CULTURE JAM

An eloquent manifesto of anti-commercialism worthy of predecessors like Thoreau and Huxley. Kalle Lasn is the publisher of Adbusters magazine, and the launcher of campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week. Lasn was raised in Germany and, like the Native American in Brave New World, was able to live beyond the soma cult of American corporate consumerism and its Big Brother of TV, which dictates our culture, fashions, even dreams. Spontaneity can only be won back by “demarketing your life” in order “to escape the consumerist script.” Culture Jamming is what Lasn hopes will constitute America’s second revolution. To the author, the colonies broke off from England’s corporate control, only to enslave themselves in the McDonaldization of America (the label less of a country than of a brand name). Sure, this proposed revolution is formidable, but so were the civil rights and feminist struggles. Lasn is more optimistic than many cynical and ironic slackers, punks, and downsiders, because, after all, we did win a thirty-years war against the tobacco giants. Other corporations, from ecologically damaging polluters to media mind-polluters, can be defeated when they too are held criminally responsible. It took slick marketing and TV spots to beat the corporations at their own game, to make smoking “uncool.” While the challenge of making the polluting BMW, fatty fast food, or porno-hyped Calvin Klein garments uncool will require a cultural awakening comparable to a hooker’s breaking away from her pimp, Lasn gives us specific ways to participate in the “joy of jamming.” If you get junk mail on the fax, send back a toner-breaking black piece of paper. When telemarketers call, say you’ll call back at THEIR home. There are 32 b&w illustrations, not finished but wickedly effective’such as the sketch of a bald Joe Camel on a hospital bed under the caption, “Joe Chemo.” Organized, like Walden, by season, this is the best call to simplify and renew natural life since Thoreau and the American Renaissance.