Consumed: A Book Review

It took me more than a year to finish this book--sometimes, that should tell you something about me, but in this case, that should tell you something about this book.  While Barber's overall thesis is compelling and important, his presentation of it seemed calculated to alienate any possible allies.  Pompous and blustering, he writes most of the book's 339 small-font pages in a breathless, melodramatic tone of fervent moral passion and outrage (I suppose the subtitle should've warned me adequately: "How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole").  Now, this would understandable as an occasional device.  The subject is one that calls for moral passion and outrage, and I, for one, am sympathetic to the desire to indulge in rhetorically-charged passages chock-full of unusual polysyllabic words.  But intense rhetoric is only effective as an occasional device, as a departure from the benchmark of more restrained rhetoric.  Unfortunately, for Barber, the bombastic was the benchmark, from which he almost never departed.  And as you can imagine, that begins to grate on one. 

As part of his tirade against consumer culture, he seeks to include pretty much every example and phenomenon he can think of, regardless of whether it's relevant or compelling.  Instead of a focused account of some of the most alarming trends and damning evidence, Barber is determined to offer a comprehensive account of everything that is wrong with the world today under his heading of "infantilization."  Couple that with the fact that he seems to have been too pompous to have accepted any advice from his editor, and one has to endure many pages of irrelevant or laughably overblown laundry lists of complaints.

And yet, I did the book the honor of reading till the end, because I believe his overall thesis is compelling and very important.

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Some Numbers to Ponder

Over the past weekend, $52,400,000,000 was spent by 223 million shoppers in the orgy of consumerism that now stains the four days of the calendar bookended by Thanksgiving and Advent Sunday.

For just 40% that amount, a supply of clean, safe water could be provided for the nearly one billion humans who currently live without it.  

I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin' . . .  (I will spare you the sort of rant I made last year at this time). 

Documentary Round-Up Pt. 2: Down with Wal-Mart and McDonalds!

Whereas the documentary in the first post, Inside Job, took on the behemoths of the American banking industry, and did it very effectively, these next two documentaries likewise sought to expose the dark underbelly of American corporate giants--two of the most iconic: Wal-Mart and McDonalds--but were less effective in their execution.

The High Cost of Low Price

Message: 4.5/5

Content/Compellingness of Argument: 2.5/5

Cinematography: 1/5

This film is an attack on Wal-Mart's business practices, pointing out, essentially, that the wonderful benefits to American society of being able to buy $10 cardigans and $5 earbuds do not come without a price.  Obvious, perhaps, yet it is stunning how many ardent defenders Wal-Mart still has.  The movie covers the obvious bases--running small businesses into the ground and destroying downtowns, appalling Third World labor conditions, barely liveable pay for First World Wal-Mart employees--along with some less obvious ones--poor security at Wal-Mart parking lots leading to high crime rates, very poor environmental standards, for instance.  All of this is very much a story that needs to be told.

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Happy Thanksshopping

Although I have oft deplored Black Friday, this trademark of a culture gone mad, this most sacred of all holidays to our national god of Mammon, I had not until today stopped to reflect on the sad irony of its position in our national calendar.  Its defilement of the liturgical calendar, with expectant, ascetic, penitent waiting for the Advent of our Lord being overrun with the frantic feeding frenzy of the Christmas shopping season, is something that has increasingly troubled me in recent years.  But sharper still is the contrast with the day that now marks the start of this shopping orgy: Thanksgiving.  

The origins of our Thanksgiving, and of its analogues in many other cultures, lies in a grateful celebration of the gifts of sustenance that God has supplied us from the bounty of creation.  Thanksgiving is the day when our ancestors rejoiced that their basic needs had been supplied, and expressed their contentment and gratitude for their freedom from want.  Today, no sooner do we pause to engage in this now-artificial ritual than we hurl ourselves with wild abandon into the whirl of covetousness and discontent, leaving behind the repose of satisfied needs to stoke the fires of artificial wants and needs.  Of course, the theologically-minded defenders of our modern consumer capitalism will insist that there is a connection--that the extravaganza of shopping can serve as an expression of gratitude for the gifts we have received, that enable us to purchase so freely, and indeed, to purchase gifts for others.  But this is to overlook the deep difference between the gratitude that accompanies the satisfaction of genuine human wants and needs, and the still-restless temporary satiation that accompanies the indulgence of artificial needs that a bottomless consumerism constantly creates.  The former is not impossible, even for the modern American shopper; but it is increasingly uncommon.

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