Enthusiasms

Did you know Google has a browsable archive of the entire run of Life magazine? It’s an inexhaustible source of Mad Men era ads. It’s funny how that works: most of us have a sense that ads are sleazy. Ads are there to make money off you, and as an industry, they have very few qualms about lying, deceiving and exploiting you. But something happens to ads as they age. They’re still trying to sell you something, still screaming at you to purchase, whispering it into your ear, but oddly, we begin to view them fondly. The past becomes a gilded age, and its ads, like everything else, become icons. Even if the product is still going strong, old Coca-Cola ads become the kind of kitschy thing people decorate their homes with, while newer ads for the same product, lacking the benefit of temporal distance, still leave us feeling slightly uncomfortable with their blatant commercialism.

This is an ad from the May 20, 1966 issue of Life. It tries to entice people to purchase property in California City. You might remember it as the ambitious planned community out in the desert that looks so impressive on Google Maps, with its enormous network of empty streets. In reality, only 14,000 people live there now, probably at most 2,000 in 1966. I’m not quite ready to let this story go. I’m sure the people who live there are tired of it: they could argue, and rightly so, that they’re just a regular small town, and the population has quadrupled in the last twenty years. I’ve never been there. But for an outsider, one town is much like the other; it just so happens that this one was supposed to be something more.

The ad is a scam. It’s a continuation of that magnificent scam Thomas More brought to the English language in 1516, when he imported utopia (nowhere) from Greek, a word that in English sounds exactly like eutopia (good place, that eu- being the same as in euphoria). It’s a cheap scam, even: in the faux naïve voice of a young boy—they couldn’t even be bothered to find a real boy, and so resort to an illustration—we hear about the wonders of life in California City. You can see a picture of the artificial lake here, in a 1962 Life story about urban development in the deserts of America. Note that there are no people and no houses to be seen. The ad puts these words into the boy’s mouth: “California City is now the tenth largest in size in the whole United States.” Which was true, if you counted the enormous area of planned streets that had not a single house on them. Sounds tempting, doesn’t it? Yes, the ad assures us, “you can own important real estate in these ‘Cities of the Future’ by making modest monthly payments.”

The ad also mentions another planned community, a “Colorado City, near Pueblo in the mountains”, which if wiki serves me right had a population of 2,200 people in 2010.

We’re looking at an ad that sells an utopian future to Baby Boomers just starting their families. If you were thirty in 1966, when this ad ran, you’d be seventy-five this year. We’re living in the future this ad sells. As such, we’re uniquely qualified to recognize the deceit. At the same time, we’re so distanced from the whole thing that it’s tempting to make it into an icon, a symbol of a golden age long past, instead of connecting it to the housing bubbles and financial troubles of our own time. (Yes, of course your house will continue appreciating! Yes, you will certainly pay off the loan you can’t afford by making modest monthly payments. Write today…)