In this heaven, law and policy prevent some destruction of the worker and the earth and discourage some consumer self-destruction. People will still want sweaters; desire for the new won’t melt altogether away. But buying a sweater will not have to be a moral decision—nor refraining from buying it constitute a moral judgment.
I leave the celebrants of Buy Everything Day and catch the train to Times Square. There I will join Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping in commemorating Buy Nothing Day. The staging area is on the median at Forty-fifth Street, midway between Macy’s and McDonald’s, Starbucks and Virgin Megastore, a half-block north of the Naked Cowboy strumming a guitar in his underpants and a half-block south of the World’s Largest Snow Globe, a transparent Bubble Boy–like chamber in which Santa and Mrs. Claus are receiving (and disinfecting?) children in ones and twos.
The Buy Nothing Day warm-up act is a street theater troupe called Green Dragon, reenacting The American Revolution (“Take 2”). “My stars haven’t spangled since Election Day,” proclaims Johnny Washington, a skinny twenty-something with a sparse red goatee, as he leaps from among the actors. In their ratty three-cornered hats, brass-buttoned castoffs, and kicked-down boots, these young women and men resemble America’s original ragtag revolutionaries, except for the pierced lips. “But today we celebrate the people we love and not the crap we buy! Happy Buy Nothing Day!” Cheers rise from the spectators. A few bemused tourists slink in closer, clutching their shopping bags.
Johnny Washington is recounting the heroic battle against Mad King George W: “We flanked him on the West Coast, we flanked him on the East.” A battalion of punk Santas bearing pink “Thank You for Not Shopping” signs filters into the growing crowd. A plastic-bucket drum starts to beat, and the syncopated chant increases in volume: “Today is a good day…Not to Buy! Today is a good day…Not to Buy!” Visions of Target are fading from my mind.
The performance meanders through something like a tale of the 2004 elections, until word passes to the players that the Main Act has arrived. Johnny Washington motions to the drummer for a bucket-roll. “I give you the man,” he announces, “who put theodd back inGod! ” And with this, a tall, broad-shouldered man, almost opalescent in a white suit and pastor’s collar, struts to the center of the crowd. His chest is thrust high, lifting to the heavens in hope and bombast, his bleach-blond pompadour is brushed back as if windblown; his gaze is level, yet focused in the distance. The whole posture suggests he has just now been dealt a blow, or a revelation. This is the Reverend Billy (aka performance artist Bill Talen), come to exorcise the demon of consumerism and cast the money-lenders, money-spenders, and money-makers from the temple of American democracy. In the name of the worker, the artist, the tenant, and the citizen, Billy speaks in tongues, only partly in cheek.
“Hallelujah!” “Praise Be!” Four female Dopplebillies in white suits and collars surround the Reverend and repeat his ecstatic calls. The audience is getting into the spirit. “Amen!” “Preach it, Brother!” we reply. At least two video cameras are trained on Reverend Billy. In hundreds of actions around the world, he has gained the irreverently reverent regard of activists and artists and a discredit verging on hatred from his corporate nemeses, plus a rap sheet of nonviolent civil disobedience arrests that would impress Martin Luther King, Jr.
Reverend Billy presses his large teeth and fleshy lips to the cardboard megaphone and addresses the neon canyon. His eyes close in concentration, his free hand opens to the angels of God and Mammon—Billy Crystal to his right, a wrinkled beauty advertising Dove soap to his left—and to the cold clouds above. “My chil-dren-ah!” he cries. “PEACE-elujah!”
“Peace-elujah!” “Tell it!”
As if asking us to turn to a page in the hymnal, Billy directs his “children” to the fliers Green Dragon has distributed, on which is printed the First Amendment. We recite it together, solemn as a prayer.
“We are here in this cathedral of logos, this STONE-henge of logos!” preaches the Reverend. “You!” he directs his megaphone at Crystal’s friendly face. “Especially you, Billy! Listen up!” For an instant I imagine the brilliant billboards and screens broadcasting children’s art, artists’ videos, recipes, and safe-sex comics. Reverend Billy spins on, half sermon, half soapbox speech, poem crossed with polemic. From time to time, he is convulsed in a limb-flinging dance (“Phew! The spirit seized me there for a moment”). The effect is indeed odd and godly, silly and strangely moving.
