Evil(TM)

At this very moment I am looking at an empty bottle of a beer known as Ruination IPA. Its label is a winged demon kneeling on some sort of pedestal. The back of the bottle boasts in flame-seared language of the destruction that will befall my taste buds and annihilate my ability to enjoy a lesser brew. This beer implies that it is evil. Ruination IPA is by no means alone in associating itself with mischief and malevolence. The Spirit Shoppe once sold a brand of wine calling itself “666”. There is also a “Devil’s Pale Ale 666”, and a “Lucifer” pinot noir. Evil, it seems, is in style in the alcohol business.

The use of characters and symbols associated with evil as marketing tools is by no means limited to alcohol. Witness the number of pastries and other indulgent foods that brand themselves as “Devil’s Delight” and other such things. There is a “Little Devil” brand of clothing marketed towards the BMX scene. In department stores there is a perfume, whose name I do not recall, that comes in a curvy red bottle with little glass horns. The imagery of sin often used in the sex product industry needs little description.

What are these labels trying to suggest to us? Certainly not that we take up a lifestyle of satanic rituals, or start committing acts of unspeakable evil. Marketing evil is all about two things, temptation and disobedience. The aspect of temptation is the more visible in the glossy world of advertising. For centuries, religious dogma dictated that overindulgence, gluttony, sensuality, and material pleasures were sins that destined you to the fires of hell. One of the best-known Christian prayers implores that God “lead us not to temptation.” While the influence of the Church has waned, and especially in the United States there is a lack of centralized dogma, much of the Puritan ethic remains embedded in society. The moral values once expounded by the Church, and now a more diffuse, socialized memory of these morals, speak against hedonistic acts of consumption. The more brazenly a product shows that it is purely for inciting the sensation of pleasure, the more these old values condemn it. What the marketing of sin suggests is that we should abandon ourselves to these pleasures and forget the traditional inhibitions that keep us from consuming. Of course, the marketers never sell true evil. Most people have moral codes and believe at least in some sense of upholding the good. Where’s the money in opposing this? Selling temptation is selling little transgressions, minor acts of sensual pleasure. We are asked to cheat against the remnants of the old moral code, not to destroy it.

Then there is the type of “evil”-marketing I have called ‘disobedience’, although this is not a great term. This is the marketing that gets in your face with the old symbols of evil, devils and demons and hellfire. Hardcore religionists would point and say that we consuming these goods are unwittingly in the thrall of Satan. But this marketing is not suggestive of who we serve, it is who we become. Consuming a product marketing with evil is a statement about ourselves. It says that we reject the reverence of a fixed morality, that we make our own choices and heed no dogma. It says that we are deliberately transgressive; we hint that we are dangerous. The brand of evil is consumed with irony. We know we don’t aim to be evil, but we smile knowingly at what we believe we subvert, the order that we offend. But perhaps the ultimate irony is that we do heed a dogma, that we may have replaced the voice of a God with the voice of society telling us to consume.

What is the Lucifer of the consumerist creed? Perhaps one day the great sacrilege will be burning piles of money. Perhaps that day is here already.

Consumerism and Industry in the Global Order

One of the classic refrains of the contemporary anti-war movement is the slogan “No Blood For Oil”. Critics allege that American interventionism in the Middle East is motivated by a desire to secure the petroleum resources of the region. They point to corporate greed, the incredible power and wealth of the oil industry and see this influence being used to dictate world affairs for profit. While much of this criticism hits the mark, especially with the widely reported instances of war profiteering and this summer’s drilling debate, the critique overlooks the fact that it is the American consumer that ultimately empowers this structure. We of course not only purchase gasoline, but our entire lifestyles are dependent upon the purchase of goods that are made available to us only through mass production and mass transportation. Recycled paper is driven from mill to wholesaler to retailer in a fleet of a thousand diesel-powered trucks. Barbie and Ken are made of extremely complex carbohydrate chains derived via elaborate chemical processes from petroleum.

What I seek to illustrate is not that the American consumer is to blame for our present military misadventure, as there are numerous more causally linked factors to criticize first. The fact is, however, that the consumerism of the West has a huge role in determining the fates of the rest of the world. Naomi Klein writes of the labor dumps of the free-trade zones around the world catering to brand-name companies looking to cut out costs from their manufacturing process. The use of cheap foreign labor in dubious conditions is familiar to all of us. However, not so many people in the world are employed in manufacturing. A Vietnamese woman with a sweatshop job may feel very glad that she is not a plantation worker in the Congo or a miner in Bolivia. The oppressing economics of consumerism extend far beyond the manufacture of the goods themselves to the extraction of resources and other forms of capitalist exploitation. Even while we lambast Disney for having Chinese women toil away on Mickey Mouse pyjamas, we hurl a different criticism at industrialists who pay workers cents a day to harvest rubber or dig for manganese. It is corporate fat cats we say, who subject the world’s poor to such misery. I most certainly do not buy bulk quantities of rubber or semi-obscure metals. But I do put tires on my car, I do buy sensitive electronics full of conductors and semiconductors and so on. All industry, all infrastructure is ultimately destined for the use of human beings. Perhaps not all of this constitutes consumerism, but consumerism could not occur without it.

