment to end the system of American mass incarceration, the New Jim Crow. Some fiscal conservatives have realized that operating prisons costs state and federal governments a lot of cash. Industrialists such as the union-hating Koch brothers, may be anticipating the upcoming labor shortage as millions of Baby Boomer retire and look to empty the prisons to keep the price of labor down. Alexander and others have been talking about mass incarceration long enough that the message that there’s a big problem is finally getting through to the mainstream. Many see the causal connection between creating a caste denied basic rights and the growing inequality of income and wealth.

That leaves only those whom the authorities have scared into thinking we are in a permanent wave of violent crime and the rabid racists to oppose ending the laws that define mass incarceration. And, oh yes, the gun lobby, which makes many hundreds of millions of dollars each year selling more and more weapons to the paranoid and the frightened.

The Obama Administration is floating the idea of sending troops and adding military bases to Iraq. According to the unnamed White House officials who told the New York Times about the possibility of dedicating more troops and money to piecing back together the country we destroyed, Iraqis would run the new bases and Americans would not participate in ground combat. When have we heard that before?

Administrations float ideas in the news media all the time. If these thought balloons get shot down by the public, Congress or the big money, the idea goes nowhere. If no one seems to care, or if the proposal picks up support, the Administration pursues the idea.  As usual with balloon floaters, the chatty White House officials made a great effort to distance President Obama from the idea being floated: “White House officials stressed that no proposal has been presented to Mr. Obama and added they anticipated no decision in the next few weeks.”

Philologists should use that sentence to exemplify the definition of “disingenuous.” It’s clear that Obama knows already and the plans are already developed in detail, even if only as a contingency.

I urge everyone to contact President Obama, your senators and Congressional representative and tell all of them not to add troops or bases to Iraq.

In fact, we should be demanding a complete and immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops, advisors, mercenaries, outsourced contractors and equipment from Iraq and Afghanistan, plus a removal of all military support to all parties at war in all Middle Eastern countries. Let’s let the parties involved in the conflict work things out.

As long as we stay involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Pakistan, we will be a magnet for forces opposed to our presence, our bullying and our cultural imperialism. None of these countries will attain stability as long as we serve as a destabilizing element.

It goes without saying that we may not like the stability that develops after we withdraw military support in the Middle East, especially if ISIS gains permanent control of some part of Syria or Iraq. But any kind of stability will be an improvement over the current situation.

In withdrawing from the many quagmires in the Middle East, I propose that we offer to pay reparations to any government or group that agrees to a cease fire. I call these payments reparations because we have been so instrumental in causing so many Middle Eastern conflicts. The reparations would come in the form of aid that could never be converted to military uses, things like schools, textbooks, hospital facilities, grain, agronomists and agricultural and manufacturing equipment. We should use our money not to destroy and kill, but to help countries advance economically and overcome sectarian differences.

Just as we are now friends with England, France, Germany, Japan and other former enemies, I don’t see why we can’t one day be friends with Iran and even ISIS, especially if we deliver a good dose of real economic and social aid. Those who shudder at the thought of an alliance with ISIS beheaders should compare the ISIS death count to that of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan and the conquest of Native Americans.

Another condition I would place on accepting American non-military aid is the recognition of Israel in the context of a two-state solution. Quite simply, to receive American aid, a country must accept the existence of both the Jewish state of Israel and a Palestinian state. I would apply this condition to Israel, too. If Israel wants to continue to receive U.S. support, it should begin to withdraw settlements from the occupied territory and enter serious negotiations about establishing a permanent Palestinian government. We’ve put up with their stiff-necked foot-dragging and mistreatment of the Palestinians long enough.

It’s time we admitted that while not the entire problem, U.S. military involvement creates enough complications that it makes settlement of civil and regional wars in the Middle East impossible until we leave the region.

All the time, I encounter companies that run into language problems trying to describe themselves. A company that produces 95% of its revenues from metal fabrication will broaden their mission statement to encompass business lines that might produce negligible revenue. When common sense suggests the corporation just say, “we fabricate metal parts,” an attorney or board member will protest, “but that leaves out that little software company we own that hasn’t turned a profit yet”; a short mission statement thus grows to several paragraphs. The most extreme example was when a wishy-washy Westinghouse wrote some 30 years ago that its mission was to create value for shareholders, which pretty much could apply to any public company.

