Orion Magazine - November-December 2008

licity problems,* Marsteller crafted the new approach. The crying Indian campaign, premiering on Earth Day 1971, had it all: a heart-wrenching central >gure, an appeal to mythic America, and a catchy slogan. There was a pro forma gesture in the direction of ecology—the Indian paddles by some belching smokestacks, after all—and the language had shifted from “littering” to “pollution.” But the message was the same: quit tossing coffee cups out of the window of your

Chevy Chevelle, you pig, and America’s environmental problems will end.

IN 1970, as Marsteller hatched the ad that would seal his fame, Iron Eyes Cody was busy making >lm westerns. He played a medicine man in A Man Called Horse, Apache chief Santana in El Condor, and a character named Crazy Foot in a comedy called Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County. As in the earlier Indian plays, Indians in westerns are usually allied with nature, wilderness, old codes of vengeance and honor— the vanishing past that civilization must replace.

But in the questioning sixties, the inevitable march of manifest destiny began to be examined for its dark side. As social unrest accelerated, the counterculture began taking up Indian-ness to express a rejection of the status quo. In 1969, Native American Vine Deloria published Custer Died for Your Sins, a scathingly hilarious manifesto diagnosing the epidemic of bad faith in Indian-white relations, and advocating a new “tribalism” bent on “rejection of the consumer mania which plagues society

* In more recent years, Burson-Marsteller performed crisis management for Union Carbide after the Bhopal disaster, for reactor builders Babcock & Wilcox after Three Mile Island, for British Petroleum after their Torrey Canyon oil spill, for Dow-Corning after silicone-breast-implant lawsuits, and for the government of Saudi Arabia after thirteen of its citizens helped carry out the attacks of September 11. One of Burson-Marsteller’s key accomplishments was helping to invent the concept of astroturf. Corporate-sponsored groups designed to look grassroots, astroturf organizations are able to reach the media, and in many cases, the hearts of the public, in ways that corporate ?aks never could. Their particular specialty was astroturf environmental groups: they helped spawn the Coalition for Clean and Renewable Energy, bankrolled by Hydro Quebec; the Foundation for Clean Air Progress, a consortium of energy, industry, and agricultural companies formed to >ght clean air legislation; and the American Energy Alliance, which lobbied to defeat President Bill Clinton’s proposed Btu tax. Until his April 2008 ouster, Burson-Marsteller CEO Mark Penn was also a chief strategist for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

as a whole.” In 1970, Dee Brown published his in?uential Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a history of U.S. government treachery toward natives that questioned the inevitability of empire. The same year, the tragicomic epic Little Big Man played Custer’s last stand as an analogue for the moral morass unfolding in Vietnam. Anti-war protesters adopted fringed jackets, beads, and braids. The Indian was still a symbol of

America’s lost principles. But, in a

Mortonesque revival, he was also becoming a living alternative to the postwar culture of consumption.

In adopting the Indian as a symbol but turning his rejection of consumerism into a rebuke to individual laziness, Marsteller and Keep America Beautiful—underwritten by the Ad Council—struck green-wash gold. Their Indian evoked the deep discontents afoot in the culture. But they co-opted the icon of resistance and made him support the interests of the very consumer culture he appeared to protest. There he stood, stoic and sad, a rebuke to individuals rather than a rejection of the ideology of waste. But then, that was the very ideology the Ad Council had promoted all along.

It was an elegantly closed circle. The titans of packaging pushed throwaways into production. The Ad Council preached the creed of consumption, assuring Americans that the road to prosperity was paved with trash. The people bought; the people threw away. Then, the same industries and advertisers turned around and called them pigs. The people shamefacedly cleaned up the trash. And the packagers, pointing to the cleaned-up landscape, just went on making more of it.

ON MY WAY HOME from central Illinois, I stop to get a sandwich at the only place I can >nd: Subway. It’s just o= a highway exit, and I can hear the gears shifting on trucks as they accelerate up the on-ramp next door. I stand in front of the fridge staring at my options. Soda, water, energy drinks, juice. Plastic, aluminum, plastic. At Subway even apples—one of nature’s most perfectly packaged fruits— come presliced in plastic bags. I ask the clerk for a paper cup of tap water. She eyes me as if suspecting I’m the Unabomber’s unknown accomplice. I feel like the Unabomber’s unknown accomplice, because this small act, I know, is ridiculous. It’s not enough.