CHOOSE life! Choose drugs! Choose oblivion! Never before have we witnessed such a blatant form of cultural cannibalism, now that advertising agencies can find it appropriate to copy the leit motif from Trainspotting for the Bank of Ireland. Is it any wonder that people really want to get out of their minds? Is it any wonder that we need increasingly strong substances, and that straight cultural enlightenment in the form of books, films, art, theatre and music is too weak and morally restrained?
Perhaps this form of artistic imitation is the most grotesque proof to date that counter culture can no longer exist in the market economy. Grunge will always be subsumed into the Christian Dior collection. Every punk will be sucked in by some record deal. Even the most eloquent parody of the market which Irvine Welsh originally coined in the mouth of a junkie sitting in the dark, personal borderland between addiction to heroin and addiction to money, can now be turned into a virtue.
The young, multioptional, Celtic buck with the Pass card and the mobile can be cool enough to reflect on life's choices. He or she can choose money without losing sight of the "gorgeous liberty" offered by drugs.
"I know exactly how this has come about. I have friends in advertising. They read. They are frequent moviegoers. They buy the latest CDs and I've watched them saying: "Wow, this is good. I can use this. It's fair game. After all, we now have poets selling cars, and Beckett actors selling life insurance, of all things."
This gives a clear signal to artists and writers that there is no culture of opposition, and no originality that is not immediately impounded. Nothing can resist the totalitarian sweep of commerce.
This gives us a stark picture of a society unable to produce any alternatives to blind consumerism other than drugs, suicide, crime and terrorism, not to mention religious fanaticism and cult worship.
These are the increasingly attractive options for those who wish to achieve individualism in our society. How can the parasitic advertisers ever find use for negatives such as terror, famine or childabuse in a business which thrives only on the positive? Well, you could argue that Benetton has already done this successfully with the inverse feelgood factor of car wrecks and AIDS victims. But this only confirms the view that culture in general has reached such a saturation point that we have lost the ability to choose.
"We're all suffocating in culture", the misunderstood hero of my novel, Headbanger, bawls at his artist wife across the dinner table. The fact is that we have reached a point, once quaintly termed the "end of history", when there is no experience or political impulse left to engage us that has not already found its way into the TV commercial. There is no mystery. No place left unexplored. No original rainforest without dozens of anthropologists and natural scientists crossing each other's paths and discovering each other's discarded Coke cans.
In this century, we have gone from a point where the pyramids were a distant myth, left for sentimental, colonial explorers (as in The English Patient), to a point where everybody can access these mysteries on their own PCs. We have lost God too, along the way. And the only morality left is the ethics of trade.
Is it any wonder that New Agers have begun to fantasise that the Pyramids are not 2,000 years old but 10,000 years old, built by strange people from outer space; that the old Atlantis theorists have come out of the woodwork; or that the Hale Bopp comet has evoked another suicide cult.
These are not premillennial tensions; this is a search for purity and primitivism brought on by the lack of mystery. That human lust for the unknown is no longer being satisfied by the credit card or by culture. Every chocolate, commercial already gives you the entire loop of emotional transformation. Only born again Jesus people feel anything special nowadays. The rest of us are blindly groping at anything for a genuine sense of wonder.
BECAUSE our value judgments keep changing with each new brand name, and because art is so closely linked with commerce, we have no conscience left except the morals of our pockets. For writers, artists and filmmakers, there is nothing left to explore except an on going fetishism of minutiae, as though we were all making commercials.
Of course, there is something fundamentally democratic and liberating about books and art. But society needs the anarchy of new low art forms and subculture. Because part of the reason behind art is the need to shock and engage. Because culture diluted by commercials is empty and we need stronger doses. The legendary New York broadcaster, Howard Stern, does not read books because they are too slow. His cultural appetite is satisfied by the musician who plays the piano with his penis.
We need shock culture. Perhaps it is the only real conscience we have left. Not the Hollywood good and evil contest between serial killers and the besieged consumer family, but the kind of culture that asks real questions; something that offers a choice, outside Snickers and Mars bars. Twin Town, Wales's answer to Trainspotting may turn out to be just a bad piece of amoral mayhem. But that may be a symptom of the fact that contemporary culture is in a state of panic, desperately trying to remain outside commerce, while thriving on it at the same time.