“Praise be!” call the Dopplebillies.
Billy steps back to rest his voice while the Dopplebillies unfurl a huge sheet of paper: the “Nine Theses Against Corporate Rule,” symbolically posting it in this cathedral door to global capitalism. The theses start with “Stop Buying Our Government” and “Stop Fetishizing Growth,” proceed though “Stop Selling Our Thoughts (“You capture our unguarded remarks and ship them overnight to a fluorescing big box where they’re sold as frozen mottos. Know this: we are actual citizens; we will take back our language”). The last is “Say Hello,” a plea for person-to-person communication that ends, “Leave the logo behind. Find the old gift.”
“Bill of Rights-elujah!” cries Billy.
“Bill of Rights-elujah!”
“Freedom!”
“Freedom!”
In a raucous line, we follow the Reverend off the median, past the Snow Globe and the queue of slightly frightened children, and across the street to McDonald’s, where Billy performs an outdoor “cash-register exorcism” beneath the golden arches. At the Virgin Megastore, he riffs on a poster of billionaire Richard Bronson in free fall from a plane, along with a half-dozen other adventurers. “This man is not Jesus!” Billy declaims, “yet look at these an-gels-ah, about him!” Two kids elbow into the space beside Billy, pull out a stack of their own CDs, and start to rap. “Preach it, brothers!” shouts Billy, upstaged by the street-level capitalists.
By now, the tourists are warming up, sensing they’ve stumbled on the Real New York. Which is exactly what this fake minister is after: something like authenticity.
When the exorcism of the Virgin Megastore breaks up, about two dozen of the remaining crowd make our way to the northeast corner of the square, to a sleek new building with a large Starbucks at its base. I hear Bill, stepping out of character for a moment, turn to one of his compatriots and say, “I can’t get arrested today.” (Later I see on the Web site that he is slated to participate in a demonstration in London tomorrow.) For more than four years Reverend Billy has targeted Starbucks for its refusal to buy beans from Latin American coffee farmers at prices supporting a living wage, but more symbolically for the way it has turned the small, personal institution of the café into a homogenized retail monopoly. The coffeehouse company has had so many run-ins with the Reverend in California that it has procured a protection order to forbid him from entering its premises. In 2000, Starbucks circulated a memo entitled, “What Should I Do If Reverend Billy Comes Into My Store?” As we approach the store, I watch its security guards mass near the door, eyeing us as we stack our hands on top of Billy’s in a “joke prayer” for the children of the farmers.
Then Billy steps inside, followed by about ten demonstrators. I slip into another door at the side, from which I can observe the action. Within seconds, two guards are pressing in on the Reverend and the demonstrators, ushering them out the door. At the same time, from the east side of the street, a dozen police are converging on the corner. A paddy wagon pulls into Forty-seventh Street.
Three cops muscle through the group to the Starbucks door and order Reverend Billy to leave. He complies without protest, motioning the flock to follow. As he crosses the threshold, he is arrested (for resisting arrest, I read later), cuffed, and rustled to a waiting white cop car. An officer presses his hand into the crisp pompadour, ducking Billy into the back seat.
“Shame, shame, shame,” chants the crowd. “Let him go! Let him go!”
“Get that bitch,” I hear a woman cop say to a male officer, n
odding toward a Dopplebilly who has climbed onto a concrete planter to get a better view. She is pulled down and cuffed, as is Billy’s wife. Both are pushed into the paddy wagon. A cop thuds the metal door shut and padlocks it with a clanking jerk.
The tourists are excited. “Mommy, Mommy, look!” cries a small boy. “They’re arresting that lady!” A German woman beside me is shouting at the cops: “Heil King George! Heil! Remember, they elected Hitler, too!” One of the Dopplebillies is crying.
Mingling with the police as if they were another city squad, the Starbucks security guards are grabbing protesters and ordering them away from the corner: “Move off this sidewalk. You may not remain on this sidewalk!” This is a sidewalk in the middle of Times Square on the day after Thanksgiving. You couldn’t move off it if you wanted to.
Anger rises to my throat and tears to my eyes. I am trying to hold on to the sweetness, strength, and silliness of the event, but they are being pulled from my grasp like a newspaper in a hard wind, scattering my high spirits in the chaos of the crowd. As the paddy wagon pulls away down Forty-seventh Street, I gaze up to the billboards above it.
