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"Hair: Public, Political, Extremely Personal" by Diane Simon
Part how-to manual, part cultural history -- what hair means and what the hell to do about yours.
By Maggie Jones
[05/10/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
Out of the past
Now that I'm in a committed relationship, my ex-boyfriends are coming out of the woodwork. Do I have to turn them away?
By Garrison Keillor
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"Shopping" by Gavin Kramer
A doomed East-West romance set in a Tokyo of brand-name whores and green-tea-flavored condoms.
By Matthew DeBord
[05/09/00]

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Data dazed
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By A.M. Homes
[05/08/00]

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"Day of the Bees" by Thomas Sanchez
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By Rachel King
[05/08/00]

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If, as Schor notes, "the level of income needed to fulfill one's dreams doubled between 1986 and 1994," it's because there are so many more interesting and relatively affordable things to dream about. Some of them didn't even exist in 1986, and others -- personal computers and cars, for instance -- are so much cheaper now. The most compelling reason to buy these new things is not the status they afford but their promise to make life easier and/or more fun. Parents are using pagers and cellphones to keep in touch with their teenagers. Teenagers are using them to keep in constant contact with their friends.

And if SUVs are mainly status symbols, why has there never been the same sudden widespread interest in acquiring Mercedeses? SUVs are more the equivalent of the 1950s station wagon, an updated version of a car with enough space to accommodate a family. With gas almost obscenely cheap and car companies building light trucks that are both comfortable and easy to drive, the popularity of SUVs seems in retrospect almost inevitable.

And if we are breaking records in running up credit card debt and declaring bankruptcy, isn't it less because we are trying to keep up with rich people than because credit has never been so widely available or collective economic optimism so high? One of the most profound cultural gaps in contemporary America is between my generation -- people in their 40s and 50s -- and our parents, whose formative experience was the Great Depression. A growing number of us have never experienced widespread poverty and unemployment without the security of a government safety net. If this were the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, we would be grasshoppers who had never experienced winter.

Schor calls for controlling consumption -- thus protecting us from the "new" emphasis on "luxury, expensiveness, exclusivity, rarity, uniqueness, and distinction" -- by taxing "high-end versions" of products. "Why not stand for consumption that is democratic, egalitarian, and available to all?" It's ironic that Ralph Nader is the author of an enthusiastic foreword to Schor's essay when the consumer movement he launched some 30 years ago is, along with the counterculture of the 1960s, at least in part responsible for our hunger for high-quality goods.

Paul Hawken, co-founder of upscale garden tool company Smith & Hawken, predicted in his 1983 book, "The Next Economy," both the growing gap between rich and poor and an increased demand (among the new rich) for quality. Should we penalize people for buying fine art when reproductions are so much cheaper? For buying hardcover books instead of mass-market paperbacks? For paying more for whole wheat when they could be surviving on Wonder Bread?

Of the nine responses by an assortment of scholars that follow Schor's essay, the most compelling are (unexpectedly) from an assistant professor of advertising at the University of Illinois, Douglas Holt, and an associate professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin, Craig J. Thompson. Holt argues that it's almost impossible to control consumption anyway, given today's market in which companies compete to appropriate every new idea the instant it becomes popular. "The market would find the nonstatus values that Schor's agenda encourages and turn them into salable goods," writes Holt, citing businesses that have already exploited symbols of the counterculture, from Benetton to the Nature Company to Ben & Jerry's.

And in his essay, "A New Puritanism?" Thompson maintains that any "moral critique of consumerism is steeped in a phobia of feminization and an infatuation with puritanical asceticism. It effects a rejection of the sensual and emotive aspects of human experience and an extreme suspicion of 'unproductive' pleasures." He suggests that if sex sells at least in part because it is a forbidden pleasure, we might become less compulsive shoppers if we allowed ourselves to truly savor the shopping experience.

Yet the real weakness of Schor's approach is her assumption that happiness is a function of relative affluence and the pressure to consume. In Schor's world, Rainbow Fish can indeed buy happiness -- for everyone -- by giving up whatever he has that might provoke envy. (Never mind that people envy all sorts of things they can't buy -- good looks and good health, talent, confidence, charisma.) While it's clear that unfettered consumption is a threat to the planet, and it's well established that, despite our unprecedented affluence, Americans are increasingly unhappy, a far more satisfying analysis of this crisis is David G. Myers' "The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty."

Next page | The real reasons why we're so unhappy, from a happiness expert