Burning Down George Orwell's House (8 page)

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?”

“It will work.”

“No offense, but you're a fucking asshole.”

“Think about it for a sec. People will notice that all these trucks are getting vandalized, right? We'll make it look like an organized grassroots effort by some smelly activists and it will get covered on every blog in the city. Think of the buzz,” Ray said. He was getting worked up. “Once some imaginary granola-eating pinkos get blamed, buying one of these things will become an act of defiance. Real men are free to waste as much fossil fuel as they want without big government or some hippies telling them what to do.”

“Screw the environment?”

“It's a matter of synchronizing the doublespeak message with the new media at our disposal. We can even arrange it ahead of time for the dealerships to provide free paint touch-ups if the truck owners want them—which they won't.”

His two minutes expired.

“SUV Hogg. That's not it exactly, but let me give it some thought. I'll run it upstairs. Have you shown this to anybody else?”

“No, I—”

“Don't. You're a strange motherfucker, Sugar Ray.”

Four days later, stacks of fresh nondisclosure forms landed on every chair in the building. Bud got the board's permission to name Ray the assistant account director for what would become the Oil Hogg initiative. It was a huge step up in the world. He even got his very own office. At the end of the day Bud and the rest of the team were waiting for him when he arrived downstairs in the parking garage. His car had
disappeared from its usual spot. In its place stood a hulking SUV—a bonus for generating the idea. With some ceremony, the CEO herself handed him the keys, which he used to scrape “Oil Hogg” into the paint.

The team kicked the project off by vandalizing the hood or door or rear panel of twenty-four SUVs and then parking them outside Chicago's most popular restaurants and tourist spots. Over the days that followed, a small cadre of sworn-to-secrecy interns posted grainy camera phone images on every social-media platform. The reaction came instantaneously. Hundreds of people liked and re-posted the images; they crowed with delight about the comeuppance of those arrogant, petroleum-guzzling bullies who clogged the roads with their behemoth machines.

No one expected the copycat vandalism that followed. Through the winter, the defacement of SUVs took on its own momentum when students, housewives, and everyday proles got in on the action and started scraping up strangers' vehicles. A wave of low-stakes eco-terrorism washed over Chicago and unwittingly spread the Oil Hogg branding message.

Then Ray's plan began in earnest. He had the interns launch the counter-initiative. They started on AM radio, calling in to right-wing talk shows to say how proud they were of being decent, law-abiding Americans and hence free to despoil the environment any way they damn well pleased. “Longtime listener, first time caller,” an intern said live on the air from Bud's office. “I'm proud to be an Oil Hogg.”

Supporters called in to echo his sentiments. The new narrative took shape online and on the airwaves, one extolling the red-meat joy of driving big trucks. The rhetoric of the new blogs and memes equated gasoline usage with being a real American. Hundreds of SUV owners whose vehicles had not been vandalized soon did it themselves. Sales boomed citywide and in the northern half of the state. The auto dealers couldn't keep them on the lot. The earnings reports erased any doubt on the part of the Logos board about Ray's unconventional methods.

The fun couldn't last, however. Someone—most likely an intern—wrote an anonymous, tell-all blog post. Chicago's free weekly ran a cover story about car dealerships promoting fake grassroots environmentalist vandalism as a way to market more trucks, and that led to a local news segment in which a trench-coated correspondent stood in front of the Logos office and scratched the Greek letters of the company sign with a key.

There were lawsuits and counter-suits, governmental fines and complaints from a union claiming to represent automobile detailers. The Justice Department was snooping around. To avoid litigation from the truck buyers stupid enough to key their own goddamn vehicles, the manufacturer confessed to the shenanigans and offered to pay for all the paint touch-ups.

The Logos Print Team designed full-page mea culpa advertisements for the region's largest remaining newspapers. The
final leg of the campaign featured fat actors portraying stereotypical pinstriped, cigar-chomping auto executives from Detroit getting busted for vandalizing their own trucks. Their buffoonish antics were detailed in an array of short advertorial webisodes, gamified apps, and social-network widgets. Protestors on both sides of the debate loved the images of fat, rich people getting marched off to jail.

One of the interns, a young woman named Flora, repurposed some Oil Hogg print ads for a series of street-art stencils and used them to deface half of the abandoned buildings in downtown Chicago. Her vandalism wasn't officially approved by Logos, but it wasn't condemned either. She garnered a great deal of attention around the office and did brilliant work despite her moral objections. In a company-wide email, she had called Ray's new step in the Oil Hogg initiative “morally reprehensible” and “pure concentrated evil, but ingenious.” Ray saved the email.

By making fun of themselves, the SUV manufacturers turned the scandal into victory and the advertising awards poured in. Local sales records were shattered as consumers rallied around the brand. It was rumored that a Chinese conglomerate wanted to import the SUVs and was petitioning the US government for some revisions to an international trade agreement. In the fiscal quarter that followed, the SUV out-performed hybrids three to one in the greater Chicago market. Dealers presold the trucks months in advance of their production and they continued to get vandalized as fast as they
could escape the Michigan assembly lines. More shifts were added at the factories and the creation of so many new jobs led to significant press coverage about the pending renewal of Detroit—and it was all thanks to him.

R
AY WAS IN HIS
office when the factory down near his hometown exploded. His mother called him. “The plant's gone,” she said and hung up. He remained at his computer and refreshed a browser window to follow what little news and gossip the downstate TV affiliates and social media users could piece together. The number of reported fatalities climbed all morning. Even before the call from Becky he knew that his father was dead.

The town became a chemical hot zone. Forty-six neighbors and friends were gone as well. Ray stayed in Chicago and managed his mother's medical care from afar, safe from the toxic smog that would soon express itself in every variety of physiological anomaly. He refused to expose himself to the poisonous cloud that mushroomed over his hometown. A boil-water advisory remained in effect for eight weeks, in a twenty-five-mile radius, while the death toll crept higher. Thousands of acres of crops had to be destroyed. Corn too toxic to be fed even to animals was sold for ethanol, where in the bellies of sedans and SUVs it gained an even greater toxicity; it was exhaust-piped into the atmosphere and dispersed across the entire Midwest.