It seems as if some of the thought police are now stuck in the same tarry mess—trying to redefine a large group to accommodate the traits of a very small part of it. I’m talking about certain supporters of those who feel that their true sex is not the one manifested by their physical sexual characteristics.

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, Elinor Burkett, a journalist and former professor of women’s studies, gave several examples of language police becoming upset when someone implied that you have to be a vagina to be a woman:

• The wonderful actress Martha Plimpton was flamed on the Internet and by Michelle Goldberg in Nation for sending out a Tweet about a Texas benefit to raise money for abortions that was called “A Night of a Thousand Vaginas.” People objected that Plimpton implied that the only way to be a woman is to have a vagina, which was “exclusionary and hurtful” to transsexual women.
• Mount Holyoke College recently cancelled a performance of the groundbreaking “Vagina Monologues” because it offered an “extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman.”

Wait a minute! I’ve seen a variety of estimates on what percentage of the population is transsexual. The numbers are across the board, and the newer the study, the higher the final estimate seems to be. But I have seen no study that estimates the transsexual part of the population as more than .3% of the population, and I’ve seen other estimates that those assigned the male sex who think they are female total a miniscule .027% of the population, which computes to just one in every 3,639 assigned males who believes she is really a woman. This total, by the way, includes all the transsexuals who have had what they call “bottom surgery” and now have a vagina. The number of transsexuals without vaginas is smaller still, in fact, statistically insignificant.

It doesn’t make sense to change the definition of womanhood to accommodate such a small group of outliers. I don’t see that either the “Vagina Monologues” or cleverly stating that only vaginas can undergo an abortion shows disrespect to transsexuals. Whether one says the “Vagina Monologues” is about women or about women with vaginas is the most moot of points since it would not be such a popular play if it did not speak directly to the human experience of all of us, regardless of sexual predilection or orientation.

Transsexuals who have taken the meds and had the operations are women—and they have vaginas. Those who haven’t taken the leap are transsexuals. As transsexuals, they deserve all the rights and respect that we should give all minority groups and individuals in the United States. I support their efforts to lower society’s prejudice against transsexuals, to educate the public and to encourage those who are confronting the possibility that they are not the sex assigned to them. But an insistence on twisting basic definitions that we have accepted for millennia not only irritates the centrists whose natural conservatism sometimes impedes their ability to accept social change. It also upsets long-term feminists and other natural allies of transsexuals. There is nothing about saying that a woman has a vagina that should upset anyone or make anyone feel less of whatever sex they identify with.

The more insidious aspect of the current problem of defining “womanhood” is the idea that someone who has secondary male sexual traits is a woman because she thinks she’s a woman. It is not a false leap in logic from “she thinks she’s a woman” to “she thinks like a woman.” In fact, if we don’t make that leap, we invalidate the person assigned the wrong sex.

Defining a woman by how she thinks, however, gives considerable fire power to those who believe that women do not have the emotional or intellectual capacity for certain positions, such as president of the United States, because it admits that there are differences in how men and women think. Feminists find that they have to make the argument that those traits that distinguish males from females have nothing to do with what it takes to lead a country or corporation or conduct scientific research; those intellectual traits are shared equally by men and women. This approach invites a careful or careless trepanning of the mind into a series of thought processes, categorizing these thought processes as “shared” or “unshared,” and then analyzing each of these processes to determine if they help or hurt one’s ability to succeed as a professional. Of course, point of view will determine the results of the analysis, as some might find a greater willingness to negotiate fundamentally sound or a sign of weakness, depending on the perspective.

It quickly gets pretty messy. The complexity of the final argument is likely to confuse or distract people from the main idea, which is that women are equal to men in capabilities and should have equal opportunities and success in society and in the workplace. But with the question of male-female differences in thinking seemingly validated by the presence of one fraction of a percent of the population, the best argument against the idea that women are inferior intellectually may still remain the record of men botching up things whenever they have been in charge.

There is no way to predict the content of our cultural vocabulary in a thousand years, although I imagine that a hundred years from now, the traditional part of it—Moses, Don Quixote, Abraham Lincoln, biblical and Shakespearean aphorisms—will mostly be intact. The more recently a cultural reference has entered our cultural vocabulary, however, the more likely it will disappear. It is likely we will remain loyal to Abraham and Faust, but perhaps not to J. R. Ewing and Stephen Hawking.