Libraries have been written about how the drive for resources causes wars, how fragile export economies based on monocultures and other single commodities leads to cyclical poverty. The phrase “banana republic”, before it meant a line of young adult clothing, stood for the domination of the West, of corporate power over the Third World, with the likes of United Fruit having whole governments in their pocket. However, next time, before we blame a corporation for anything, especially for utilizing power and wealth, we must ask where this wealth derives from. It is not from corrupt politics or a reckless disregard for the welfare of laborers, although these certainly help the profit margin. What empowers the corporate world is us. Their revenue is the banana in your lunch bag. If we seek to end the heinous practices that lead our governments to conduct foreign relations we consider unacceptable, we have to first address our own consumption and realize that we are dependent upon that which we deplore. To end our own complicity we must reevaluate how much we truly need to consume. We should not simply ask ourselves what we truly ‘need’, or follow some utilitarian program of global good and expect this to be feasible, but we should ask the more pertinent question of how we can live and find value in our lifestyles while compromising excess and luxury in favor of a sustainable justice.

Transcendence or Consumerism?:The Social Meaning of Drug Use

Ladies and gentlemen, the great question of our times: is doing mind-altering drugs a consumerist act?

Many people within and without drug-consuming subcultures identify the experiences of taking various drugs with mystical or religious significances. Critics deride these claims, saying that these experiences are merely chemical-incited delusions or that the iconography and rhetoric of the drug-using counterculture are merely other expressions of acceptance-seeking, self-branding conformity. Interestingly, we have the term “drug users” but not the term “drug consumers”. Perhaps this is reflective of a true difference between drugging oneself and other forms of consumption, or perhaps it is a linguistic dinosaur waiting for society to replace it.

Let’s look first at some of the popular legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco. There is little doubt that using these is an act of consumption. Cigarettes were once most obvious example of the increasing ubiquity of advertising and marketing, while alcoholic beverages are today one of the most brand-dependent industries. The consumption of fine wines and champagne and expensive spirits is one of the best-known delineators of refinement and social standing, while the consumption of cheap liquors and mass-produced beers is quite the opposite.

Perhaps it from the stigma of criminality that an illegal drug is “used”, or worse “abused”, but not “consumed”. Consumption is at the heart of our society, and we cannot allow actions we condemn to be legitimated by lexical proximity to our heart!

Illegal drugs are inherently different from legal drugs in that they cannot be branded. While a merchant of such drugs may seek to raise the reputation of his product, excessive indentifying features and widespread renown would be severe liabilities. As one bag of marijuana, cocaine, or whatever is generally indistinguishable from like bags of similar product, there is no social cachet in the display of its pedigree other than endless and dubious claims about the pharmaceutical efficacy, or “quality” of the product. We could speculate against Baudrillard and say that drugs are special because they have use-value and exchange-value but no sign-value!

Of course, once one begins to discuss the particularities of various drugs, it becomes clear that a sign-value does exist, not in the way that a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt displays the appearance of wealth with a little logo, but in the way that playing polo itself demonstrates economic and cultural capital. Wall Street bankers don’t smoke crack, but are stereotyped as the likely users of pure cocaine. There is a classist hierarchy of drugs, with some such as cocaine associated with wealth and extravagance, while others such as crack and crystal meth are representative of poverty and ignorance. The poor fall into a greater cycle of addiction, poverty, prison, and death while the rich may consume incredible quantities of drugs and boast of it due to there expense. Eventually, the rich may go to rehab and begin to consume the “drug-free life” of health foods and spiritual centers.

It is now clear that using drugs can be a consumerist act. But can they ever not be? Maybe. We could certainly tell a person just off of an acid trip that the experience they just spent hours narrating was in no way a transcendental experience but merely a consumption of a physiological state of being and its associated culture and lifestyle. But, if we deny the nonconsumerism of such acts, if even biochemistry becomes subject to this social critique, what remains that is not a consumptive act?

Death, Undeath, and the Pursuit of Material Happiness

In the late 1960’s George A. Romero released the first of his series of dead-coming-to-life social criticism films “Night of the Living Dead”. This iconic film jump-started and remains emblematic of the still-existing genre of zombie movies. A few years later Romero released his landmark “Dawn of the Dead” which remains one of the entertaining indictments of consumerism ever caught on film. The premise of the movie is that zombie attacks have suddenly overwhelmed the major cities of the United States. A small group of survivors evacuates via helicopter, and while flying over an unknown suburb sight the edifice that will be their fortress against the living dead: a shopping mall.

Although the mall contains a number of undead, their choice at least initially proves to be astute: they have a limitless amount of supplies to survive on if only if only they can clear the building of existing zombies and then barricade the rest of the witless undead hordes outside. After many gruesome encounters they finally secure a safe existence within their castle of consumerism. They then go about the slow business of surviving and waiting for the world to sort itself out. However, they do much more than survive. They live the good life. Life in the mall offers them not only the food and safety they need to live, but sleek furniture, fine drink, and fashionable clothes. They have lost contact with the outside world, which is presumably falling to pieces around them, but they don’t even care. They take the self-absorbed goods-based lifestyle to its extreme: caring about luxuries and status symbols while there is nobody to demonstrate their status to and while the fate of the human race lies in a most precarious state.

