IBM and 'The X-Files'.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: IBM TV ads during the show twist its anti-establishment message into anti-Internet, anti-democracy corporate propaganda - Talking Back - Column - Brief Article

My job in this magazine, and my inclination in general, is to point the various ways rightwing ideologies costume themselves and parade seductively through the mass media. A colleague who knows this recently challenged me with the following: "So, how do you account for The X-Files? It's one of the most subversive shows on television," he said.

He's got a point. Sunday-in and Sunday-out, twenty million viewers tune in to episodes about FBI and CIA cover-ups, government disinformation, human abductions, alien visitations, and secret plots to test unknown substances on unsuspecting citizens. Shadowy lighting and oboes in minor keys intensify the paranoid atmosphere. Walker, Texas Ranger it ain't. No celebration of traditional authority figures here, no deification of state power. Instead, government officials at the highest level are incompetents, or liars, or murderous anti-democratic conspirators out to hoodwink every single American and violate the Constitution.

This fall's much anticipated season premiere gave an analysis of the Cold War that would have done Noam Chomsky proud. Archival footage of the 1940s and 1950s accompanied the words of a government agent as he explained that the entire Cold War was a fabrication designed to sustain America's war industries. "The business of America is not business," he tells Mulder, it's war," Since the military wanted to spend money, "when there wasn't a war we called it a war anyway," he says. The military's postwar goal? "Global domination through the capability of total annihilation."

The agent's history lesson went like this: When Robert Oppenheimer tried to stop the arms race, "we silenced him." And after Joe McCarthy, Americans ate up the Cold War ideology "with a big spoon." More recently, he continued, "the biological weapons used in the Gulf War were so ingenious as to be almost undetectable," adding that they were "developed right in this very building." Reported alien abductions were and are really citizens being taken against their will and used by the government as guinea pigs for all sorts of life-threatening tests. Whew!

Having just taken this in, it's time to cut to the commercials, which make you feel like you're being slammed around in ideological bumper cars. Time now to stop questioning authority. and instead acquiesce to it. IBM's new Lotus campaign stands out as one of the more aggressive sets of ads in recent memory, designed to ridicule the anti-authoritarian tendencies the...