It’s also safe to predict that for the foreseeable future, cultural ephemera will appear and disappear at an in ever-increasing rate. There are just so many inputs to our cultural vocabulary nowadays, including advertisements, television shows, movies, pop music, celebrity culture and political scandals, in addition to works of high culture like serious drama, classical music, literary novels and scientific advances. The mixing of cultures adds to the inputs: African, Latin, Indian, Chinese and Japanese and other cultural references seep into any western culture much more readily and easily than during medieval times.

Beyond predicting the probable sources of change in our cultural vocabulary, we can’t say much about the future. For one thing, it’s possible that government and large organizations will exercise more social control in the future and freeze the development of our cultural vocabulary. Or perhaps somewhere today lives a woman or man destined to found a new religion and thus join Moses, Buddha, Mohhamad and Confucius as important religious figures with whom virtually every adult has familiarity. No one could have guessed in 600 CE that most people around the world would know something about Mohammad. Julius Caesar in 60 BCE was merely another scurrilous politician and the richest man in Rome, not the embodiment of empire and imperialism.

We can identify the processes by which our cultural vocabulary will evolve, but it’s impossible to predict what its actual contents will be in the future. In a thousand years, will audiences smile knowingly on hearing the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth? Will Odysseus still serve as a symbol of the clever and Isaac as a symbol of the pious? Will people still look at “Guernica” and say, “Yes, Picasso.

And what about Mean Joe Greene, Joe Isuzu and Mrs. Olsen? Will they still make people think of soda pop, automobiles and coffee in a thousand years? Will they have been reduced to their emotional essence and symbolize friendship, oily rascality and neighborliness? Or will they be as forgotten as Queen Blanche, Bertha of the Big Foot and the other ladies of times past whom the 16th century French poet Francois Villon compared to the snows of yesteryear?

From almost the beginning of human culture, artists in all genres and for all purposes have used pieces of cultural vocabulary in their works. But in all case, the artist shapes the cultural vocabulary to his or her own purposes. For example, Odysseus’ wiliness is heroic for Homer, treacherous for Virgil and bombastic and legalistic for Shakespeare; in James Joyce’s hands, the character of Odysseus is transformed into a self-abnegating Jew in turn-of-the-20th-century Dublin. Botticelli’s Venus is a Christian neo-Platonist symbol of divine love, whereas Titian’s Venus revels in the sensuality of the real world and Paulo Veronese’s embodies the civilizing effects of love. Select virtually any cultural icon that has been around more than a few hundred years and you will be able to find different versions of it throughout literature, art, pop culture and even history. In a sense, the artist “cannibalizes” the cultural icon by spinning the shared understanding of the icon with his or her own meaning.

Mass culture chews up images and concepts quickly—be it fictional characters like Robin Hood, Mr. Spock or Jason Bourne; historical figures such as Napoleon at Waterloo or Washington crossing the Delaware; sayings like “where’s the beef?” or “I’ll be back”; real incidents like the Spitzer prostitution scandal; fictional ones like movie plots; or new products, especially strange ones. Situation comedies, comedy sketches, TV commercials, spoof movies, newspaper headlines, news programs, comic strips, catalogue captions, advertising slogans, postmodern art and book titles are just some of the communication forms that routinely cannibalize cultural references. One week, we’ll see hundreds of references to twerking and a few weeks later, they’ll be gone, only to be replaced by hundreds of references to 1970s race car drivers, thanks to the movie “Rush.” Like twerking and “Rush,” most of this cultural phenomena is ephemeral—here today and gone tomorrow. But you can still provoke a heart swell with a reference to Moses and Lincoln, or a chuckle with an imitation of Richard Nixon.

Cannibalization of cultural iconography occurs primarily through direct reference or through imitation, parody and, travesty. James Joyce structures Ulysses after Homer’s epic and a secondary character in the “American Pie” movies calls himself the “Sherminator,” referring to another movie in another genre. Over time, we expropriate and distort the content of a cultural icon, sometimes to the point that we cannot recognize the original, as when Robin Hood becomes an anti-tax conservative in the Russell Crowe movie remake instead of someone who takes from the rich to give to the poor; or when Martin Luther King comes to represent general service to the community in place of seeing him as representing civil rights and civil disobedience. We morph cultural icons, as when the Terminator and Joe Isuzu transform into good guys. We take them out of context and thereby change their meaning, as Andy Warhol did with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.

The surest sign that an event, person, character or saying has permanently entered the public collective consciousness is that it has undergone a large number of these cultural expropriations over a period of years. It’s one thing for Johnny Carson to joke about the Mean Joe Greene soft drink commercial in 1982. It’s quite another to recycle the concept as a homage-cum-parody 30 years later to sell suds to housewives.

