Free Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash by Edward Humes Page B

was not. This was not the flimflam of the confidence man or the deceitful quackery of the snake oil salesman, but the art of the spinmeister—not hiding or breaking the truth so much as redefining it. He was helping to rewrite America’s mythology. Eastern Airlines’ noisy planes became “Whisperjets.” U.S. Rubber, whose tires sold poorly abroad because of anti-American sentiment, became “Uniroyal.” The gas station chain with an eye-glazing name and a reputation for poor service, Cities Service Oil Company, became the peppy “CitGo.” Lippincott was so successful at designing to redefine that he was hired by the U.S. Navy to reimagine the interior of the Nautilus nuclear submarine to make its cramped quarters appear spacious, and by the U.S. Treasury Department to make the Internal Revenue Service appear more user-friendly (his one great failure, it seems, as the IRS apparently declined to change its name to something kinder and gentler). The rebranding, design and corporate identity industry Lippincott helped create succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. He helped make short-lived, disposable products and rising amounts of consumer waste appear to be virtues. He didn’t hide the shortcomings previous generations would have identified in these products. He celebrated them.
    It’s no coincidence that the notion of saving up to buy something (and earning interest in the process) started losing ground in his era, supplanted by the then-new phenomenon of credit cards and borrowing to buy (and paying interest in the process). Political leaders who once fretted that Americans didn’t save enough compared to the citizens of other wealthy nations, a disparity that still holds true today, eventually stopped complaining as the credit industry became a major force in the rise and fall of the American economy (and a major source of political campaign donations as well, more than $32 million a year leading up to the current financial crisis). The normalization of what was once unthinkable, even shameful—large amounts of consumer debt—added decades of longevity to the Lippincott vision of throwing out and buying more at an ever-increasing rate in order to manufacture boom times. Average household credit card debt topped the landmark of $10,000 in 2006, a hundredfold increase over the average consumer debt in the 1960s. One consequence: Much of the material buried in landfills in recent years was bought with those same credit cards, leading to the quintessentially American practice of consumers continuing to pay, sometimes for years, for purchases after they become trash.
    There were others at the time of this transformation who took an opposing view, who urged the country to reject “a society built on trash and waste,” as the journalist and best-selling author Vance Packard saw it. Packard, whose first book had created a sensation in 1958 by citing examples of subliminal advertising and other manipulative imagery he accused the Lippincotts of the world of employing, wrote a prophetic follow-up in 1960 called The Waste Makers . In it, he accused his industry and marketing critics of sparking a crisis of excess and waste that would exhaust both nation and nature, until future Americans were forced by scarcity to “mine old forgotten garbage dumps” to recover squandered resources.

    “Wastefulness has become a part of the American way of life,” Packard wrote. “Some marketing experts have been announcing that the average citizen will have to step up his buying by nearly 50 per cent in the next dozen years, or the economy will sicken. In a mere decade, advertising men assert, United States citizens will have to improve their level of consumption as much as their forebears had managed to do in the two hundred years from Colonial times to 1939 … The people of the United States are in a sense becoming a nation on a tiger. They must learn to consume more and more or, they are warned, their magnificent economic