| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JUNE 21, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
We're Suckers--and We Love It LEAD US INTO TEMPTATION The Triumph of American Materialism By James B. Twitchell Columbia University 310pp $24.95 Here, indeed, is a timely tome. Just when it seems that Americans' massive spending binge might slow down, perhaps pitching the U.S. and the world into recession, James B. Twitchell arrives with a reassuring message: The shopping spree is not simply the symptom of a fast-growing economy and soaring stock market. Consumerism has become the driving force of the culture itself. Shopping is a quest for meaning and personal identity. In Lead Us Into Temptation, Twitchell, a professor at the University of Florida, offers a starkly different view from that of other academics, who lament the triumph of materialism. Robert H. Frank's recent Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails To Satisfy in an Era of Excess attempts to prove that the accelerating rate of consumption, arising in part from the substitution of luxury goods for simpler wares, is damaging both to the economy and to the happiness of those doing the consuming. Juliet Schor's 1998 book, The Overspent American, portrays ordinary Americans as being prodded by the mass media to imitate the spending habits of the superrich. This leaves them miserable and stressed-out, as they work harder and longer to get more to spend. Twitchell, on the other hand, argues that if Americans find themselves swimming in a consumer culture, it's because that is where they want to be. They are not--as generations of leftist critics have argued--gullible rubes manipulated into buying things they don't need. Says Twitchell: ''Consumers have not been victims in this process. In fact, we have eagerly participated.'' And no matter what the Marxists say, ''our love of things is the cause of the Industrial Revolution, not the consequence. Producers conspired, to be sure, but consumers were always eager to buy.'' How did Americans get this way? Twitchell offers what he concedes is a not terribly original explanation: In urban, secular society, materialism has replaced traditional religion. Our forebears went to church to find meaning and magic. Now, we head for the mall, where we choose particular objects to give our lives meaning. By selecting certain items--the Ralph Lauren loafers rather than the Rockports--we are joining a particular sect, or in the lingo of the consumer culture, choosing a lifestyle. ''For better or worse, lifestyles are secular religions, coherent patterns of valued things,'' Twitchell writes. And, he asserts, this materialist creed can be far more liberating and democratic than the spiritual ones: If you have the money--or the credit--you can overcome limitations of class and religion. Leave your polyester past behind. Become that Polo guy. The liturgy of this religion, of course, is advertising. This is no accident. Twitchell tells how the pioneering ad men---many of them the sons of Protestant clergymen--adapted the language of uplift to the job of selling. Instead of exhorting churchgoers to aspire to Christ-like goodness in order to make a heavenly exit from the material world, they preached another kind of salvation. Twitchell then details the evolution of advertising and such techniques as branding, packaging, database marketing, and psychographics. And this is where contradictions begin to crop up in his argument. If consumers are such eager participants in the process, why must marketers pursue them so arduously? Why do they spend billions to gather data to sort us into such categories as ''money and brains'' or ''young suburbia?'' At one point, Twitchell observes: ''What advertising does is add meaning to otherwise interchangeable and often unnecessary products....'' Marx would agree. Twitchell is a tart-tongued observer who details how every corner of the culture has been exploited for commerce: how infomercials broke the line between advertising and programming and how kiddie TV shows with product tie-ins did the same. The theater, the concert hall, and the art museum are all merchandising venues. He tells how a colorful cellophane wrapper transformed the demonstrably inferior and nutritionally challenged Wonder Bread into the top brand--a triumph of packaging. He even celebrates his own packaging coup--glibly acknowledging that chunks of Temptation are recycled verbatim from his two prior books, Adcult USA and Carnival Culture. In a breezy, ironic voice, Twitchell provides a withering look at what he calls ''mallcondo culture''--that spot just off the interstate that dovetails so nicely with the unreal world of television. ''In earlier days, all kinds of extraneous forces got into the downtown shopping experience: churches, governments, civic organizations...libraries, and various do-gooders. None of that is at the mall.... Nothing gets into the mall without being checked out, and nothing gets into television that has not passed the programmer. And the mall owner/programmer/gatekeeper has only one thing on his mind: make money.'' That doesn't sound like someone who really believes that the consumer is calling the shots--or is even a willing partner in self-deception. In the end, then, Twitchell comes off as profoundly cynical. He acknowledges that the commercial culture is ''stultifying'' but concludes by saying: ''While this is dreary and depressing to some, as doubtless it should be, it is liberating and democratic to many more.'' Who are those many more--the mallcondo majority? Are they (are we?) too doltish and passive to yearn for something better? BY GEOFF LEWIS _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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