The longer a cultural artifact remains part of the cultural vocabulary, the more it changes from its original form and meaning, until finally it can mean anything to anyone. In a sense, frequent morphing of a cultural artifact hollows it out so it becomes an empty vessel that can be filled with any idea. Take the United States constitution, not the document itself, but its cultural meaning as a holy icon that guides our society and sets our laws. In any given year, dozens of conservative, progressive and centrist writers invoke the constitution, each to mean something completely different. Years of reinterpretation and misinterpretation by the news media, politicians, writers, filmmakers, composers and public relations professionals have slowly hollowed out the concept of the constitution, so that it can come to represent anything—and everything.

Another example is Martin Luther King. Our public celebration of King’s birthday displays a great ignorance of what he stood for. The media give us an overly generalized story and one quote about a dream. Politicians and writers mostly either refer to his legend without defining it or attempt to attach that legend into the beliefs of the speaker or writer. Even conservatives try to connect their ideas to King’s legacy. That’s the great thing about cultural artifacts that have been hollowed out: they can contain any idea one likes.

Making Dr. King’s birthday commemoration a day for volunteering distorts both Dr. King’s views and the good he did. Spending the day collecting for the poor, performing a charity show, reading to the elderly, cleaning up city parks and doing all the other things that people now typically do on MLK Day are all admirable, but this volunteering relates only in the most nebulous of ways to the hundreds of thousands of volunteers whom King enraptured and engaged 50 and 60 years ago. Those volunteers did two things and two things only: Walk for peace and justice and sit for peace and justice. Just as the news and marketing media transform King the social revolutionary into a mainstream American leader, so social action morphs into volunteering in ways that attend to social ills without addressing how to cure them. King becomes a fatherly figure who reminds us to help out others, a kind of Smokey the Bear of volunteerism.

Tomorrow will be a final edition of this special series on our shared cultural vocabulary. In it I weasel out of predicting what our cultural vocabulary will be in the future.

As we have seen, the elements of our cultural vocabulary come from many sources—works of high, low and commercial art and entertainment, news events, history as taught in elementary school, scientific discoveries, ethnic groups and other subcultures (such as urban Afro-American culture, college students or tattoo wearers) and other countries. From a bubbling cauldron of new and recycled cultural artifacts constantly emerge pieces of shared language that penetrate the consciousness of virtually all members of a society.

But while the bits of our shared cultural language can come from anywhere, the main mechanisms for sifting and shaping the cultural vocabulary have always remained firmly in the hands of ruling elites because of their control of the channels of distribution and dispersion of information and knowledge. During medieval times, for example, the church decided which of the thousands of Greek and Roman manuscripts monks would study and therefore copy and save. A political deal with a Roman emperor led to the widespread influence of Christianity on the cultural vocabulary of the West and the disappearance of the many rites and deities of Roman religious practice. Royalty of all kinds from kings to emperors to Rajas have promoted and suppressed literature and visual arts. Until well into the 18th century, the writers and artists who repeated and amplified myths and legends were either part of or supported by the ruling elite. Church and government have controlled education in most cultures.

The development of the printing press and capitalism transformed the ownership of communications vehicles, as commercial enterprises joined religions, aristocracy and government as the sieve that sorts our cultural ephemera to determine which will remain part of our vocabulary and which will disappear. Society’s wealthiest tend to own most commercial media, from newspapers to large websites, which means that the owners of the prime commercial means of transmitting cultural artifacts all come from the same social class and tend to have the same basic values and interests. In undemocratic societies, the commercial media tends to ally with the government. In a democratic society, the commercial media tends to be owned by those who have greatest access and control of the government.

It was, for example, a combination of public schools, text book publishers, movie producers, popular novelists, politically-motivated historians and politicians who promulgated the positive cultural myths surrounding slavery and the Confederacy once held throughout the United States. It was the combined efforts of all these gatekeepers of values and cultural imagery that enabled the dissemination of these false myths that predominated during the late 19th and 20th centuries; e.g., that plantation life was pleasant for slaves, that freed slaves were not prepared to act independently, and that the mediocre butcher Robert E. Lee was a great general who fought the United States only reluctantly. It has taken the Civil Rights movement and several generations of truth-telling historians, revised text books and mass entertainments such as “Roots” and “12 Years a Slave’ to begin to right the misperceptions about the Old South—to change our collective understanding of slavery and the cultural vocabulary we use to characterize it.

