An important book?
I've recently been reading Nation of Rebels byJospeh Heath and Andrew Potter, a couple of Canadian academics. It starts with two Seattle vignettes and works its way from there to a thoughtful critique of the ennervating effect of the counter-culture's discontent of post-war consumerism on progressive politics.
The choice of vignettes are interesting and play as touchstones for my (clearly ageing) generation. The first is Kurt Cobain's suicide in his Lake Washington home in 1994 - ostensibly because, in the view of the authors, of his inability to live with being famous - a belief that he was selling out his punk roots by out-selling Michael Jackson. The second were the anti-globalisation riots in Seattle in 1999 where the downtown Niketown was attacked as a symbol of captalist oppression by people wearing Nike trainers. From these beginning the authors construct an argument that counter culture has failed because it is simply a different form of the consumerism that it claims to despise. Thus, there is no fundamental difference between mainstream Macy's and radical REI except that REI's clothes are three times the price. Worse, this reflects a distraction into utopian/ pseudo psychological solutions to problems rather than pragmatic gradualist ones. At its worst this creates an oppositionalism on the progressive wing of politics, which is just as pernicious in its own way as the anti-governmentalism of the radical right.
Well, sort of. It's a thoughtful and reasonably well researched book, and makes some good points, so it's worth reading. But I'm not sure how much it explains the world. It gives some explanation of the failure of the left over the last 30 years - but my own take on this is that there has been a lack of intellectual discipline and an awful lot of self-indulgence influenced by French post-modernist drivel - a point Francis Wheen made far more cogently a few years back.
I'm not sure though that this explains much of the world we are living in, which seems much more about the about an unthinking repetition of the supremacy of unregulated markets in all situations and in the face of evidence, an increasingly naked assertion of might being right and the abuse of religion to get the poor to acquiese to their own oppression.
Their choice of opening vignettes was interesting. I suspect the meanings are far more simple than the authors considered. That Kurt Cobain was clinically depressed, a hopeless heroin addict and his wife was leaving him seem more pressing reasons for suicide than a rather tenuous concept of selling out his punk roots. As for Nike-shod Niketown assailants - it is hardly unknown for looters to attach themselves to a riot, is it?
The choice of vignettes are interesting and play as touchstones for my (clearly ageing) generation. The first is Kurt Cobain's suicide in his Lake Washington home in 1994 - ostensibly because, in the view of the authors, of his inability to live with being famous - a belief that he was selling out his punk roots by out-selling Michael Jackson. The second were the anti-globalisation riots in Seattle in 1999 where the downtown Niketown was attacked as a symbol of captalist oppression by people wearing Nike trainers. From these beginning the authors construct an argument that counter culture has failed because it is simply a different form of the consumerism that it claims to despise. Thus, there is no fundamental difference between mainstream Macy's and radical REI except that REI's clothes are three times the price. Worse, this reflects a distraction into utopian/ pseudo psychological solutions to problems rather than pragmatic gradualist ones. At its worst this creates an oppositionalism on the progressive wing of politics, which is just as pernicious in its own way as the anti-governmentalism of the radical right.
Well, sort of. It's a thoughtful and reasonably well researched book, and makes some good points, so it's worth reading. But I'm not sure how much it explains the world. It gives some explanation of the failure of the left over the last 30 years - but my own take on this is that there has been a lack of intellectual discipline and an awful lot of self-indulgence influenced by French post-modernist drivel - a point Francis Wheen made far more cogently a few years back.
I'm not sure though that this explains much of the world we are living in, which seems much more about the about an unthinking repetition of the supremacy of unregulated markets in all situations and in the face of evidence, an increasingly naked assertion of might being right and the abuse of religion to get the poor to acquiese to their own oppression.
Their choice of opening vignettes was interesting. I suspect the meanings are far more simple than the authors considered. That Kurt Cobain was clinically depressed, a hopeless heroin addict and his wife was leaving him seem more pressing reasons for suicide than a rather tenuous concept of selling out his punk roots. As for Nike-shod Niketown assailants - it is hardly unknown for looters to attach themselves to a riot, is it?
posted by Exiled in mainstream at
5:16 PM
1 Comments:
Which makes a recent confrontation with Prince Charles all the more relevant. He has called for MacDonald's to be banned on health and environmental grounds. He thinks that cheap food is the enemy of the environment. I call this the "Let them eat grouse" argument.
We could find many things wrong with modern life, but I don't think that making scarce things plentiful is one of them. Consumerism is a double edged sword. It seems that there is an ulterior (Luddite?) motive in a lot of the protests that young people make about global consumerism. Supposing that there were a technological fix to environmental warming, impoverished factory labourers, third-world debt, polution, AIDS, war and the rest. I believe that some people would reject it just because it is a technological fix.
By
Terry Hamblin, at 9:05 AM
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