One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  In his stentorian wail, his well-enunciated words, his talent for self-publicity, he will treat the assembled customers to a sermon on the evils of ‘Frankenbucks’. He will tell them about the genetically modified, Monsanto-brand bovine growth hormones in Starbucks’ milk. He will tell them about the battles the company has engaged in to prevent its workers joining trades unions. He will tell them about Starbucks’ corporate policy of ‘clustering’ many outlets at once in parts of town where there are local cafés, and expanding the clusters until only Starbucks is left. He will tell them about the company’s use of prison labour to package its products.

  Most of all, he will preach the gospel of anti-consumerism; will tell tales of devastated neighbourhoods, cannibalised by chain-stores and left out in the sun to die. He will amuse and infuriate, the Starbucks employees will shuffle their feet, the branch will begin to empty and, if he’s lucky, Billy will be thrown out, still preaching. He loves being thrown out.

  This is just one – the most basic – of the tools in the Reverend’s armoury. He will also, on occasion, initiate ‘cellphone operas’, in which members of his congregation will wander the store shouting loudly into cellphones about anything from slave labour on coffee plantations to low-paid employees, their conversations rising to a co-ordinated crescendo. Billy has also written a number of scripts for suggested ‘spat theatre’, which anyone, anywhere, can perform – loudly, of course – in their local Starbucks with a friend. One features a couple loudly discussing their imminent sex in the Starbucks toilet. In another, an ex-prisoner pops in for a coffee and discovers that the packaging he’s just bought was glued by him while he was inside. Another, entitled ‘Where My Latte Gets Its Bovine Growth Hormones’, features two lovers whose relationship has been sponsored by Monsanto.

  All this explains quite adequately why Starbucks hates and fears the Reverend – so much so that they distributed a memo to all their New York employees entitled ‘What should I do if Reverend Billy is in my store?’ Hide, perhaps.

  The Reverend Billy, in his more sober moments, is plain old Bill Talen, an actor and writer who, after many years treading the boards, decided that he needed a new direction. Bill had always wanted his art to change the society it reflected, but it took the birth of the Reverend to really begin to have the effect he wanted. His alter ego was inspired by a number of factors – an old friend who was himself a priest, his own Calvinist childhood, America’s television-evangelist tradition, and what was happening to New York’s Times Square.

  This was in the mid-1990s, when mayor Rudolph Giuliani was at the height of his campaign to clean up New York – part of which involved a scheme to transform Times Square from a haunt of ‘low lifes’ to a playground for tourists and consumers.

  ‘Anyone who looked like they had character was out,’ says Bill, plunging into his freshly delivered plate of turkey, ‘because they were creating a mall in Times Square. It had been full of preachers, ranters – a place where all sorts of people would come and shout at each other about their beliefs, and nobody asked why. The end of that was the start of a very deliberate process, and we see the results today. Places like Times Square and SoHo are now very commodified, and the streets are not really public spaces any more.’

  Bill believed that the community, and the city, he valued was being sold – sold to some of the biggest retail corporations on the planet. From this belief, the Reverend was conceived; and at the Disney Store in Times Square, he was born.

  ‘I decided to don my uniform,’ he says. ‘Dinner jacket like a televangelist, and the collar. I created a theology based on standing up outside the Disney Store.’ He morphs into the Reverend mid-sermon: ‘MICKEY MOUSE IS THE ANTI-CHRIST, CHILD! DON’T GO INTO THAT STORE! DON’T GIVE YOUR MONEY TO THE PEOPLE WHO PAY THEIR SWEATSHOP WORKERS A DOLLAR FOR AN EIGHTEEN-HOUR DAY! SAVE YOUR SOUL!’ A middle-aged man eating his lunch quietly in the stall behind us looks round to check he’s not in any danger from this shouting lunatic.