That the ruling elite tends to have the most to say in what cultural artifacts survive and remain part of our cultural vocabulary does not suggest any grand conspiracy theory. As C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite, G. William Domhoff in Who Rules America and others have noted, ruling elites share the same values, attend the same schools, play golf at the same clubs and serve on the same boards and associations. A conspiracy isn’t necessary for class action.

Technology plays two roles in the process of creating cultural vocabulary from the enormous and chaotic ocean of imagery and information that confronts. From the development of the printing press to the explosion of social media, new technology has always tended to speed up both the creation and the discarding of temporary pieces of cultural language. For example, the twerking fad of the late summer of 2013 lasted much less time than the hula hoop fad of the 1950s. While technology allows for a faster dispersion of information, it also fragments the mass market into literally thousands of sub-markets, each of which develops and speaks its own language, with its own jargon, each phrase of which could break out into the mainstream for a few weeks, or for centuries.

But technology isn’t just a vehicle for transmission; it is also responsible for the creation of a growing part of our cultural vocabulary: the selfie; the “nerd”; the ascension of Steve Jobs to a position equal to Henry Ford and Thomas Edison in American business mythology; calling our thought processes “software”; asking someone to put something back in its original place by saying “go to default.”

Tomorrow I will discuss what I call the cannibalization of cultural artifacts as a primary means of controlling and exploiting our shared cultural vocabulary.

The concept of a shared cultural vocabulary is related to yet different from that of cultural literacy. Cultural literacy comprises the knowledge of general history and of great works of literature, music, art and philosophy essential to be a good citizen. Too often conservative critics present lists of what constitutes cultural literacy that focus almost exclusively on the traditional works of white European males. More progressive critics will include the works of non-westerners and women and of newer art forms such as film and graphic novels. These critics—both conservative and progressive—all postulate cultural literacy as proscriptive: here is what you need to know.

Cultural vocabulary takes a different approach—one that describes instead of prescribes—by defining the cultural vocabulary as the body of information that most people in a culture share. Whether or not we should have read T.S. Eliot is not relevant to a description of the cultural vocabulary; what counts is that in 2014 a business magazine such as The Economist will cleverly reference Eliot’s “The Waste Land” by opening an article with “April has been a cheerful month for the Affordable Care Act…”

Those like E.D. Hirsch and Harold Bloom who construct lists of great literature and other cultural artifacts with which every culturally literate person should be familiar must frown dyspeptically at the symbolism of a TV commercial becoming as much a part of our cultural heritage as Huckleberry Finn or the founding of Jamestown. I’m sure that Bloom’s prescriptive cultural vocabulary would exclude Mean Joe Greene throwing a jersey or Mikey liking a dry cereal.

The argument concerning what constitutes cultural literacy and therefore should and should not be part of the cultural vocabulary goes back centuries. In Greek times, critics argued whether the low art of pottery carried the weight of painting. In late medieval times and the Renaissance, the argument was between Latin versus the vernacular. For the past 200 years, the argument has been about the relative merits of high and low culture, between serious novels and potboilers, literature and comic books, Beethoven and the Beach Boys. In all these instances, critics have argued about the relative merits of high and low (or popular) art.

But a television commercial is something different from both high culture and low culture. It represents commercial culture. Its makers intend not to edify nor to amuse, but to sell a product, service or idea.

Commercial culture has a history that may be as long as that of either high or low cultures, thanks to the fact that those who pay for propaganda are usually those who control the social order. The cultural dictators of all ages, especially the conservative ones, have tended to warmly embrace commercial culture. The Aeneid, a piece of propaganda purchased by the Roman Emperor Augustus, makes all the lists of the cultural essentials. I think one can make a compelling case that the psalms were works of pure propaganda meant solely to influence public opinion: King David (or the writers he hired) created our beloved psalms to improve public opinion about his actions, which was at a low after he had used the armies of Israel’s enemies to take over the country and then sent his best general out to die so he could cavort in the streets with the man’s wife. English literature students still read early Irish poems, which were little more than paid political announcements for Irish chieftains. We see print and poster advertisements by Toulouse-Lautrec, the Russian Constructivists, Depero and other visual artists hanging in art museums all over the world. Every serious film buff lauds the technical aspects of Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films, made for and financed by the Nazis. Many commercial works have managed to make it into the exalted cultural literacy pantheon of authoritarian critics of all ilks.