For one character, though, these comforts ring hollow. With the bulk of human existence stripped to its most basic states, life and death (and the horrifying prospect of undeath, without a functioning society, the language of symbols and possession become next to meaningless. Yet to others, these goods offer them solace in a world that otherwise doesn’t make sense any more. Ultimately however, their obsession with the material becomes their undoing. At the end of the film, a human biker gang invades the mall in search of supplies, allowing zombies to penetrate into the protagonists’ consumer paradise. The bikers begin a bout of wanton looting. Had the protagonists allowed this to continue, it would most likely have been a simple matter to rid the mall of remaining zombies and resecure their perimeter. But this isn’t good enough, as they rush to defend their things, not from the zombies but from the people taking away their commodities. Chaos ensues, people die, and the mall is lost to the shuffling hordes.

The movie is pretty clear in showing how consumerist attitudes affect the lives of the people living within the mall, but what does it say about how consumerism affects or lives? I would agree with Romero that it makes us selfish, indifferent to the greater world around us, and exclusivist. The ultimate zombie movie cliché is that “the zombies represent society, man!”. This film is no exception. Except, when I see these zombies I see not a generalized mindless social organism, but the downtrodden, the poor and the hungry (hungry for brains?). Consumerism ultimately makes us think what matters is what we have, and drives us to protect our wealth as if we were protecting our selves, at the expense of all those others who see into world of prosperity and just want to have a little of it for themselves.

Martha Stewart, Snoop Dogg, and the Bourgeois Kitchen

Recently, Martha Stewart had a very special guest on her cooking show. That guest was none other than gangster hip-hop legend Snoop Dogg. The footage can be seen here:

Part 1
Part 2

Aside from its seeming absurdity and entertainment value, these clips actually touch on a lot of aspects of modern consumer society. First off all, before Snoop Dogg actually appears onstage, there is Martha Stewart herself. While I am by no means a frequent viewer of her shows, you can see even in just this episode a very clear and conscious message designed to encourage a particular style of consumption. For starters, the kitchen is massive and while all the instruments and ingredients necessary for any particular segment are conveniently provided by her assistants, the expansive wall of cupboards and shelves suggests the broad array of further cooking utensils and foodstuffs that the modern woman is told she needs to have on hand if she is to be a socially adequate cook. That it is important for a woman to be a good cook is the even more basic message illustrated by the prevalence of housekeeping shows similar to hers. There are no shows on any of the networks providing useful tips for avoiding housework (although many now have entire shows dedicated to making things quicker and more convenient for working mothers and so forth). That Martha is seen as an incredibly successful and carreer-oriented businessperson makes her status as the pinnacle of domesticity all the more powerful to many viewers. The true sign of success in the Martha Stewart universe, however, is the dozens of warmly colored wooden drawers , the island stove, the upscale seasonings, and all those other markers of bourgeois home décor and culinary sophistication.

Into this wonderfully bourgeois setting steps Snoop Dogg, the ultimate hybrid of the impoverished working-class and the flashy nouveau-riche. Perhaps it is significant that his rise to incredible wealth was as a creative artist, that ever hard to place group in the social hierarchy. In any case, the contrast between Snoop and Martha could not be more glaring. Class and race consciousness hit full throttle right off the bat as Martha struggles embarrassingly with Snoop’s dialect, confusing common street language with Snoop’s own tongue-in-cheek additions to the language and subjecting both to ridicule. What follows becomes a painful belittlement of the speech of the urban poor. What could be more inadvertently condescending than asking in seriousness whether or not one of the most successful people in the country whether or not he can spell?

Snoop Dogg, far from being visibly offended, takes matters in stride. It is likely he on a large amount of drugs on set, but his subsequent behavior shows the true gulf between their worlds. Snoop makes this contrast as obvious as possible, at times deliberate by jokingly explaining “street” terms and his own vocabulary to the presumably uninformed audience, to playing ironically with Martha’s own expectations of him (“That’s a potato…”), to rejecting the ‘fancy’ foods he is unfamiliar with (“White pepper?!? I want black pepper”). He skips such bourgeois treats as gourmet pepper, but has no trouble whatsoever blatantly shilling for a brand of high-end cognac, a symbol of what an incredibly rich man such as himself is supposed to savor.

The chuckles from the audience come to an awkward halt when Snoop teaches them a phrase “Ball Till You Fall”, outlining his own outlook on wealth: “Make as much money as you can before you die.” The crowd is stunned. Surely, there must be some greater goal in life, the upper-middle class housewives in attendance wonder? What vulgar ostentation is this? And he can’t even cook mashed potatoes! When he pours cognac into his bowl of potatoes, it probably became a gastronomic catastrophe. Truly, this footage reveals Snoop Dogg is an atrocious cook. But perhaps the biggest difference between himself and viewers on the Martha Stewart is that he doesn’t care.