  Before long, the Reverend was inside the store, co-ordinating cellphone operas about anorexia and Barbie dolls and being regularly evicted by large, unamused security guards. He press-released all the theatre critics in New York – ‘A new play is opening at the Church of Stop Shopping, starring the Reverend Billy and friends, opening in the Disney Store, Times Square.’ Hundreds of people came to watch. It was part of the play that Billy and friends would jump up on to the counter and stop the cash registers; bodyguards shouting at him from both sides – ‘they were my proscenium arch’ – would be incorporated into the performance.

  Bill, it is clear, loves every minute of this. He is loving just telling me about it. But it should go without saying that this is not mere entertainment. This is politics.

  ‘The corporations are pushing into public space so thoroughly that it’s not public space any more,’ he repeats. ‘It’s an amazing privatisation process going on in New York at the moment – the streets, the very fundamental of public space, are no longer ours. I moved from the Disney Store to Starbucks for a reason. Starbucks believe they’re selling a lifestyle, they’re selling meaning, they’re selling community, they’re involving us in a consensus about what it means to be a neighbourhood – it’s completely delusional. The opposite is happening; we have fluorescent, hushed, centrally planned chainstores all over New York now, and gradually, the sassy verbosity that you love about this place, the ability of regular people to tell amazing stories – all that is considered a market, and that “market” is having so many brands pushed on to it that it is being murdered.’

  In the wrath of the Reverend Billy, global interests are assailed by a very local sensibility. It is, says Bill, the neighbourhood striking back.

  ‘I take my cue from what is happening in my neighbourhood,’ he says. ‘Is it a healthy neighbourhood? Are people looking each other in the eye, telling stories, circling each other with playful insults? Do they feel they belong there, will they rise up and defend each other? That’s a healthy neighbourhood. The transnationals need us not to have neighbourhoods. They want to mall-ise us. They want our relationship with each other to basically happen through a credit card. The transnationals are a totalising presence – their major market is to persuade the individual that they will not enjoy direct access to their own lives – their dreams, their desires, will be mediated through their presence, their image, through what they sell.’ He soaks up the last of his gravy with a slice of flimsy white bread.

  ‘That’s where I get my politics,’ he says. ‘I am defending my neighbourhood’s right to not be mediated.’

  If consumerism really does mediate our desires, then the USA, the original consumer society, must be the most mediated place on Earth. Consumerism – every man and woman’s right to be able to buy anything they want, and now – has been a driving force behind the American Dream for decades. The United States, of course, is by no means the only country whose national purpose has become entwined with rampant material consumption: every country in the ‘developed’ world, to different degrees, is engaged in the same consumer crusade. Poorer nations, sheepishly following the Western development model, are beginning to catch up – their new, and usually tiny, middle classes proudly sinking their teeth into KFC bargain buckets while most of their population have to walk miles to find water. But the USA, as ever, is the nation which does it biggest and best.

  The United States of America, with just 5 per cent of the world’s population, consumes 30 per cent of the world’s resources, including 25 per cent of the world’s fossil fuels – the cause of global climate change. By the time a baby born in the US in the 1990s reaches the age of seventy-five, he or she will have produced 52 tons of rubbish, consumed 43 million gallons of water and used 3,375 barrels of oil. The waste generated each year in the US would fill a convoy of ten-ton rubbish trucks, which would stretch over halfway to the moon. The amount of energy used by 1 American is equivalent to that used by 6 Mexicans, 38 Indians or 531 Ethiopians. Almost 60 million adult A
mericans – over a third of the population – are overweight, and there has been a 42 per cent increase in childhood obesity in just twenty years – a pandemic which has been blamed on overconsumption of both fast food and television.1

  To ensure that this profitable spiral continues, corporations shovel an estimated 12 billion display adverts, 3 million radio commercials and over 200,000 TV commercials into the American consciousness every single day.2 American teenagers are typically exposed to 360,000 adverts by the time they graduate from high school, which seems to have the desired effect: 93 per cent of American teenage girls say that their favourite hobby is shopping.3