Before the advertising of products and services began sometime in the 19th century, virtually all works of commercial culture were either masked as entertainments or part of a liturgy. Nowadays, commercial culture will sometimes mask itself in movies which have as their sole purpose the selling of merchandise, e.g., movies about comic book heroes that spin off action figures, costumes, masks, toys, clothing, book marks, calendars, coasters, decorative boxes, jewelry, jigsaw puzzles, mugs, napkins, note cards, pens, tote bags, trays, lunch boxes and other branded merchandise. But more often than not, commercial culture today involves a naked sales pitch. That our cultural vocabulary so quickly consumes the naked sales pitches of “where’s the beef” and “can you hear me now” reflects the crass materialism of the age.

The development of the mass media of advertising, and then of film, radio, television, video games and the Internet has led to commercial culture playing a far great role in determining our cultural vocabulary than before World War II. We can see the hegemony of commercial culture everywhere: the enshrinement of commercial or decorative artists such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons in our pantheon of the visual arts; the widespread tattooing of Coke and other brand logos on body parts; and the widespread interests in celebrity culture (which I define as a preoccupation with the commercial transactions of people who are famous for no reason except perhaps for being wealthy). All represent the hegemony that commercial culture has achieved.

That hegemony shines through the recent ending of the Madman series, which, like the end of the first season, asserts that commercials are an art form by setting up situations in which the protagonist Don Draper transforms the discontents of his life into seminal TV commercials—at the end of the first season, his memories of his family, now fractured by his infidelity, becomes the Kodak “Moments” commercial; the last scene of the last episode of the series shows Draper, having found peace through transcendental meditation, dreaming up the wildly popular “I’d like to teach the world to sing” Coke commercials. The sublimation of real life into art has a long history—Dante, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, the list of authors whose works are at least partially autobiographical seems endless. With Mad Men, we see commercial art imitating life in a work of dramatic art about commercial art.

Tomorrow I take a look at some of the ways that words and phrases are added to our cultural vocabulary.

It seems as if it were only yesterday that America first saw the heart-rendering TV commercial in which Mean Joe Greene, a professional football player from the 1970s, throws a jersey to a young boy who offered him a Coke. The commercial, first introduced in 1979, makes all the lists of Top 10 or Top 25 American TV commercials of all time.

A recent TV spot parodies the Mean Joe commercial of decades ago. In the new spot, Joe throws his jersey to a housewife, played to soccer-and-bake-sale-mom perfection by sometimes raunchy comic actress Amy Sedaris. The camera angle exaggerates the difference in size between the characters much more than the original spot did. The housewife tosses a bottle of Downy laundry detergent to Mean Joe, looking sharp and very buff for a guy in his mid-60s. When Mean Joe lobs his jersey to her, she smells it, makes a disgusted face and throws it right back to him.

A great spoof.

TV commercials have parodied TV shows, movies and other art forms for decades. And parody or travesty sometimes enters into the occasional revival of an old ad concept like the resurrections of Mr. Clean, Joe Isuzu and Charlie the Tuna, which are all cases of a TV commercial making fun of itself.

But this laundry soap commercial may mark the first time we’ve seen a television commercial that pays homage to a commercial for a different product.

What does it say about our cultural vocabulary when to understand and appreciate a television commercial, you need to know about a 30-year-old television commercial for something else?

Cultural vocabulary comprises the quotes and images of literature, the visual arts, entertainment, current events and other cultural phenomena that people need to know to understand the cultural references that abound in the mass media, the popular arts and general conversation. Our cultural vocabulary consists of many artifacts:

• Real and fictional people, such as Adam & Eve, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Pascal and Don Quixote.
• Events, e.g., Hannibal crossing the Alps, the Battle of Waterloo, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong stepping foot on the moon.
• Phrases, e.g., quotes from poems, books, movies and songs, anything from “No can do” and “Let’s get it on” to “To be or not to be,” from “Four score and seven years ago” to “I have a dream.”
• Inanimate objects, e.g., the Bible, the Holy Grail or a Super Bowl ring.

Archetypes, e.g., the henpecked husband, the genius who is inept with women, the good prostitute, the cop who can’t follow orders, the stupid or buffoonish strongman, the evil businessman, the evil stepmother, the bumbling leader and the tragic young lovers. These archetypes are often embodied in people or characters who enter the cultural vocabulary: Archie Bunker, James Bond, Hercules, Stepin Fetchit, for example.

