Amazon's Charmless Charm Offensive (Don't Fall For It!)

 

The other side of the story:
Make Amazon Pay protest, London, 2021
<War on Want - Make Amazon Pay Protest, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112850122>

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Now that the World's Richest Boyfriend has finally gotten married, he needs some way of paying for all the rice that he and his A-list buddies scattered behind them in Venice. That's one takeaway from all those adverts blanketing the airwaves -- you know, all those images of Joe Amazon Man, or Jane Amazon Woman, just good company foot soldiers, doing their best to put food on the table. 

What makes them notable is their presentation, one carefully crafted to refute popular impressions of Jeff Bezos's outfit as an overweening corporate bully -- a bad actor, like many Fortune 500 companies, that seems to view mistreatment as a feature (not a bug) of its corporate DNA. Whether it's Amazon's allergy to competition, unionism, or improving its oft-criticized Dickensian warehouse conditions -- to name three of the more common charges leveled their way -- it's a situation that seems tailor-made for the curt response that Ebenezer Scrooge elicits from his departed cohort, Jacob Marley, as to what this ghost, this awfully scary blast from his past, could possibly ever want with him:

"Much.”

The ads take varying tacks to deflect those charges, whether it's the benefits angle ("Health insurance from the first day"), shout-outs to its DYI roots ("60% of our sellers are independents"), or simpler, more straightforward images, such as the young Hispanic guy who wows his date by taking her to a shiny, fancy steak house -- the implication being, it takes Amazon-level wages to make this kind of outing happen.

It's a bit too close to Scrooge saluting himself as "The Founder of the Feast," after witnessing the Cratchit family's painfully spartan holiday dinner -- but no matter. Like  so many bad actors before him, real or imagined, Jeff Bezos is running in the court of public opinion. And while he doesn't relish getting roasted publicly, he's not going down without swinging. Enter the Charmless Charm Offensive, then, to win us back over.

Presumably, it's the reason for the dizzingly diverse array of characters who populate these ads -- like the Hispanic dad, gently cradling his kids, for instance. It's an image lifted straight from the Norman Rockwell handbook. Who could find fault that? Never mind that Jeff Bezos spiked an endorsement of Kamala Harris, even after it had already been prepared. Never mind that Bezos was among the first major business titans to trip in bending the knee to Trump, by joining him at the podium during his restoration ceremony.  

And never mind, at least on the opinion pages of the newspaper that he oh-so-conveniently owns, the Washington Post, that Bezos has tilted them in favor of his new Washington, DC friends, an intention not-so-subtly telegraphed thusly, in February: "We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

Translation: "I have to keep the Orange Man happy, so whatever crosses his mind, no matter how outrageous or dangerous it seems, I'll just have to suck it up, and support it. And so should you. My profits come before the public."

<The happy couple, greeted 

in advance of their $50 million spectacle:

https://substack.com@lizplank>

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It's a story as old as the hills. Over 100 years ago, John D. Rockefeller began handing out dimes to small children, while cohorts like Andrew Carnegie funded libraries across the nation, in moves meant to distract their favorite pursuit -- the bare-knuckled accumulation of wealth and property, by whatever means necessary. If it meant wringing the last drop of humanity dry, so be it.

Along the same lines, it's worth recalling that America's most notorious gangster, Al Capone, invested in a couple Chicago soup kitchens at the onset of the Depression -- and considered hiring Ivy Lee, the same man who'd coached Rockefeller, to burnish his own public image. Nothing came of it, perhaps because Lee feared being "taken for a ride," had any of his gambits backfired ("I'm sorry, Mr. Capone, but income tax law is not 'bunk,' however ardently you believe that").

If you've ever wondered why public relations is derided as "journalism's evil twin," perhaps these words from the Bill Moyers collection (see link below) should clear up whatever doubts you may yet entertain:

"To the generation before the first World War, Rockefeller was the rapacious Midas, a billion dollar tyrant who would crush anyone in his way. His all-powerful trust, the Standard Oil Company, was broken up by government legislation. Bodyguards had to surround him when he went to church. Even some of his charitable donations were returned as tainted money.

