Politics & Power Quote by Zelda Fitzgerald

American advertising, in Zelda Fitzgerald's hands, isn’t just background noise; it’s the air her generation breathed. The line snaps with a bright, corrosive irony: “infinite promise” sounds like civic scripture, then she undercuts it with two wonderfully absurd examples. Learn piano by mail. Fix your face with mud. These aren’t random jokes; they’re period-specific miracles of early mass marketing, when the catalog and the ad column offered not merely products but transformed selves. Fitzgerald mimics the cadence of belief to show how belief gets manufactured.

The intent is double-edged. She’s not only mocking gullibility; she’s tracing how desire itself was trained. “We grew up founding our dreams” frames advertising as a kind of informal education, a parallel school system that taught ambition in slogans and before-and-after testimonials. It’s a generational confession: the dream wasn’t born pure and then corrupted by commerce; it was built out of commerce, brick by glossy brick.

The subtext is especially sharp coming from Fitzgerald, a writer who lived inside the Jazz Age’s public spectacle and paid for it privately. As the wife and collaborator-shadow of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she understood the transactional performance of glamour: sell a story, sell a persona, sell a marriage-as-myth. The last clause, “I still believe,” lands like a wink and a bruise. Even after disillusionment, the seduction lingers. Advertising doesn’t just promise you can change; it promises you can become someone else without the inconvenience of time, effort, or reality. That fantasy, she suggests, is the real American inheritance.