Starbucks’ coffee cup quote. Globalization, anyone?

“Taste is subjective. Taste is democratic. Taste is powerful. Taste– the combination of texture, aroma, temperature, aesthetic and environment– is also a window into someone else’s life or culture. Be confident in your taste, but remain curious and expose yourself to new tastes. Allow your taste to constantly evolve and grow– while keeping and cherishing the memories that taste creates.”

~Marcus Samuelsson, chef and co-owner of Aquavit.

Radio Commercials

Normally, I don’t listen to advertisements on the radio. But, today I had no choice, as I lay helpless, two people doing mysterious things in my mouth. I cannot imagine how much of my life has been spent at the dentist. Way too much.

That’s something I always remember about going to the dentist… the radio is always on. Why, I wonder? It could be just to keep them entertained as they work. Or to ease the nerves of the patients. The music is never heavy metal or country, both high-adrenaline music (heavy metal because its so intense, and country because people hate it so much). It’s always something safe and relaxing, like jazz, or soft rock, or a genre along those lines.

But today, in between Jack Johnson and the Beach Boys, a commercial came on. “Studies show that most consumers buy new furniture every seven years.” It said. “Think about it; how long has it been since the last time you bought new furniture? Seems about right, doesn’t it?” The woman’s calming voice was so persuasive.

Do people really appreciate being referred to as “consumers”? That label seems so… impersonally detached, assuming such a gluttonous comment about every person. And are the listeners really going to be convinced they need new furniture, just because all the other “gluttonous” MH3s buy it after a period of seven years? (MH3 is a term I learned working at Cutco– someone who will buy is married, has a house, and is over 30). Not to mention, isn’t it depressing, anyhow, that even if one was convinced to buy that Lay-Z-Boy today, they would just be getting a new one in seven years? How… detached. And how strange that the commercial isn’t even trying to hide that. They aren’t promising that I’m going to love the chair forever. They’re telling me I’ll get tired of it. But I still need to buy it anyway, since I’m tired of the old one.

Another commercial came on later for Haagens. “Laurie,” the average shopper, told us how she had shopped around at various different stores in the area… and Haagens always had the lowest price that saved her money. I didn’t think too much about this one, considering my mouth had been open for about thirty minutes straight and my jaw was starting to hurt, but the dentist’s assistant commented and surprised me out of my discomfort. “Well, if Laurie says it’s the best prices around, of course I’m going to shop there!” sarcasm was dripping heavily from her voice. After realizing the assistant was talking about the radio ad, my dentist added, “Well sure, that’s how it works, personal testimony.”

This quote I read while in the waiting room seems quite appropriate:

“The worldwide span of capitalism no longer depended on the accumulation and control of capital in the financial sense… Through mass media and pop culture it was enchaining them not through outright poverty, but by stuffing their heads with name brands and celebrity puffery, alchemizing them into mindless consumers.“

~Carl Raschke, The Next Reformation, pp. 14-15.

Thankfully, not all of us are mindless. Yet.

Wall-E: A Movie Review

Wall-E repelled me from the start. The previews convinced me the makers of Pixar were going to make yet another movie about robots, and as opposed to the more critical (and I think accurate) accounts such as “I, Robot” and “A.I.” and others that show the negative affects of a world inhabited by robots, I thought this one was going to be about how good they were.

And it was… to a certain extent. Just as I was afraid they were going to do, since the main characters are robots, they used movie-making and story-telling magic (often through humor) to emotionally attach the audience to Wall-E and Eva. Wall-E’s eclectic-ness and love of beauty showed him to be more “humane” than one would expect from a robot, and it is subtly implied that that is what has kept him alive, since all the other Wall-Es have “died.” Eva could be described (in human terms) as a B.A.– ready to shoot anything that seems like a threat or even an inconvenience or annoyance.

Yet… ultimately, despite all my criticisms of the movie, it was a work in anthropology, trying to decide what it means to be human. And surprisingly to me, they encountered consumerism quite profoundly in the movie. Consumerism was seen to be a huge problem– the premise of why Wall-E is by himself on earth is because the humans filled it up with so much trash it was no longer liveable. So, they go off to space to live while the Wall-Es (which stands for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class”) clean up the mess they left behind. The original people intend to come back once earth is cleaned up enough that life can live, but for hundreds of years that is not the case. So instead, their space ship becomes something extremely and eerily similar to “A Brave New World”– people who can do whatever they want, consume as much as they want, and in that way find their happiness. And on that line of exciting consumerism, I recently found out that EVA is designed by Apple.

The captain, which is one of the three humans who begins to return to what it means to be human, specifically by being honorable and virtuous, says a profound line when the robot who is controlling the ship tells him they cannot return to earth. “You will survive here,” the robot tells him. “I don’t want to survive,” the captain says passionately, “I want to live!” Two other passengers, with Wall-E’s help, discover a world outside of their TV screen, a world of beauty. The space outside their windows, the pool that no one swims in, etc… and then ultimately, through human touch, each other.