"He was, after all, the man who Senator Robert LaFollette called the greatest criminal of the age. No wonder the muckrakers went after him with all the barbs in their quiver. What a target he was and what a time they had. There he was hoarding his money and thumbing his nose an Uncle Sam while robbing the country of its wealth. He was their one man rogues gallery of barnyard images, as greedy as a pig, as slippery as an eel, as vile as a vulture preying on the public.

'What in the world happened? How did they change the image of the most hated man in America? What transformed the ogre into the grandfatherly choir master of the news reels?"

As Lee himself often reminded people -- to the point of absurdity -- he never changed Mr. Rockefeller, but simply allowed a different side to become better known. Thanks to a media culture that largely kept Blacks, women and other nuisance minorities off to the sidelines, that gauzier image of the grandfatherly figure handing out his dimes to anyone became the most prevalent image of him. Never mind that he had plenty more dimes where those came from, all of them made possible by the countless lives he'd ruined.

And we're still fighting so many of the same battles today. Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays, his successor as the unofficial dean of America's PR industry, would undoubtedly have supported Amazon's charm offensive, one designed to help you forget the company's data security breaches, excessive packaging waste, hostility to unions, and prevalence of counterfeit merchandise (depending on the site). 

Distraction and diversion are the bad actor's stock in trade. As the old joke runs -- why else would they try these tactics, if they didn't really work? Look at Richard Nixon, who wrote 10 books, all of them best-sellers, that did much to burnish his image as an elder statesman, once the excesses of Watergate had burnt his political career to ashes.

Isabel Allende, I suspect, holds a rather different opinion of these efforts, so start with her for the rest of the story. For me, it doesn't matter how many bestsellers Mr. Nixon penned -- his crimes against the unfortunate inhabitants of Cambodia, Chile, Laos, and Vietnam speak to a starkly different reality, one that no amount of apple-polishing and image-making can ever paper over.

And, while Mr. Bezos has never vicariously experienced the thrill of overturning a democratically elected government -- as Nixon and his chief enabler, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, did in Chile -- the enormity of his own moral shortcomings is surely no less concerning. We'll know soon enough how well the Charm Offensive worked -- or didn't, if another one returns to blitz our airwaves.

Either way, we shouldn't let those cozy homespun images divert us from the reality behind the excessive gauziness of the imagery, as Elizabeth Plank's excellent writeup of the World's Most Expensive Boyfriend's wedding should make amply clear:

"A $50 million celebration in Venice, complete with a foam party on a half-billion-dollar yacht, three days of masquerade balls, and ninety-four private jets idling on the tarmac like this was a climate-change-themed sequel to White Lotus. Oprah was there. So were Kim Kardashian, Tom Brady, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ivanka Trump. I watched celebrities, dressed in couture and climate virtue, celebrate (without irony!) a man who has done more to accelerate climate collapse and enable fascism than almost anyone alive.

"It felt like a punchline. Except the joke was on us."

I couldn't have said it better. --The Reckoner

Links To Go: Maybe John D's Ghost
Will Drop A Dime On You, Too!:

Bill Moyers: The Image Makers:
https://billmoyers.com/content/image-makers/

Elizabeth Plank: Paper Straws For You,
Private Jets For Them:
https://lizplank.substack.com/p/paper-straws-for-you-private-jets

The Conversation: Washington Post's Turnaround...:
https://theconversation.com/washington-posts-turnaround-on-its-opinion-pages-is-returning-journalism-to-its-partisan-roots-but-without-the-principles-251189

The Daily Beast: Tragic Real Reason Behind Bezos' Gaudy Wedding:
https://archive.ph/15thY

The rest of the story/Take II: The Reckoner