Flipping through a recent issue, I began to become aware that there was a common thread running through the images I was seeing. Not in the layout of the magazine itself, per se, but rather in the advertising. Every few pages there was this commonality. Once I noticed it, I went back and checked to make sure. Sure enough. It was there.
The first image was near the front of the magazine - within the first few pages, I'd say. As you can see, it shows an image of, well, a white guy in the right corner of a window. He stares out, masterfully, over a production floor. He looks calm and relaxed and in control, even though his shirt sleeves are rolled down. His posture (arm up, legs slightly crossed) communicates that things are okay. He is where he should be, right? And so is everything below him. Where it should be. For some reason, this guy's back simply oozes confidence, to my eyes, at least.
So far, so good. But then, a few pages on, here was this second image - in many ways a direct replica of the first. Powerful-looking man, in lower right corner of window, looking out through window in a visual narrative of poise and mastery. This time its is harder to tell the racial profile of the man, but he is quite decidedly not African-American (this will become more important in a second). If I'm not mistaken, that's Taiwan through the window. I especially like the tagline: "The end of think. The beginning of know." Introspection is dead; kiss it goodbye. Now is the time for the blind bling-bling of bourgeois assurance that brought us great advances like collateralized debt obligations and... you know... dioxin and stuff. all this to say, by white guy #2, I was starting to get a little suspicious.
That was when I came across this third image, toward the back of the magazine (wouldn't you just guess that?). In contrast to the two masterful non-African-Americans in the right of the two previous windows, here is a very nervous looking African-American, posed to the left of the frame, in a similar manner to the first two. Only here, the window is replaced by a (barred!) railing, a poor-man's window, if you will. The caption reflects uncertainty and lack of control over one's life - precisely the opposite of the message of the first two images. If the first two guys are management, this fellow is lower-middle management at best, and facing an immanent layoff at worst.What is one to make of these images, taken together? First, probably, is the fact that they are together. All three of them occur within fifty pages of each other in the same magazine. You would think advertising firms would want to keep their material a bit more fresh than this. And yet, here they all are.
Second, taken together, they convey a narrative of business in our present-day global America. The narrative, as I have intimated above, is one of mastery and its lack. To the white guys sweating the present "economic downturn," the message seems to be, "don't worry - you're still on top." To the non-white, however, the message is just as clearly one of nervousness and lack of control over one's resources and, ultimately, time (delay of retirement indefinitely, for example).
It is not lost on me that these images are amalgamated within the Atlantic, a magazine I continue to have serious misgivings about reading. I keep feeling like the editorial policy of the Atlantic should be much, much to the left of what it actually is. You pick it up, it at first has that nice lefty vibe, like the one you got clearly in the good ol' days when Lewis Lapham was at the editorial helm over at Harper's, or, sainted memory!, the really good old days of "fighting" Bob LaFollette and Milton Mayer over at the Progressive. I can't help thinking that any of those mags would have put the kibosh on these sorts of semiotic shenanigans between their covers, despite the loss of potential ad revenue.
Alas, however, not so the Atlantic.
So, like the old song, I ask, "How much is that white guy in the window?" How much as in, "how often?" of course, but also, "at what cost?" I ask because, cute as he is, I am certain that white guy is for sale, and I want to suggest that the price - for us nervous folks, non-white and otherwise - might indeed be too high. Caveat emptor.
