Anticonsumerism that doesn’t smell like patchouli
A man named Fratto is telling you to buy a bunch of crap you wouldn’t have otherwise (i.e. don’t need).
There. That’s my anticonsumerist news for the day. Read it and get pissed.
Oh, yeah. Fratto is the deputy press secretary and he’s speaking on behalf of the US government.
Move to Canada. We can all stay at Josephine’s house. She’ll be cool with it.
Meet the eco-chocolate.
Not only is it yummy and have neat tips on the wrapper, but it can assuage your environmental guilt. Why? This choco-tastic candystuff - brought to you by TerraPass, Whole Foods Market and Bloomsberry and Co. - comes with a verified TerraPass carbon offset for the average human’s daily carbon footprint.
The carbon footprint measures how much greenhouse gas a person or industry produces, for those of you who haven’t left the house since 2004.
Carbon offsets are when companies, or in this case chocolate lovers, by the right to pollute. Basically, other companies either cut their carbon footprint or pledge to cut their carbon footprint and they get a credit for that. Then, they sell off the right to pollute to another company, but that company has to pledge to cut down in a couple years.
So Bob’s Ferrous Metallurgy finds some way to reduce the amount of CO2 it puts off by 100,000 pounds. Fred’s Family Meatpacking buys from Bob the right to put off 100,000 pounds of CO2 while Fred is working on ways he could put off less CO2. In the long run, the net CO2 is reduced, Bob and Fred didn’t go broke looking for eco-friendliness and the Chicago Climate Exchange is in the picture somehow.
(The aforementioned neat tips)
I want to know what you, my loyal reader, thinks of carbon offsets. I’ve heard it’s genius; I’ve heard it’s hooey. I would look into the matter more, but it’s finals week. You’re lucky I’m blogging at all.
If what they say happens is actually what happens, I guess I can see the value of industrial carbon offsets. But, on the individual level, it’s not like the eco-friendly projects are going to stop if you don’t buy the eco-chocolate bar. I mean, chocolate is good and all, but come on.
Every so often, I’ll come up with a great joke but have no place to put it. Now, with lame self-indulgence, I can include my most recent example.
Past examples:
– Making a movie about a team of semi-driving bounty hunters who, in 1997, have 24 hours to get to Florida and capture Gianni Versace’s killer. It’s called “Cunananball Run.”
– “[Insert name of ex-girlfriend] and I didn’t have a lot of shared interest. She doesn’t like camping and I don’t like sleeping with strange men I meet in bars.”
– Korbel: The Beer of Champagnes
And now, my newest and one of the few to actually fall within 100 miles of this blog’s topic:
– Hanes: Clothing for kids, by kids
Thank you.
The ongoing process of me realizing that no one in the US makes a damn thing anymore is constantly stymied by reality.
I’ll find a small company that makes the greatest potato chips I’ve ever had or recall the trip to Iowa my family made when I was a kid to pick up the hand-crafted table they had ordered years before.
And now, for the first time in years, I have a shirt that was made in the US of A. Here it is.
It’s made by Filson and I don’t care for it much.
Allow me to explain. It’s comfortable and is made of some of the softest and most pliable wool I’ve ever felt. It’s high-quality craftsmanship, durable (if dry clean only) and fills me with pride that there is a clothing company from my country that didn’t choose the easy route and contract with overseas sweatshops.
On the other hand, it’s sort of dorky. Massive chest-pockets.
I could rock it if I were fly-fishing, on a horse or tending a crackling fire in a Manitoba cabin, but for bumming around Logan Square in Chicago … eh. I plan to wear it indoors a lot. Whatever. Quasi-hipster Chicagoans are not their target market anyway.
I got the shirt from my very tall, very skinny friend Nathan, who said it never fit him right. As he very politely put it, I’m “broader” so it might fit me better. It did, damn it.
Then I decided to blog about the shirt. I needed a picture of it (see above), so I went to Filson.com and totally stole it without attribution. Take that, intellectual property laws!
On the site, I saw that the shirt was priced at $147.50.
Holy crap.
It sucks that we live in a country where people have to support lousy business practices just to get by. A working mom and dad with a couple of kids need to buy the cheapest shirts possible or the family simply won’t get by. They’re not going to Filson, no offense to the very praise-worthy company.
