[PEN-L:8805] Re: Consumerism defended

["Michael Hoover" <hoov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Village Voice, June 30 - July 6, 1999
> Natural Born Shoppers
> "Commercialism is the water we all swim in, the air we breathe, our
> sunlight and our shade."
> If James Twitchell weren't a graceful, witty writer, his new book, Lead Us
> Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism, would be
> excruciating. Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising at the
> University of Florida at Gainesville, seems to have deliberately crafted
> his tongue-in-cheek thesis to annoy as many people as possible.
> Consumerism, he argues, is not a bad thing; it is "democratic" and
> "liberating." And scholarship that suggests otherwise is naive-a product of
> alarmist dumbbells whose reasoning has been muddled by Marxist ideology.
> Louis Proyect

Twitchell has been writing a variation of the same book for the last few
years...earlier incarnations include _Adcult_, _Carnival Culture_, and
_Shame_ ..his mantra that the love of things is part of our nature is
'consumer sovereignty' dressed up in advertising and brand-name language
about which he writes...T wants it both ways, he simultaneously whines
about and revels in the 'stenography of surfaces'...so *Wired* magazine
folks can dig 'feel good' culture that Twitchell describes, George Will
can muse approvingly about his 'moral nostalgia', and Chuck Colson (yes,
the former 'meanest man' in US politics/Watergate criminal turned born-
again Christian/prison minister) can find T lamenting the loss of
traditional Christian social anchoring (he is all for shaming)...
Twitchell simplistically claims that family name/pew placement/educational
affiliation/accent/club membership no longer convey social status...
hucksterism masking ideology masquerading as critique...  Michael Hoover