these dreams of a better and more prosperous world more seriously than the state ever expected, so much so that the government was ultimately sued for false advertising.” Or, as a popular joke of that period had it: “Marxism would have worked if it wasn’t for cars.” (It seems that the Chinese have learned the East German lesson, purchasing the entire Volvo operation from Ford in 2010.)
The East German experience shows that the media could play a much more complex and ambiguous role under authoritarianism than many in the West initially assumed. Much of the early scholarship on the subject greatly underestimated the need for entertainment and overestimated the need for information, especially of the political variety. Whatever external pressures, most people eventually find a way to accustom themselves to the most brutal political realities, whether by means of television, art, or sex.
Furthermore, the fact that the media did such a superb job at covering the fall of the Berlin Wall may have influenced many observers to believe that it played a similarly benevolent role throughout the entire history of the Cold War. But this was just a utopian dream: Whatever noble roles media take on during extraordinary crisis situations should not be generalized, for their everyday functions are strikingly different and are much more likely to be geared toward entertainment (if only because it sells better). A case in point: While many praised Twitter’s role in publicizing and promoting political demonstrations in Iran, the death of Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009, quickly overtook the protests as the site’s most popular topic.
Watching Avatar in Havana
But if the Western media made the consumerist benefits of capitalism easier to grasp than any piece of samizdat, it only gave its hopeful Eastern European viewers a rather shallow view on how democracy works and what kind of commitments and institutions it requires. As Erazim Kohák, a Czech-American philosopher whose family emigrated to the United States in 1948, memorably wrote in 1992: “The unfortunate truth is that as the former subjects of the Soviet empire dream it, the American dream has very little to do with liberty and justice for all and a great deal to do with soap operas and the Sears catalogue.... It is a dream made up mostly of irresponsibility, unreality, and instantly gratified greed.” Kohák knew that it was affluence—“the glittering plenty we glimpsed across the border in Germany and Austria ... freedom from care, freedom from responsibility”—rather than some abstract notion of Jeffersonian democracy that the Eastern European masses really wanted. As Kohák was quick to point out, affluence came fast in the early 1990s, without anyone giving much thought to what else democracy should mean: “When the popular Czech cartoonist Renčín draws his vision of what freedom will bring, he draws a man blissing out on a sofa, surrounded by toys and trophies—an outdoor motor, a television set with a VCR, a personal computer, a portable bar, an LP grill. There is not a trace of irony in it: this is what freedom means.”
But the Russia or China of today is not the East Germany or Czechoslovakia of the late 1980s. Except for North Korea, Turkmenistan, and perhaps Burma, modern authoritarian states have embraced consumerism, and it seems to have strengthened rather than undermined their regimes. Popular culture, especially when left unchecked by appeals to some higher truth or ideal, has eroded the political commitment of even the most dissatisfied citizens. Although the jubilant Czechs installed Václav Havel, a playwright and formidable intellectual, as their leader, they couldn’t resist the consumerist tornado sweeping through their lands (ironically, “Power of the Powerless” essay, Havel’s most famous attack on the totalitarian system, was a fulmination against the petty-mindedness of a communist store manager). Havel should have listened to Philip Roth, who in 1990 gave him and his fellow Czech intellectuals a most precious piece of advice on the pages of the New York Review of Books. Roth predicted that soon the cult of the dissident intellectuals would be replaced by the cult of another, much more powerful adversary: I can guarantee you that no defiant crowds will ever rally in Wenceslas Square to overthrow its tyranny nor will any playwright-intellectual be elevated by the outraged masses to redeem the national soul from the fatuity into which this adversary reduces virtually all of human discourse. I am speaking about that trivializer of everything, commercial television—not a handful of channels of boring clichéd television that nobody wants to watch because it is