The signs serve as a Greek chorus echoing the drama below. A forty-foot-tall Sean John assumes the iconic pose of the two African-American sprinters on the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, head bowed, fists raised in a Black Power salute. (Pointing out “the brilliance of contemporary capitalism…to steal [emotion-laden oppositional] images and re-brand them,” journalist Jonah Engle notes that Sean John apparel “is manufactured at the Southeast Textiles factory in the San Miguel Free Trade Zone by Honduran workers who make 15 cents per $40 sweatshirt and whose deplorable working conditions were the subject of a campaign by the National Labor Committee for Labor and Human Rights last year.”) At John’s feet, a ticker mounted by the Center for American Progress ceaselessly counts the rising cost of the war in Iraq; the number on November 27, 2004, surpasses $146 billion. A vertical neon sign beside the hip-hop salesman and the Iraq War bill summarizes the theme: Argent. One door west, atop the marquee of a sleek new hotel, a simple, solid, sans-serif red letter stands like a sentry: W.
NOVEMBER 28
In Hardwick, Sandy Howard is bombarding theGazette with letters accusing the Zoning Board of favoritism to “lobbyists and special interests.” Around the country, property rights groups are drafting copycat bills to Oregon’s Ballot Measure 37, which forces the government to compensate property owners for conservation, planning, and zoning rules, rendering community control of development almost impossible.
Closer to home, in Brooklyn, developer Bruce Ratner is pushing to get several blocks of homes declared “urban blight,” in order to raze them from the site of his proposed Jets stadium. And on Bergen Street, a half-block from the communal house I lived in when I moved to Brooklyn in 1973, a guy named Pietro Costa is building a three-story, twenty-one-foot-deep extension into his forty-foot backyard, breaking up one of the quadrangles of green that have lain unobstructed behind every block of brownstones in the community since the 1860s. His neighbors are distraught, but the addition is legal and Costa is unmoved. “Life leads us down different paths, and people should be allowed to use their properties in a suitable way according to their needs,” he tells a reporter.
On Friday, at the Battle of Starbucks, I shouted at a chunky young cop with a clutch of flex-cuffs on his belt, “Thank you very much for defending the right of Starbucks to sell coffee, instead of the rights of New Yorkers to exercise their freedom of speech!”
“Move on,” the cop replied coolly. “You may not remain on this sidewalk.”
At his post-election press conference, the president spoke of the “security and independence that comes from owning something, from ownership.” It was a pitch to privatize Social Security, rendering it neither social nor secure.
“Private property has made us so stupid and inert that an object is ours only when wehave it,” wrote Marx. “All the physical and intellectual senses…have been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses, the sense of having.”
Another way of putting this: capitalism gives us everything except what is free.
December
Prosperity
DECEMBER 4
Not Buying It has given Paul and me a holiday gift whose value we could not have anticipated: nothing special. Free of the obligation to buy or to be merry, life is gloriously ordinary.
On a Saturday morning just twenty-one days before Christmas, Paul is online pricing materials to insulate the steam pipes in our Brooklyn building’s cellar, a chore for the co-op.
I glance over his shoulder at the Web site he has up. “Insulation At Its Best,” I read the slogan aloud.
“Insulation doesn’t get much better than this,” answers Paul.
I go into the bedroom to put on my shoes. Jonathan is arriving soon to give me a walking tour of Walt Whitman’s haunts in Brooklyn Heights.
Paul concentrates on insulation; I follow the historian following the poet through his old neighborhood. While the rest of the city schleps parcels, I am fleet of step and light of encumbrance. My backpack is so empty that there’s room in it to carry around the 600-page library book in which I am engrossed, Andrew Solomon’sNoonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Glad tidings!
DECEMBER 5
Our holiday cheer may not be generally shared. The sales figures from the day after Thanksgiving are coming in, and for many retailers Black Friday was black in the customary sense. Like last year, stores at the top end are giddy with business, while at the bottom prices are being slashed to subterranean levels.