It is not really clear (possibly because it is chiefly a children’s movie) how reproduction happens on this ship. Children are kept in separate quarters from the others, cared for by robots, and again it is a sense of Brave New World. The captain asks the control robot for statistics at the beginning of the day and is told there is no more human count. Death is not discussed, but there is talk of “ancestors” so even though they have found out how to live happily with no worries, it is not an eternal life. Obesity plays a large part in relation to consumerism as well.

My frustration with the movie is that although they brought out all these criticisms, the solution seemed extremely unreal. The ship defeats the “evil robot” (which is another discussion that could be had- some robots are essentially good, while others are not. How did that happen? A discussion of Frankenstein might be in order for that), and then returns to earth with a green shoot that miraculously survives quite a beating. The captain somehow had water on his ship, although all other water sources seemed to have disappeared on earth, and they have been in space for 700 years. Then the humans take that one shoot of green and manage to reproduce it into lots and lots of greenery.

Which on the one hand, is extremely profound. Wendell Berry might be excited, that farming is put in such a positive light, and that the humans’ personal relationship with the earth is what allows them to live instead of surviving in a consumerism theme park. But, possibly because its supposed to be a side-plot anyway, and the real story is the romantic relationship between two robots, their lives are way to easily, sometimes at the assumption that the technology and robots helped make it that way (even though that sort of lifestyle is what led to the hyper-consumerism in the first place).

However, with all that said, it is a great movie about what it means to be human, and what our relationship with the earth should be. And, it is fantastic that such a seemingly silly movie can have such profound implications.

You Are What You Consume: “Being Consumed”: A Review

I’ve heard a few rumors that Wal-Mart is moving into an area near where I live.

Discussing with an acquaintance of mine who had brought it up, I immediately (probably parroting something I had heard from someone else) said with selfish conviction, “Oh, yeah, that’s going to be just awful for traffic.”

To which they responded, “Well, maybe, but think of how necessary it is. Wal-Mart’s prices are great, and it’s going to help a lot of people out having one this close.”

This is a vague recollection of how the actual conversation went, since it wasn’t very important to me at the time. I remember thinking a little about the selfishness of my comment in light of my companion’s comment, and how it had caused me to feel a slight twinge of guilt, since my companion obviously was not thinking of just herself, as I was. But now, after spending the day reading William T. Cavanaugh’s new book, “Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire,” I realize we were both untruthful in our statements, for very different reasons.

Mine, was quite obviously a selfish comment. It is ridiculous that I would judge an event’s worth by how much inconvenience it would cause me through excessive amounts of traffic. My statement was not even concerned with environmental issues or safety issues that more traffic would cause… traffic was simply a negative entity because it would cost me an extra five minutes to get to where I wanted to go, as if the time was mine in the first place and that the new Wal-Mart’s traffic would unjustly rob me of that time.

My acquaintance’s comment, although seemingly more thoughtful, was unfortunately just as erroneous. Just as traffic is inherently a negative, something that’s going to save money is a positive, and Wal-Mart does this well, both by offering low product prices, and with the recent gas rates, being close in proximity for convenience. But even if the items are cheaper at Wal-Mart, one has to wonder, in this free market economy with other competing stores that charge a much higher price, how are those price reductions possible for a competitive business? How is the company dealing with the money that’s being lost?

One can only infer that, through globalizing and paying minuscule wages to workers in foreign countries, Wal-Mart saves money and can “afford” to keep their prices so low. But that is perhaps a hasty assumption. They may very well pay their workers a decent amount. But that’s an even larger issue– although, as my companion’s comment said, Wal-Mart might be convenient for the community in which it resides, that community will have no idea exactly where those products came from. Nor will they care. So in fact, although Wal-Mart offers decent prices, it cultivates a detachment from the products, and from the production process.

Through the unlimited amount of commodities they offer, they are encouraging an endless amount of desire for stuff. Cavanaugh makes a magnificent point saying that the problem of consumerism isn’t that people are too greedy, and hoarding away as much wealth as they can… the problem is that people are addicted to wanting for the sake of wanting. Instead of being overly attached to items, they are in fact quite detached from them, never being fully satiated and always returning to shop again and again. This detachment ends up not being just directed at the products, but at the method of production as well. Put simply, our want for a nice pair of jeans competes against our desire to have justice reign in the world. So although the jeans might have been made by a Chinese woman who had been working a 16 hour shift for the 30th day in a row, we feel like there is nothing we can do. We have no way of finding out whether or not the worker who made them made them with dignity. And even if we could find that information out, what would the alternative be? Our addiction to the idea of capital is often too strong for us to gauge how worthwhile it really is to pay more money for a product for the cause of justice, or healthfulness. We want a healthy world… but often the price seems to high.