Over the next week, I’m going to take a break from political reporting and analyze some aspects of the concept of cultural vocabulary, including its relationship to cultural literacy, the concept of commercial culture, how the cultural vocabulary develops and what I call the cannibalization of cultural icons.

In the latest Foreign Affairs, political scientist John M. Owen IV starts to make the case that we can compare the current state of unrest in Islamic territories to the European wars of religion of about 450 years ago, in an article titled “From Calvin to the Caliphate.”  It’s a point that I’ve wanted to write about for some time now, but haven’t gotten around to yet. Reza Aslam has made a similar observation in the past.

Too bad Owen IV misconstrues what’s taking place today and so makes the wrong comparison and draws the wrong conclusions. Owen characterizes today’s wars in the Islamic world as a battle between secularism and Islamism, the idea that the original religious laws as laid down by Mohamed in the Koran should guide society and government. He compares this battle to the more than 100 years of almost constant warfare between Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th century. The comparison, as we will see, is very apt, but the terms of comparison are incorrect. The contemporary element in the comparison is not a war between secularism and Islamism, but between two forms of Islam, Sunni and Shiite. In several nations we see a struggle between the secular and religious, just as in United States and Israel, but the major wars and the larger battle today are between two kinds of Islam.

The comparison between two eras of warfare in which the antagonists represent two forms of the same religion resonates in many ways: Both the Reformation era wars and the current ones between Shiites and Sunnis in Syria, Iraq and Yemen came about 1,500 years after the original establishment of the religion. In both cases, the religious wars begin a short time after the war zone, once unified under a religious autocrat, broke apart; the Reformation Wars came a hundred or so years after the emergence of nation-states from the ruins of a Christian Europe led by the Papacy; today’s wars in Islamic territories come about a hundred years after the breakup of the Islam-based Ottoman Empire. In both cases, the major battles are in transitional territories in which neither form of the religion predominates: in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, it was the German territories; today, the worst battles are in a transitional zone between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran. In both cases, an influx of new military technology developed in another part of the world exacerbated the conflicts, making them more brutal and deadly: during the Reformation it was gunpowder, imported from China; today it’s primarily American military technology.

By asserting that the important battle today is between secularism and religion, Owen views the current state of unrest in the Islamic world completely from a Western perspective. Westerners of course identify with the secular over the religious, at least when applied to other cultures. Today’s secular world culture is, for better or worse, the American consumerist culture, and whenever new countries embrace our model, we are bound to make a lot of money out of it.

The opposition of the secular to Islamism enables Owen to imply a good and a bad side to the war, but in doing so, Owen insults the Moslem religion. Owen clearly prefers secularism, and subtly treats Islamism as inferior. He doesn’t take sides, however, when it comes to discussing the 17th century wars.

The illustrations that accompany the article visually communicate that while both sides of the Reformation Wars had their reasons, Islamists are nothing more than barbaric thugs. On the left side of the page we see a bearded white man dressed in Renaissance garb, clutching a large white cross to his side in one hand and raising his other hand as if to make a point. On the opposing page we see the Islamic soldier also with one hand pointing up, but the other hand contains an automatic weapon, and except for white sneakers, he is clothed entirely in an ominous one-piece black outfit that covers all of his face except his eyes. The look in the Christian’s eyes is one of fear. The look in the Moslem’s eyes is menacing and dangerous. This conflation of a pious scholar with a terrorist goon drains the blood from the extremely bloody Reformation wars, while subtly delegitimizing Islamism by reducing it to violence. Incidents of war-related barbarism were common in both the 17th century and today, but the imagery suggests that only Islamic wars have driven men to despicably inhumane acts.

Owen’s article is a piece of a propaganda machine that spews out justifications for American actions in the Middle East almost on a weekly basis. Framing Middle Eastern unrest in terms of the secular versus the religious provides our leaders and our country with the ideological rationale to intervene. It also allows us to take a side with which we are sympathetic, the forces of western modernity. By contrast, focusing on the fight between two forms of a religion which has few adherents in the United States might strike most as not our business.

The real reasons we are fighting a series of disastrous wars and actions in Islamic territories are economic and political: controlling sources of oil, developing markets for our weapons industry, supporting our Saudi and Israeli allies (who themselves are at odds), and the still unknown real reason the Bush Administration decided to take down Saddam Hussein and destabilize a country sewn together after World War I from three distinct regions and cultures.

