Andrew Ervin - Burning Down George Orwell's House

In the fall, she became the acting chair of the Department of English, where she filled in for a sick colleague. Her new responsibilities often kept her at campus late into the night. She also taught two classes, which involved a great deal of preparation and grading, and sat on a number of different departmental committees. With more time on his hands, Ray sometimes went out drinking with Bud, but he also spent more late nights at the office. That was when he began to tinker in secret on the concept that would define his career in advertising.

His project was, at the beginning, nothing more than a mental exercise, a distraction undertaken for the sake of curiosity and to avoid puttering around the condo and waiting for Helen to get home. Some people played video games or watched sports; Ray invented a new platform from which a company like Logos could interface with its strategic partners and their would-be customers. He sought to utilize the Orwellian nature of social media and invent a profitable new method of corporation-consumer interactivity.

He decided on vandalism.

A TRULY MONUMENTAL ADVERTISING campaign could be a work of public performance art, one that could make an ungodly profit if the advertisers learned to put — or learned to pretend to put — the once-private desires of the proles (that was, the consumers) ahead of those of Big Brother (the corporate overlords who hired them). Ray wanted to exploit the proles’ false sense of freedom; he would reach out to consumers’ greatest aspirational self-images confident in knowing that people purchased things not for who they were but for who they wanted to be.

The idea behind his secret campaign wasn’t all that complicated. Contemporary consumers believed that they wanted to be free of corporate manipulation and free of subservience to Big Brother. The average American consumer spent enormous amounts of money in the effort to appear anticonsumerist. Ray had done the same thing for years.

As an experiment, he crafted an anticorporate message and campaign for a real American corporation. Just for laughs, he chose a particular model of military-grade SUV that had been introduced to the public marketplace a decade prior. After the initial novelty had worn off the sales figures plummeted due to a combination of abysmal gas mileage and skyrocketing petroleum costs. Out of boredom, Ray devised the method that would — on paper — make those trucks the most desirable vehicles on the road even amid a global oil crisis and during an era dedicated to environmental sustainability. It was meant to be theoretical.

As the intellectual property of Logos, his project didn’t belong to him. He kept it a secret up until the day that Bud sent a company-wide email announcing that they had formed a strategic partnership with the very same manufacturer of the very same military-grade SUVs. Ray read the email three times: Bud would soon begin building a team to interface with the automaker and better enable it to reposition its brand image amid a global marketplace advancing toward greater ecological awareness. Ray leapt from his cubicle.

Being named the account director for a domestic SUV company was a logical step in Bud’s career. He had a cell phone pinched between his face and shoulder while he pecked at a keyboard. “Two fifty a barrel,” he told the caller. “Yeah … I don’t know … Either the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Mexico, I forget which — same difference … Our projections have it at three hundred by the end of the decade … Yes, this decade. That’s why the small part of Detroit that isn’t already boarded up is shitting itself right now. For our purposes, more expensive is better.”

Ray tiptoed in. Every footstep required concentration. Bud lifted his chin at him as if to say, What do you want? Ray thought about turning around and walking out. He could forget about his efforts to sell a shitload of SUVs and go back to hiding in his cubicle and spend the rest of his life rewriting the same three goddamn advertisements … or he could find out if his theories would work in real life. He handed Bud an unlabeled DVD.

“Jürgen, I’m telling you we’ll take care of it,” Bud told the telephone. “You won’t regret it … Yes … Yes .” He cupped his palm over the receiver. “What is this? I don’t have time for games, Man Ray.”

Ray slid the disc into one of the computers on his desk and the TV monitors on the wall went blank. The sound of a truck engine filled the room. A speck appeared at a distant horizon on both screens. The image grew larger until it became one of the SUVs that Logos was now partnered with. The truck, its engine roaring with thirst, sped toward the camera as if to mow the viewer down, then it skidded to a halt and filled the screen. A vandal had carved two words into the door as if with a key: “SUV Hogg.”

“Let me call you back,” Bud said. He sent his phone skidding across the papers on his desk. “What the fuck is this?”

“It’s our campaign.”

“Close the door. We don’t do campaigns, Ray. We establish strategic partnerships and provide market-driven solutions.”

“It’s our new strategic partnership. Scroll over the truck. It’s all there.” Words popped out from the hood, from the roof and trunk, from the tires. Clicking on them led to page after page about the proud tradition of petroleum production in American history. It was all very patriotic. Bud’s cell phone rang but he ignored it. Ray had earned himself two minutes to make his pitch. “The environment-friendly angle is a mistake,” he said.

Bud looked baffled. “A mistake? The contract it took me nine fucking months to procure is a mistake?” His landline rang. He answered both phones and placed them next to each other on the desk so the callers could talk to each other.

“Nothing we do,” Ray said, “will convince women or hippies to buy these trucks. Look at where the market’s headed. We need to help the automaker reassess the brand’s goals and attack a core audience. Men who buy SUVs don’t care about the environment or else they wouldn’t buy SUVs in the first place. My campaign — sorry, my market-driven solution — is about defiance.”

“Defiance.”

“Screw the environment.”

“Screw the environment? That’s your idea? How long have you been working on this?”

“You’re always preaching about interactivity. What’s more interactive than vandalizing your own truck?”

Bud hung up the two phones. “How did you know we’d get this account?”

“I didn’t.”

“So you spent, what, a month putting this together? Even if it was on your own time, you do understand that it’s the exact fucksticking opposite of the direction I agreed upon with the client?”

“Give them the DVD. I have a whole platform developed. You’ve said it yourself that the thirty-second ad is dead, right? So we’ll go post-media with this. We’ll go post-post media. I’ll put it this way: when’s the last time you took the L and someone wasn’t having a loud personal conversation on his cell phone? Everyone hates that guy, right? But what I have in mind will use the disintegration of public and private space to our advantage. We’re going to get twenty of these things—”

“Twenty of what?”

“These SUVs. We get as many as we can and vandalize them.”

“Vandalize them?”

“Yes.”

“To say ‘SUV Hog’?”

“Two g ’s. We’ll copyright it immediately.”

“Are you fucking retarded?”

“Every couple weeks we’ll scrape ‘SUV Hogg’ into a truck and park it at that week’s hot place. Or outside a stadium before a playoff game.”

“You’re suggesting that people will buy SUVs because they’re getting keyed? Do you appreciate how stupid you sound?”