By nature of being screwed by the system, regular folks in America have to support an economy that screws people overseas.
The rich get richer and we’re footing the bill, one shirt at a time.
His name is Roland. He’s my friend Rob’s son and his third birthday party was today.
Me being the good pseudo-uncle I am, I went to get him a gift. I went to a locally owned toy store, feeling all good and self-righteous. I rock. Then I tried to look for something not made in a country with horrible labor standards.
I found two things - baby blocks made in Germany (too young for Roland) and a train whistle made in the US (too loud for Rob). Then I just opted to get Roland a book.
I think you can see where I’m going. The first book I looked at was made in Thailand. Then China. China again. They keep making these books in China. They’re printing Curious George in China, for pity’s sake!
The two books are found that were printed in the US were a Shel Silverstein thing and Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax.” Shel was “Made in America,” but the good doctor was just “Printed in the USA.” I don’t know where the binding or parts came from. But I got Roland “Where the Sidewalk Ends” last year, so I went with Dr. Seuss.
Even the books are made in China, man.
Since starting this site and thinking more about these issues, I have noticed a change in my personal life.
I’ve been called bougie, a hypocrite, pretentious, pompous and all sorts of other crap.
And it really pisses me off. Here’s why:
Would you call someone on a diet a hypocrite if the person doesn’t have full-blown anorexia nervosa?
Yes, I buy things. Yes, I buy more than I need. I’m just trying to cut down on my purchases by reminding myself of all the horrible things it entails. The sweatshop clothing, the sky-high landfills, the nation’s ballooning credit debt.
I’m on a damn product diet here and I’m sick of being told it’s futile. What? Do I think I’m going to bring down the halls of capitalism by the fact my last major purchase was a download of Premiere Elements I needed for class? Hell, no. I don’t even want to bring down the halls of capitalism. I like capitalism. I just don’t think we need so much crap.
But that makes my beliefs futile, doesn’t it, David Gross of Slate.com?
“The cultural anti-retail moment will likely pass. Thoreau lasted only 26 months in his cabin by Walden Pond. The elevation of frugality into a virtue seems likely to last about as long as modern recessions do — about eight months.”
Better tell the Catholic church, all the Buddhists and certain acetic sects of Hinduism - some dude who posted to Slate said that what they have considered a virtue for millennia is just a fad. Hey nuns, don’t you that vows of poverty are so eight months ago.
By the way, Gross, sources? Facts? Figures? Anything to back up that very loud claim?
Oh, but then the commentary on the commentary starts (of course, now I’m commenting on the commentary to the commentary).
Listen to blogger Rob Horning of Popmatters.com:
“The problem is that anticonsumerism becomes an identity pose that is either manifestly hypocritical or deeply reliant on the same individualistic values that support consumerism in the first place —one advertises oneself as an anti-consumer, making that one’s brand on the marketplace of social approval. Not to get all poststructuralist, but when you found your self-concept on not shopping, you are in effect deeply invested in shopping.”
First of all, use the diet analogy. There is nothing, I repeat, nothing hypocritical about trying to improve yourself.
The second point I disagree with in Horning’s comments is about people making not shopping their identity. I agree, it can get pretty annoying, but Horning seems to betray himself later in the post.
He later writes:
“We are already inside consumerism, and it’s virtually impossible to construct an identity outside of it — it’s the only viable language of identity that we learn in the West.”
So, at first he takes self-identified anticonsumerists to task for constructing their identities based on consumerism, then says its virtually impossible not to. I’m sorry, but that’s like yelling at someone for inhabiting space.
Yes, it’s hard to maintain a low-consumption lifestyle - who can count themselves as a success in it? No one reading this on their own computers, that’s for damn sure.
So knock anticonsumerist individuals’ arguments, knock the means they think will achieve their goals, knock me. But until someone can - without relying on Gross’ loud but unsubstantiated claims or Horning’s questionable syllogisms - tell me what’s wrong with the ideal, then I’m just going to try to find my own way toward it.
OK, so it’ll be a tight squeeze trying to justify putting this entry on a blog about consumerism.
As tight a squeeze as Richard Long into a futuristic jumpsuit! BURN!
Oh, wait. You guys have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.
