commercialization of culture

The day after Thanksgiving is purportedly the busiest shopping day of the year, so naturally Adbusters, the culture-jamming magazine based in Vancouver, B.C., has proclaimed today “Buy Nothing Day.”  It’s an inspired idea to raise people’s consciousness about the excesses of consumerism, which increasingly has a more apocalyptic implication, global warming.  The colossal cycle of production and consumption, much of it gratuitous and contrived, is literally starting to jeopardize the future of life on earth.  

It’s always revealing to see how the mainstream media react to Buy Nothing Day.  Newspapers always seem to fill up their newshole on this slow-news weekend with amusing, offbeat subjects like protesting tree-sitters in Berkeley, celebrity "news" and…the idea of buying nothing for a day.  How zany is that?! 

The current supply of donated hearts, kidneys and livers for transplants is far too little to meet demand.  So economists have a simple solution:  create a market.  Let people sell their organs and let donors buy them.  It’s a case of balancing supply and demand.  Today’s Wall Street Journal gives fresh attention to the perennial idea of establishing an organ market as a way to decrease the growing waiting list for kidneys.  Organ sales have been banned in the U.S. since 1984 under a bill introduced by then-Rep. Al Gore.

WSJ reporter Laura Meckler describes the crusade by transplant surgeon Arthur Matas of the University of Minnesota, to create a trial market as a way to supply kidneys to the 70,000 people now waiting for transplants.  Meckler also describes the objections of Francis Delmonico, another prominent kidney surgeon who until recently was the president of the United Network for Organ Sharing, which runs the nation’s organ-distribution system.  “The sale of bodies or body parts would undermine the fundamental values of our society,” Dr. Delmonico has testified to Congress.

The history of transportation in the U.S. has been less about meeting needs than about creating them. From the “internal improvements” of the early republic, to the railroads, urban trolleys, and interstate highways that came later, development has been the object, more than serving the needs of people already in a place.  Urban trolley systems were built out to farmland. The railroads recruited settlers from Germany and Scandinavia for the lands they opened up.  (They described the Dakotas as a New Eden.)  

The Golden Gate Bridge, which connects San Francisco to the Marin Headlands to the North, is a chapter in this same story.  For all its iconic glory, the bridge actually was part of a development push to the North. The authority that governs it includes members from counties all the way to the Oregon border.   One suspects that the main concern of those members is not the aesthetics of bridge design or the self-presentation of San Francisco.

The history of transportation in the U.S. has been less about meeting needs than about creating them. From the “internal improvements” of the early republic, to the railroads, urban trolleys, and interstate highways that came later, development has been the object, more than serving the needs of people already in a place.  Urban trolley systems were built out to farmland. The railroads recruited settlers from Germany and Scandinavia for the lands they opened up.  (They described the Dakotas as a New Eden.)  

The Golden Gate Bridge, which connects San Francisco to the Marin Headlands to the North, is a chapter in this same story.  For all its iconic glory, the bridge actually was part of a development push to the North. The authority that governs it includes members from counties all the way to the Oregon border.   One suspects that the main concern of those members is not the aesthetics of bridge design or the self-presentation of San Francisco.

It is not common to associate commercial credit with such things as community and trust, but that is a symptom of how credit cards have sucked this function into the abstracted realm of corporate finance. The criticism of these cards usually goes another route – namely to the way they have lowered the resistance to buying and led to the massive build-up of shopper debt.  

This is beyond question. When you have to take actual money out of your pocket you think twice about a purchase.  Credit cards are like plastic alcohol.  They loosen you up, make things seem almost free, especially (and perversely) when you are strapped for cash.  But credit cards carry another malignancy that is noted less often.   This is the way they sever an invisible thread that once helped hold communities together, and degrade mutual obligation in the financial realm.

It is not common to associate commercial credit with such things as community and trust, but that is a symptom of how credit cards have sucked this function into the abstracted realm of corporate finance. The criticism of these cards usually goes another route – namely to the way they have lowered the resistance to buying and led to the massive build-up of shopper debt.  

This is beyond question. When you have to take actual money out of your pocket you think twice about a purchase.  Credit cards are like plastic alcohol.  They loosen you up, make things seem almost free, especially (and perversely) when you are strapped for cash.  But credit cards carry another malignancy that is noted less often.   This is the way they sever an invisible thread that once helped hold communities together, and degrade mutual obligation in the financial realm.

It is a weird alchemy of a commodity culture that it turns the normal and sensible into the eccentric and suspect.  Natural food becomes a cultish attachment rather than a redundancy.  Walking instead of driving becomes a sign of questionable political inclination.  A desire to conserve rather than waste becomes “political correctness.”  Then there’s clotheslines, which have emerged as sources of contention in suburbs throughout the nation.  

Clotheslines are the best way to dry clothes, absolutely and without question.  Clothes last longer and smell better; and the sun is clean and free. The consequences for the use of fossil fuels are larger than you might think. Some 5% to 10% of the residential energy use in the U.S. goes to washing and drying clothes, and most of that is in the drying.   Wash with cold water and you save 85% on that side.  Hang the clothes on the line and you cut 100% of the electricity or gas use on the other.  

It is a weird alchemy of a commodity culture that it turns the normal and sensible into the eccentric and suspect.  Natural food becomes a cultish attachment rather than a redundancy.  Walking instead of driving becomes a sign of questionable political inclination.  A desire to conserve rather than waste becomes “political correctness.”  Then there’s clotheslines, which have emerged as sources of contention in suburbs throughout the nation.  

Clotheslines are the best way to dry clothes, absolutely and without question.  Clothes last longer and smell better; and the sun is clean and free. The consequences for the use of fossil fuels are larger than you might think. Some 5% to 10% of the residential energy use in the U.S. goes to washing and drying clothes, and most of that is in the drying.   Wash with cold water and you save 85% on that side.  Hang the clothes on the line and you cut 100% of the electricity or gas use on the other.  

There was a time, a few days ago in human history, really, when people spent a lot of time looking at the sky at night.   To read Greek mythology, and Shakespeare’s plays, one might guess that people were as familiar with the constellations, as they are with corporate brands today. Or close at least.   Of course, it was possible back then to see the sky at night.  As David Owen pointed out in a recent New Yorker piece (August 20th), in Galileo’s day – about 400 years ago –people thought the Milky Way was a continuous ooze, so densely packed were the heavens to the naked eye.

Today we can see only a fraction of what was easily visible back then.  We are enclosed in a visual cocoon, and the cause is not just the smog and fumes that fill the sky.  Even more it is the light.  “Today a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night,” Owen writes, would see “less than one percent of what Galileo would have been able to see.” We emit so much illumination – if that’s the word – down here below, that we have lost the capacity to see above.

I was born and raised in La Castellana, a coffee producing town in the province of Negros Occidental, in the Philippines. Our town is well known for its special blend. In fact, a string of coffee shops in Bacolod City, the provincial capital, serves coffee grown here.

Nearly half of the residents are coffee drinkers, and there are 42 kapehan (coffee shops) in the town proper. About a third of these are located in the public market and each can accommodate 20 to 50 people at a time. The rest are in the residential areas where each block (about 3 acres) has one or two coffee stalls. Roughly, there is one kapehan for every 100 households.