Cavanaugh does not offer an easy answers for this. But what he does suggest, since the question should not be whether or not we consume but rather how or what we consume, that we allow our lives to be transformed through consuming the Eucharist. Cavanaugh’s Catholicism comes into place quite nicely here.

The Eucharist joins the body of Christ in a common telos, an end desire that is what directs our consumption. Any desire that does not have a goal, desire sought for desire’s sake, is nothingness, according to Augustine. The Eucharist is a sacrament in which a community of virtue learns to desire truthfully, and in that experiences true freedom.

Cavanaugh explains, when we consume the Eucharist, although the body of Christ is being consumed, it is mysteriously consuming us. We are the body of Christ. We, like Christ, are identified with the poor and the weak. By consuming the Eucharist, we are subscribing to a reality more real than capitalism. We are allowing our lives to be transformed by this consumption by living “eucharistically”, giving and pouring ourselves out to be consumed by others.The Eucharist shows us a different sort of globalization, a universalism that is made real by embracing particularity, not by shunning it, replacing the abstraction of capitalism not with other abstractions but recognizing the concrete particulars of our community, and recognizing in that particularity of each person, a universalism that makes clear the universal nature of the Gospel.

Trade turns everything into a commodity, according to Cavanaugh– objects, people, ideas, feelings, etc. This is done with a mindset that assumes scarcity. To trade something implies a giving up of something for the sake of something else. It implies ownership of one object that is transfered to be owned by someone else. The Eucharist works with a very different mindset. By allowing oneself to be consumed, instead of just consuming, it gives up the illusion of being in control and offers one up to the vulnerability of a sovereign God, a God who invites us on a difficult journey of discipleship that will not always make sense, and will require us to lose everything, claiming that (illogically- loosening our grip on what makes sense) we will gain Christ. The Eucharist invites us to participate in a heart-wrenching event of loss, of death, claiming that in that very event lies true life, and hope for redemption. But that hope cannot be gained unless one lays down the desire to simply consume and allows oneself to be consumed.

Can You See the Matrix?

“While the voices of blockbuster movies and pop culture cry out for a life outside the matrix of numb efficiency… thankfully there is a movement of ordinary radicals sweeping the land, and ordinary people are choosing to live in radical new ways.”

A friend of mine wrote a blog about Shane Claiborne’s book “Irresistible Revolution.” I started to leave a comment, but it was getting to be just as long as the post itself, so I decided to write a blog in response to his.

http://reverenceofthemysterious.blogspot.com/
2008/04/first-century-christianity-brought-to.html

Shane Claiborne is definitely someone who backs up his writing with actions. He’s not just promoting this sort of life-style; he’s living it. As a pseudo-Portlander, I was interested to note that an emerging church here in Portland, Imago Dei, was supported by the proceeds of his book.

One of the (many) definitions of Postmodernism is “Late-capitalism.” Everything is infiltrated with the capitalist mindset. I went to the Portland Art Museum today with some 9th graders, and I couldn’t tell you how many times they suggested to one another that they should become an artist, because they could make millions! Especially attractive to them was the ease with which they could do it. Work is not valued, in and of itself; only as a means of making capital.

Seeing how money is really only illusionary and symbolic, it seems like a shaky ground to base one’s potential happiness on. However, the real troubling aspect is that we not only judge inanimate objects within the capitalistic mindset, our fellow human beings. When we meet someone, one of the first questions we ask is “What do you do?” which is secretly the question, “How much money do you make?” Depending on their answer we know how much society values them based on the sort of work they do, a.k.a we’ll have much more respect for a doctor than a janitor, since they make more money. Even our houses and cars are structured around appearances, trying to make them look as expensive as possible to get people to think that we are well-valued in society. From what little I know of Foucault, he would see that as a power struggle; the more societal value we have, the more power. Having just read Karl Marx’s, “The Communist Manifesto,” his criticisms are particularly notable in light of this conversation.

And perhaps that is one thing Christianity can take from Marx. Not just his criticism of capitalism, but perhaps even his alternative lifestyle. As Victor alluded to in his blog, politically communism has failed miserably and it would be foolish to say that it is flawless. But in the context of the Church, should our communities be somewhat communistic? The Anabaptists seemed to think so, abolishing private property and private capital, etc.