A local Chicago station - one of the few I can pick up on my rabbit-ears antennae - shows old “Twilight Zone” reruns. I was watching one about a futuristic world (”Let’s call it the year 2000,” Serling says) where people change their dowdy old bodies for fresh, new, hot-hot-hot ones. I found out while looking it up for this blog entry that the episode was called “Number 12 looks just like you.”
Of course, there’s a twist and a weird ending, typical “Twilight Zone” stuff. But what really got my attention was the 1964 ideal of male beauty, actor Richard Long.
Here he is in a screen capture from YouTube:
Look at that tummy. Look at those sloping shoulders. That would not fly today in the world of rock-hard man-abs and David Beckham messing things up for us tubby schlubbies out there. (See my video entry below for some true gastrointestinal expansion. Damn you, Combos and beer!)
Now, I’m not calling Richard Long (or myself) fat. I’m just saying that when Richard Long sits around the house, he probably has about 10 to 15 more pounds of body fat than some current male sex symbols.
For comparison, take a gander at the People Sexiest Man Alive 2007 “Guess the Chest” contest. Zac Efron is a freak who should be killed (not just because of the massive scabies blister on society that is “High School Musical.”) Efron looks like a giraffe’s neck.
The National Eating Disorders Association reports that 10 percent of the eating disorder cases reported to mental health professionals come from males. Here’s a page full of research regarding gender and eating disorders.
A lot of time, gender issues exhibit tribal responses, I’ve found. It’s hard for a male to express displeasure with men’s role in society without it being unfavorably compared to how bad women had it for so long. And it’s hard for women to express her displeasure without someone giving her a label she doesn’t want.
But when one out of every 10 people with an eating disorder is a male, I think this issue deserves more serious coverage, more in-depth coverage and a more peering look at how our culture treats our boys.
Oh, and Zac Efron? Eat a goddamn sandwich.
That’s not a clever title. There’s a disposable video camera out there.
I first saw it a few weeks ago at my local CVS. That’s a chain of drug stores for those of you outside Chicago.
According to this CNN.com article, CVS unveiled the disposable, single-use video camera in summer 2005. I guess I’m glad it didn’t take off the way they were planning (seeing your first one sitting in a bin of film in a low-income neighborhood almost three years after it came out is not my definition of a runaway success), but it’s weird that it came out in the first place.
They probably said that about disposable cameras, too.
I’m trying to come up with ways to make fun of the disposable video camera, but I can’t. Everything that I come up with could apply to something we take for granted as disposable. Single-use cameras. Razor blades. Plastic forks. Lighters.
I mean, when you think about it, a disposable lighter is pretty asinine. It’s a tube of flammable liquid you’re expected to toss in the garbage. That’s weird.
I guess that’s the major critique of the disposable video camera - knowing the American market, it made perfect sense that CVS thought it would take off.
A lot of times, people ask me, “Paul, how can I not buy stuff?”
Well, here’s how.
(By the way, I know the video is extending into the right-side blogroll and stuff. I know how to fix it, too. I chose to sacrifice my weird little blog description for higher video quality. My call. Hope I made the right one.)
I once bought a used book at Myopic in Chicago. Don’t ask me what book it was - too nerdy to admit.
Inside the book was a Post-It Note (brand name ownership example #1) with a phone number for a man named Noel who lived in England.
How cool is that? You won’t get that at a Borders.
The point of that anecdote is that used stuff is cool. It’s got history and a little bit of class and it makes you wonder. Who had this before? Where has it been?
Granted, maybe I’m a little more romantic than most, but don’t you ever wonder what a wild journey your toaster over had before you? No? Just me? Well, crap.
I don’t really have the time or energy to go into more convincing reasons, but check out Freecycle or the free section of Craigslist next time you need something. The stuff is already out there and you can get it without increasing your impact on the earth. Without you, that stuff would probably go into a Dumpster (brand name ownership example #2) and you would buy a completely separate table or whatever. And that would go into a Dumpster once you’re done with it.
Hit the used book stores, thrift shops, resale establishments and so on. It’s cheap, helps keep stuff out of garbage bin recepticles (got tired of saying “Dumpster”) and you’ll get cooler, more unique stuff than Ikea offers.
You can still have stuff without going hog-wild into buying stuff.