The one profit center that seems to be thriving comprises the seasonal products and services I’d call shopping alleviators. “’Tis the season to be stressing,” AOL’s opening screen announces. The article links to lists of day spas and sites selling relaxing lotions and potions. Personal shoppers are rushing to the scene like combat nurses. Pharmacists are stocking up on Celexa, as diagnosed compulsive shoppers steel themselves for thirty days of authorized bingeing. My friend Vera tells me her sister Sandy, age sixty-seven, has been arrested (again) for shoplifting from a mall in Sacramento. Her lawyer is planning to tell the judge that his client ran out of her prescription and, due to other Christmas obligations, had no time to refill it. She was temporarily insane.
Even for the symptoms of shopping overload, there is retail therapy. Anecdotal evidence points to an upswing in “self-gifting,” which, from Target to Tiffany’s, may be outpacing other-gifting. “When we do our holiday gift guide,” the editor ofLucky tells a reporter, “it’s two for me, one for you.” In case the self-indulger experiences a scintilla of guilt, a purchasable pick-me-up assuages that, too. Every boutique counter this year offers a garland of silicone bracelets, each in a different color signifying a different endangered species or incurable disease. For only a dollar, the shopper gets to do good, broadcast her generosity, and—not to be underestimated—acquire an accessory in the season’s must-have material, rubber.
DECEMBER 10
This morning on public radio, the host Brian Lehrer is devoting a portion of his show to the commercialization of Christmas. A British woman calls in to say she is gobsmacked by the volume of holiday decoration here in the States. “If you ask me, the whole thing is a waste of electricity,” she snorts.
And if you ask me, the Sistine Chapel ceiling is a waste of paint.
In Carroll Gardens, each homeowner is a Leonardo of holiday decoration. Every front yard boasts a fully loaded crèche: the Holy Family, attended by the shepherds and their reindeer, a phalanx of Tin Soldiers of the Cross, and the Three Wise Men, Melchior, Balthazar, and Frosty. A bit apart from the mangers are stationed the inflated Elves, like massive, menacing bouncers. Tape loops alternate religious and secular fare—for example, “Silent Night” and “Here Comes Santa Claus.” They sound like angel choirs translated into cell phone ring tones.
I love these displays not for their religious fervor, but for
another kind of devotion that they show: the devotion to something from which absolutely no profit is gained. Yes, there is in them an element of what Juliet Schor calls competitive consumption, whose prize is social status. One year, everyone on my block had to have a string of white lights resembling icicles, the next it was webs of evenly spaced lights that fit over the shrubs like hair-nets, the next, the magna-inflatables (each of these innovations shows up a year or two later in Hardwick). But this is friendly competition, Frisbee football as compared to the Super Bowl, and the decorating is a labor, most of all, of love. “Labor divorced from purpose appeals to me,” says a character in Ben Katchor’s musical theater piece “The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island.” Is this not the definition of art?
DECEMBER 12
We are not entirely avoiding holiday purchases, though the ones we are making are consistent with the rules—food only. There’s a tradition to uphold. Today is our Fourth Annual Chanukah Latke Bash. Paul and I shop and clean for two days, rise at six and fry eighteen dozen potato latkes, toss a huge salad, and pour jars of homemade applesauce and a pint of sour cream into blue bowls. In butterfat alone, the sour cream exceeds our yearly ration of utter non-necessity. Paul breaks out a few six-packs of his October batch of homebrew, and we’ve bought a case of seltzer, in this instance a necessity, to cut the latke grease. When the table is set and we’re dressed for the party, I send Paul out for an extra pint of sour cream. This last-minute precaution, including my anxiety and Paul’s easygoing compliance, is part of the yearly ritual.
Because we’re not buying it, we’ve asked friends to bring wine. Under the circumstances, adherence to this rule is somewhat academic. Case in point: on a huge oval platter, I lay out two smoked whitefish from Russ & Daughters, about four pounds of smoky flesh and skinny bones, for $60. Necessary? Are you kidding? Everything purveyed by this venerated Lower East Side establishment (“the Louvre of Lox,” theTimes of London called it) two doors down Houston Street from Bronfeld Myron Foam Rubber Cut to Order is the most superfluous of superfluities. The spotless stainless-steel case that runs along one side of the shop is a shah’s jewel case, displaying watered-silk lox, gilt-skinned trout, silver-plated herring, caviar pearls at $100 an ounce. Beside the humbler fare on our table—potato, onion, apple—the fish fulfills that gift-economy code that requires magnanimity be answered with magnanimity. Our year of receiving is coming to an end.
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