  Few aspects of life in the Land of the Free (Market) are exempt from this assault on the mind. Children, for example – a growth market – are ruthlessly targeted. Coca-Cola and Pepsi have branded entire schools, paying them up to $20 per pupil in exchange for selling a set number of drinks on campus, and banning the products of their competitors. Channel One, a commercial TV company, beams daily ‘educational’ programmes into 12,000 American schools on free, donated equipment – on condition that the pupils watch adverts aimed at their target demographic. Procter & Gamble sponsors school lessons on oral hygiene. Campbell’s Soup created a science ‘lesson’ where pupils compared the viscosity of one of their sauces to that of a rival. Kellogg’s created an art project where sculptures were made out of Rice Krispies.4

  None of this is particularly exceptional, and all of it makes good business sense. Children in the US directly spend $24.4 billion a year, and adults spend a further $300 billion a year on their behalf.5 ‘If you own this child at an early age,’ said the former president of the clothing chain Kids R Us, apparently with no sense of rising horror, ‘you can own this child for years to come. Companies are saying, “Hey, I want to own the kid younger and younger.”’ The head of the Prism Communications company said much the same: ‘They aren’t children so much as what I like to call “evolving consumers”,’ he explained delicately.6

  Adults, meanwhile, have their own challenges. There is barely a foot of space in the USA that has not been bought up by corporations trying to flog their goods to the increasingly overspent American. Toilet walls, petrol pump nozzles, cash machines, mobile phone messages, spam e-mails, stickers on oranges, the backs of bus tickets, not to mention millions of billboards, newspaper, magazine and TV ads – few places are exempt from corporate attempts to create new needs to be met. And with straight adverts increasingly old-fashioned, twenty-first-century corporations have turned their attention to buying up public space, in what one critic has called an ‘enclosure of the cultural commons’.7 Go to see a sports event, in a land obsessed by baseball, basketball and American football, and you may find yourself in the Continental Airlines Arena (formerly Meadowlands), the FedEx Field (Washington), the Staples Center (Los Angeles), or the presumably soon-to-be-swiftly-renamed Enron Field (Houston). You may find yourself staring up at a historic public landmark which has been given a corporate facelift – the Empire State Building, for example, lit up, as it was in August 2002, in ‘Snapple Yellow’ to celebrate the drinks company’s thirtieth anniversary. You may find yourself at a branded festival, in a logo-swathed public park or on the campus of a sponsored university.

  If this is too down-to-earth for you, there may soon be more celestial opportunities to extend your consumer choice. Pizza Hut recently succeeded in getting its logo pasted on to the side of a Russian space rocket, and then topped even this achievement by delivering ‘the world’s first space-consumable pizza’ to cosmonauts on the International Space Station. ‘Wherever there is life, there will be Pizza Hut pizza!’ declared the company’s chief marketing officer, who had perhaps been watching a little too much Star Trek. Pizza Hut is not alone; Radio Shack, Lego and Popular Mechanics all paid to have astronauts promote their products on the space station.8 If this all sounds amusing but harmless, it may be only the first step in the commercialisation of space; for years, corporations have been exploring the feasibility of putting giant billboards in orbit, which would promote their products in the night sky from the Caspian to the Kalahari.

  With such a bombardment of exhortations to spend, it is not surprising that the American people have been obeying. Per capita consumption in the USA increased by 45 per cent between the 1970s and the 1990s.9 Unfortunately, and perhaps not coincidentally, so did rates of obesity, depression, eating disorders, family breakdown, crime and income inequality. The proportion of the population describing themselves as ‘very happy’, meanwhile, failed to increase at all – in fact, it fell by 4 per cent.10

  So whatever happened to the American dream?

  The Reverend Billy thinks he knows: he says that consumerism killed it. This is not exactly a new message, of course. But Billy is not alone in believing that if it is to be implanted in the minds of his fellow Americans as firmly as exhortations to Just Do It, Think Different and Come to Marlboro Country, the medium of communication will need to be as sophisticated, arresting and unexpected as the most successful advertising campaigns. There is a term for this: it’s called culture jamming, and, like consumerism itself, it is spreading like a rash from the shores of America to the wider world.