The New Monastics, which Claiborne and some of his fellow brothers are sometimes being called, seem to value this sort of counter-cultural lifestyle as well. One could argue that we need to realize that we live by a different paradigm of reality; what the world tells us is “real” is really an allusion; a matrix we are stuck in. However, it is possible to recognize the matrix and have a rebirth (not unlike Neo’s– full of lots of pain) and to see the world as it really is. Rodney Clapp wrote a book called “A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian World.” While Neibuhr’s renowned “Christ and Culture” was profoundly important, Clapp’s criticism of it is that he addresses “culture” as this monolithic thing; Clapp recognizes that we live in a multi-cultural society, and that the church itself should be one of those cultures. And as its own culture, Christianity has a lot of practices (liturgy) that operates under a different way of thinking that reveals itself differently, and perhaps even counter-cultural (or, my favorite word, subversive). The New Monastics practice this liturgy in a profound way; but that is not to diminish the subversiveness of the “normal” Christian practices. Even getting up and going to church is itself a counter-cultural act; “time is money” capitalism says, and as such we should spend every minute we can trying to increase our capital. There is no way to “make money” at church (unless you’re the pastor?), but more than that, it is saying there is something much more valuable than money.

Teaching the Communist Manifesto… to 9th Graders.

It is a horribly distasteful feeling to look into seventeen pairs of eyes belonging to the brightest freshmen I know… and see blank stares. Irritably, I cannot even interpret why they look blank; are they bored, apathetic, did they get enough sleep the night before, or do they just not see me as someone they can learn from? Of course, my real hope is that they are actually learning something, despite the evidence to the contrary.

I am a senior in high school, and the reason I was teaching The Communist Manifesto is because of my role as teacher’s assistant, and the teacher was out of town. I petitioned for the role of TA because I thought I wanted to be a teacher; but to be honest, I don’t know if teaching is even a profession I want to go into. I know I love to learn, and that I would love others to love to learn as much as I do. Not to mention the numerous ways my life has been changed by those who see their identities as “teacher” not just their occupation. But do I have the gifts and strengths to be a teacher myself? That is a question I hope I won’t have to wrestle with for a few years. But for the time being, I know I wanted to do my best in this role.

The class curriculum itself is quite fascinating in and of itself, even for me; the freshmen are learning things most people do not learn until college, if they learn it at all. The highlight of the year is the number of months they spent on the Enlightenment, reading literature that correlated with the time and/or themes of the Enlightenment. Now they are struggling through “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx, the most difficult reading they’ve had all year.

I began reading it myself, and it certainly was not a piece of cake. The language especially is the difficult aspect for a group of 14-year-olds who would much prefer the writing style of Ted Dekker than the antiquated language of Karl Marx (and… perhaps I secretly speak for myself as well). So not only did I face the challenge to lead a discussion over the message of Karl Marx and its long-reaching implications (which I was not even sure if I understood correctly), but I also had to be able to tell them what specific paragraphs and words meant. It’s one thing to read something and have a nice summary to use for inspiration in an abstract discussion; quite another to actually encounter the text itself.

When it got down to it, certain things were disastrous. I selected a number of quotes that I printed the day before on transparencies, only to find the next morning I had not allowed the ink to dry before stacking them on each other, leaving them smudged and pretty much useless. Then I had thought we would start from page one, spending the most time on the first section, and if time allowed, move on to the second. Apparently I was not present (or paying attention) previously, since the class had already talked about the first section. In hindsight I realize I should have asked someone to summarize, both for my benefit and theirs, but instead I was so flustered I just opened it up to questions and jumped right into the material. I’m not sure if this was a good strategy on my part, especially because in some ways I made it clear to them that I really had no idea what I was talking about. Not to say that I told them I was unqualified (although they could have taken it that way) , or that nothing could be learned; I just wanted them to know that my comments and explanations were undoubtedly imperfect, even if my experiences gave me a better context from which to interpret the passages more accurately than they could.

For the majority of the period, I opened it up to specific questions the students had, and after having them read the paragraph they were struggling with, I’d try and explain it in layman’s terms. I had a dictionary on my desk for the words I had never heard of, or did not want to explain poorly. All-in-all, I think it went… alright. of course, there’s always things that can be improved. But, on the positive side of things, we parsed out exploitation, discussed why Marx would want to abolish things like private property, the family, and eternal truths and religion. I even tried to talk about metanarratives with them at the very end, but with about three minutes on the clock I think I just confused them more than anything. Hopefully it was at least a starting point for further conversation.

My biggest obstacle was not knowing whether or not they actually cared about trying to learn the material. A lot of my experience as a student has shown me that in most classrooms, the learner is almost entirely passive. As I’m studying teaching, however, I’m realizing that if true learning is taking place, it is the student who is the main character in the classroom, and as such should play a very active role. As a student myself it is a little uncomfortable to do that in classrooms in which my peers are content to be passive, and in which the teacher has some sort of agenda that makes them prefer to be the main character in the classroom. Because I am chiefly a student, it felt like I was masquerading as a teacher for the period, and I had no way of knowing whether or not the students saw me as someone they could truly learn from or someone not worth their time. Ultimately I hope despite their passivity and my own experience, learning occurred, at least in a foundational way that can continue to be built upon.