ABSTRACT
Th e above quote is from a speech given by U.S. President George W. Bush to a group of airline employees at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport just two weeks aft er the U.S. airline industry virtually had come to a standstill post-9/11. It was meant to serve two major purposes: it was intended to reassure an American public-frightened by repetitive visual traumatization through a voracious and voyeuristic media-that fl ying was again safe, and it was meant to tell the world that the United States would not let a terrorist attack aff ect “our way of life.” But it also served third and fourth purposes: the statement demonstrated that the U. S. way of life insisted upon a capitalist model of spending beyond one’s means, and it showed that perception and the surrounding aura of advertising-in this case advertising as exho rtation to spend, spend, spend!—could be convincing and, indeed, could itself produce self-certain conviction.