Concealing political and economic motives behind idealism also characterized the Reformation wars, in which religion stood as a proxy for the various economic interests of the German principalities, France, Spain, Sweden and other countries. Behind the fight between Sunnis and Shiites stands the geopolitical elbowing of Saudi Arabia and Iran, and probably of Egypt and Turkey as well.

Owen ignores these points of comparison, which would help make the case for pulling out our troops and drones. His intent in “From Calvin to the Caliphate” is not to learn from the past, but to use a misreading of history to provide further justification for American imperialism.

In 1976, British cultural philosopher and novelist Raymond Williams published Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which analyzed the origins and uses of 110 words that are important to the way we organize concepts about society and politics. Forgotten now by most, Williams was once a key theoretician of the New Left. A random sampling of the words he analyzed suggests how deeply Williams dug into the thought structures that form how we look at a broad range of human phenomena: unemployment, revolution, underprivileged, consumer, alienation, technology, family, genetic, experience capitalism and cover the full range of human experience, including politics, economics, society, culture, the arts, science and religion. Williams focuses on British word uses, but also covers this side of the Atlantic.

Oxford University Press has now republished the updated edition of Keywords that came out in 1983, and it is a treasure for anyone interested in the ideological basis of contemporary culture. While Hip-Hop culture, blockbuster movies, text messaging, social media and digital technology have all contributed copious words and phrases to our cultural vocabulary since the mid-1980s, little has changed in the basic concepts by which we understand society and formulate actions. Far from obsolete, Keywords still lives and breathes the assumptions of capitalism and the consumer society.

Here are a few of the many insights I have culled from reading Keywords:

• Many words with positive associations, like interesting and improve have their origin in financial matters. Interesting derives first from having an interest in land or a business operation and then getting interest on an investment; improve and improvement first applied to land and economics before people started using it generally to denote making something better. As Williams writes, about interesting: “It seems probable that this now central word for attention, attraction and concern is saturated with the experience of a society based on money relationships.” The language certainly underscores my theory that contemporary society reduces all human relations and experiences to buying and selling.
• Consume and consumer originally had a negative connotation, meaning “to take up completely, devour, waste, spend.” A disease of the lungs was even named consumption. American advertising has now transformed consumer into a positive trait. Consumer still focuses on using up something, i.e., what manufacturers produce. We use it positively, as in consumer choice and negatively, as in consumer society. But—to quote Williams, “the predominance of the capitalist model ensured its widespread and often overwhelming extension to such fields as politics, education and health.” For the most part, to consume is now a very good and admirable thing.
• Our current confusion about matters of class reflects the confused origins of the words we use to describe the various classes. Lower class originally referred to the lowest ranking in a hierarchical society in which those above were inherently better humans. Middle class, on the other hand, referred from the beginning of its usage only to economic matters and described those in society with middling incomes—not the wealthy and not the poor. Building on the original meaning of the lower classes as inferior beings, the rightwing constantly uses language that delegitimizes the poor, making them seem undeserving of aid and at fault for their condition. This constant undercutting of the claims for social and economic justice for the lower class helps to form a wedge between the middle and lower classes, and influences many in the middle class to align with the wealthy, who have been picking their pockets for centuries, and certainly during the past 35 years. As Williams shows, the centuries-old strategy of the ruling elite to divide and conquer is baked into the language.

Unfortunately, Keywords has gotten the kind of play in the news media reserved for academic studies that prove that public schools do a better job of educating students than private schools do or provide precise details on how wind energy could provide all of our energy needs. In other words, Williams’ masterpiece has been virtually ignored by the mainstream news media. I routinely read book reviews in the following publications: New York Review of Books, Nation, New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The only one of these periodicals to review Keywords, and the only reason I know about the book, is Nation magazine. A Google News search revealed that Philosophy Now, The Guardian and Purple Revolver also reviewed Keywords, a paltry number compared to the hundreds of reviews of David McCullough’s latest inspirational biography (of the Wright Brothers) and of David Brooks’ right-wing sociology, The Road to Character to be found online.

Our mass media—controlled by a handful of companies which represent the ruling elite (another word Williams covers)—naturally censor thought that does not jibe with the beliefs of their owners. The mass media allows some dissent, but not much. The media does a lot to keep false notions such as creationism, low-tax policies and deregulation alive in everyone’s minds. Meanwhile, embedded in the structure of the language are the ideological assumptions that keep the ultra-wealthy in control. Keywords is an essential book for understanding the underlying or hidden ideology that dominates the English language and therefore our thought processes.