Politics & Power Quote by Louis Kronenberger

America, Kronenberger jabs, hasn’t merely gotten less lyrical; it’s gotten expertly persuasive. The problem isn’t disenchantment so much as commodification. Prose would be a downgrade, sure, but it’s still a human mode of telling the truth plainly. Advertising copy is something else: language engineered to bypass reflection and trigger desire. He’s not mourning the loss of beauty; he’s diagnosing a hostile takeover of the imagination.

The line works because it stages a bait-and-switch. You expect the familiar lament - modern life has lost its poetry - and he corrects it with a sharper, nastier substitute. Advertising isn’t accidental dullness; it’s strategic speech, a style with an agenda. By casting “the poetry of life” as something rewritten by copywriters, he suggests that even our inner narratives (romance, ambition, success, selfhood) are being formatted into slogans and pitches. The subtext is that Americans don’t just buy products; we buy scripts for how to feel and who to be.

Context matters: Kronenberger came of age alongside mass media’s ascent - radio, glossy magazines, Madison Avenue’s mid-century confidence - when consumer culture stopped being a backdrop and became the national vernacular. As a critic, he’s defending not elitist “high art” but the right to language that isn’t trying to sell you something. The sting is his implication that persuasion has become our default register, and that a country can lose its soul not by going quiet, but by never stopping its pitch.