  Kalle Lasn is a man who enjoys explaining it. Lasn, a determined, middle-aged troublemaker, is the founder of Adbusters magazine, a Canadian vehicle for challenging the consumer culture. Set up by a group of ex-advertising executives, Adbusters, which calls itself a ‘journal of the mental environment’, has a language, and an approach, all of its own. It popularised the concept of the ‘subvert’ – producing spoof ads which so closely mirror the original that the subversive message they contain drops into your subconscious just as easily. It talks of ‘meme warfare’ (the battle for control of the mind), ‘Manchurian consumers’ and ‘uncommercials’. Like the advertising industry it sets out to undermine, Adbusters can get a little, well, pretentious, but Lasn is an expert at finding the words to explain what culture jamming is, and why America needs it.

  He explains it best in his book, Culture Jam.11 ‘America,’ he writes, ‘is no longer a country. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar brand . . . American culture is no longer created by the people . . . we ourselves have been branded . . . American cool is a global pandemic.’ Lasn says that the point and purpose of culture jamming is to ‘strike by smashing the post-modern hall of mirrors and redefining what it means to be alive’. Like the Reverend Billy, Kalle Lasn and his crew at Adbusters are waging war for the right to live their lives unmediated by what global corporations say is vital, necessary, entertaining. Substance, say the culture jammers, not style. Reality, not image. Self-definition, not brand recognition. ‘The only battle still worth fighting and winning,’ says Lasn, ‘the only one that can set us free, is The People versus the Corporate Cool Machine.’

  ‘Consumerism’ might seem a nebulous target for political resistance: the sort of thing you can only complain about when you live in a country rich enough to afford it. But people like Kalle Lasn and the Reverend Billy are concerned that consumerism has attained what the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci called ‘cultural hegemony’ – it is such a dominant and ingrained value within our culture that it goes virtually unquestioned. If this is true, and if the result is that manufactured culture is replacing real culture, then the means of questioning those values, say the culture jammers, need to be clear, clever and subtle. They need to be able to get under the skin of a population so used to being bombarded with messages plugging consumer materialism that having a Nike swoosh shaved into the back of your head can win you plaudits in the playground. This, say the jammers, is nothing short of cultural warfare – warfare in which culture is both something to be defended, to be re-created – and to be used as a weapon.

  What really gets activists exercised is the extension of American consumption patterns – and all the values and the assumptions they are based on – to the rest of the world. Nobody can have failed to notice this happening, apparently inexorably, over the p
ast few decades, as markets expand, borders are opened and barriers to trade removed. Western consumerism has broken through its geographical boundaries and is spreading itself all over the map.

  The result of this, say critics, is the homogenising of cultures. A global market requires global tastes, and global tastes require global values. If, for example, as they have made clear many times, the corporate mission of both Coca-Cola and Pepsi is to have everyone on Earth drinking something made by them every day, then everyone on Earth must want to drink carbonated, sweetened, canned drinks. To want to drink them every day, they must first have offloaded the drinks of their own culture, and with them the myriad strands of tradition and history that make their culture different from the one which created Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

  More even than that, though, they must have adjusted to the kind of environment in which refrigerated carbonated sugary drinks are on sale from vending machines in every town, in which drinks are bought not made, in which global corporations outcompete local producers and in which a fast-paced, urban consumer lifestyle necessitates regular ‘refreshment’. The same goes for hamburgers, jeans, jeeps, trainers, hair gel and shoulder bags. This is not, in other words, about fizzy drinks at all: it is about culture. All over the world, the extension of the consumer machine that the culture jammers say is eating America is steamrollering the world’s many cultures, leaving a rootless, cosmopolitan global monoculture in their place.

  The result is the bleaching of the human rainbow. It is the same massive cultural airstrike that leads to women buying acidic skin-lightening cream in India and Africa, to look more like the cool white people on satellite TV, and Chinese children undergoing tongue operations to make their English more acceptable to the ears of their global masters. It is the polar opposite of that ‘world made of many worlds’: it is a global mall, in which corporations expand by eating up the small, the local, the unique and the different – colonising and commodifying everything we could ever need, and then selling it back to us.