The Corrections

they’re the same as yours.”
    “This is not about opinions,” Chip said. “This is about learning to apply critical methods to textual artifacts. Which is what I’m here to teach you.”
    “I don’t think it is, though,” Melissa said. “I think you’re here to teach us to hate the same things you hate. I mean, you hate these ads, right? I can hear it in every word you say. You totally hate them.”
    The other students were listening raptly now. Melissa’s connection with Chad might have depressed Chad’s stock more than it had raised her own, but she was attacking Chip like an angry equal, not a student, and the class ate it up.
    “I do hate these ads,” Chip admitted. “But that’s not—”
    “Yes it is,” Melissa said.
    “Why do you hate them?” Chad called out.
    “Tell us why you hate them,” the little Hilton yipped.
    Chip looked at the wall clock. There were six minutes left of the semester. He pushed a hand through his hair and cast his eyes around the room as if he might find an ally somewhere, but the students had him on the run now, and they knew it.
    “The W——Corporation,” he said, “is currently defending three separate lawsuits for antitrust violations. Its revenues last year exceeded the gross domestic product of Italy. And now, to wring dollars out of the one demographic that it doesn’t yet dominate, it’s running a campaign that exploits a woman’s fear of breast cancer and her sympathy with its victims. Yes, Melissa?”
    “It’s not cynical.”
    “What is it, if not cynical?”
    “It’s celebrating women in the workplace,” Melissa said. “It’s raising money for cancer research. It’s encouraging us to do our self-examinations and get the help we need. It’s helping women feel like we own this technology, like it’s not just a guy thing.”
    “OK, good,” Chip said. “But the question is not whether we care about breast cancer, it’s what breast cancer has to do with selling office equipment.”
    Chad took up the cudgels for Melissa. “That’s the whole point of the ad, though. That if you have access to information, it can save your life.”
    “So if Pizza Hut puts a little sign about testicular self-exams by the hot-pepper flakes, it can advertise itself as part of the glorious and courageous fight against cancer?”
    “Why not?” Chad said.
    “Does anybody see anything wrong with that?”
    Not one student did. Melissa was slouching with her armscrossed and unhappy amusement on her face. Unfairly or not, Chip felt as if she’d destroyed in five minutes a semester’s worth of careful teaching.
    “Well, consider,” he said, “that ‘You Go, Girl’ would not have been produced if W——had not had a product to sell. And consider that the goal of the people who work at W——is to exercise their stock options and retire at thirty-two, and that the goal of the people who own W——stock” (Chip’s brother and sister-in-law, Gary and Caroline, owned a great deal of W——stock) “is to build bigger houses and buy bigger SUVs and consume even more of the world’s finite resources.”
    “What’s wrong with making a living?” Melissa said. “Why is it inherently evil to make money?”
    “Baudrillard might argue,” Chip said, “that the evil of a campaign like ‘You Go, Girl’ consists in the detachment of the signifier from the signified. That a woman weeping no longer just signifies sadness. It now also signifies: ‘Desire office equipment.’ It signifies: ‘Our bosses care about us deeply.’”
    The wall clock showed two-thirty. Chip paused and waited for the bell to ring and the semester to end.
    “Excuse me,” Melissa said, “but that is just such bullshit.”
    “What is bullshit?” Chip said.
    “This whole class,” she said. “It’s just bullshit every week. It’s one critic after another wringing their hands about the state of criticism. Nobody can ever quite say what’s wrong exactly. But they all know it’s evil. They all know ‘corporate’ is a dirty word. And if somebody’s having fun or getting rich—disgusting! Evil! And it’s always the death of this and the death of that. And people who think they’re free aren’t ‘really’ free. And people who think they’re happy aren’t ‘really’ happy. And it’s impossible to radically critique society anymore, although what’s so radically wrong with society that we need such a radical critique, nobody can sayexactly. It is so typical and