The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

Corporations, too, began to campaign for themselves as politicians always had. Apple rolled out its IIc model in 1984 with a series of two-page magazine ads that were longer than the articles they interrupted. “The newest member of the Apple II family,” one began, “has its own reasons for being.” But such ads were now explicitly political, too. Increasingly they presented the company under discussion as being in the Making-the-World-a-Better-Place Business. “Barbie: The Doll Dreams Are Made of,” ran one 1986 ad showing the doll in an astronaut suit. It would be sexist not to buy it. Companies were even ready to do some of the regulatory work that had heretofore been thought government’s business. “Starting April 23,” announced one 1988 ad, “only Northwest Airlines will prohibit smoking on all flights starting in North America.” The ad ended with what, to the culture of ten years before, would have been a bizarre spectacle: a planeful of rich-looking businessmen with their power shirts and owl eyeglasses, applauding and guffawing as if they were people whom Americans might envy and emulate.