Saving the world

>> Kalle Lasn's maniacal Culture Jam hopes to awaken us from our trance

by JULIET WATERS

Last Friday, Nov. 25 was official Buy Nothing day. Odds are you didn't know this, since publicizing it has always been a problem. If you go to Adbusters' media foundation Web site (www.adbusters.org) you'll get walked through the dilemma. Or you can read about it in Culture Jam, founder Kalle Lasn's primer on the ethics and goals of culture jamming.

The problem is obvious. The survival of mainstream media is entirely dependent on consumer culture. To advertise Buy Nothing day on the day after American Thanksgiving, traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year, would totally violate the aspirations of the advertisers who keep newspapers and networks alive. Running that ad would be roughly equivalent to cutting off their ear. A prelude to suicide. So year after year, the networks and newspapers refuse to run ads for Buy Nothing day.

This problem reminds us how private the public airwaves are. The goal of culture jammers is to continue, through like-minded campaigns (like TV Turnoff Week, and the movements to "uncool" Nike, Coke and Calvin Klein), to remind us.

So you'd think that after reading a 250-page book I'd be reminded not to buy anything on Nov. 25. Yet 10 a.m. Friday morning found me scarfing down a mama burger at the A&W that had opened the day before on my street corner.

Was this because I'd been "branded" at a very young age back when my family used to dine at the A&W drive-in? When I saw the orange and brown bear was I led zombie-like to its neon-lit cave searching for my lost childhood? This would be Lasn's explanation. In the first chapters he builds a case for ways in which the media have infiltrated our psyche. He holds it responsible for a range of mood disorders, malaise and a crippling of individual motivation and will-power.

Am I mentally ill? Or, after being initially sympathetic to Lasn's anti-corporate manifesto, did I become so tired of his preachy, grandiose tone that I was unconsciously compelled to undermine him?

Who knows. The point is I forgot about Buy Nothing day. And because it was so easy to forget, I have a hard time accepting Lasn's claim in the first chapter that "culture jamming will become to our era what civil rights was to the '60s, what feminism was to the '70s, what environmental activism was to the '80s. It will change the way information flows, the way institutions wield power, the way TV stations are run, the way the food, fashion, automobile, sports, music and culture industries set their agendas. Above all, it will change the way we interact with the mass media and they way in which meaning is produced in our society."

Notice how Lasn lists no movement for the '90s. You might make the mistake of thinking there wasn't one. Unless you took a moment to remember that the biggest political movement of that decade didn't have to advertise itself. People have been shutting out and shutting down consumerism in all kinds of little ways in the last 10 years. Musicians surviving on smaller labels, writers thriving through zine culture, but mostly people nurturing a means of communication that will never be entirely monopolized by corporate culture: the Internet.

In advancing its self-aggrandizing manifesto, Culture Jam conveniently leaves these people out of the discussion. Reading it you'd think the first world will be populated by the living dead until culture jammers release them from their trance. The maniacal, simplistic tone of this book is guaranteed to irritate anyone who ever had a thought of their own.

But hey, in the voyage towards a more interesting, less monopolized world, every little bit of work helps. So next November on Buy Nothing day, I will make a bigger effort to hide my Interac card. Maybe someone can remind me.

Culture Jam, by Kalle Lasn, HarperCollins, pb, 248 pp, $19.95