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It’s not enough
just to write a book to make a point these days.
Once it’s written,
you have to sell it. And to do that, you need a hook. This season, that
gimmick is being painfully earnest . . . and unwittingly hypocritical.
First out of the
gate, there was a rash of books advocating young women cast aside the
feminist achievements of their forebears — forget sexual autonomy, forget
workplace equality; instead, turn yourself into some unholy mix of Helen
Gurley Brown, a Jacqueline Susann heroine and June Cleaver. Canada’s own
Danielle Crittenden led the pack. Crittenden said women should be
stay-at-home moms — unless they happened to be named Danielle Crittenden.
Then there was Jed
Purdy, the 24-year-old Savonarola whose For Common Things was
marketed as a clarion call to all the disaffected, irony-impaired
wisenheimers who can only mock the continuing crisis. We were all supposed
to forget about 50 years of cynical politics and a succession of cheap
shucks to return to a simpler, better time. Jed wasn’t really clear on how
widespread credulousness would make things better. We were just supposed to
trust him that it would. Next thing you know, old Jed’s a millionaire.
Push aside
Crittenden’s carping and Jed’s jeremiad to make room for Naomi Klein’s No
Logo (Alfred. A. Knopf Canada, $35.95).
Klein’s spent the
last five years as a spokesperson for her generation — she’s 29 — in a
Toronto Star column. Simultaneously, she’s been straw boss of the
anarcho-syndicalist collective that brings you the leftist curio This
Magazine. In her book, Klein castigates cool-hunters and research
wizards who explain youngsters to corporations and marketers eager to sell
them stuff; she says that’s bad. But apparently it’s good if the person
doing the explaining is Naomi Klein and the audience is suburban newspaper
readers or people who buy her book. Being so hip and with-it and cutting
edge and all, Klein knows a trend when she sees one. And this Humorless
Earnestness is something she’s almost been bred for. Like Purdy, Klein was
reared by disaffected hippie types. Like Purdy, she is dismayed by her
contemporaries. And like Purdy, she knows how to fix what ails us. We can
start by feeling guilty for consuming.
No Logo
is 445 closely printed pages of thumb-sucking about the global economy
that’s spread across the planet in the wake of Marxism’s collapse, larded
liberally with charts, graphs and visual aids to give its airy adolescent
contentions the weight of truth. Klein wants us all to take up arms and
resist being identified as target markets by the big corporations she labels
“brand bullies.”
Like anything
else, Klein’s book is a product before it’s anything else, and it’s being
branded, hyped and marketed for all it’s worth. Knopf paid a healthy advance
for No Logo. It wants to earn that advance back and turn a profit.
Like any product, Klein’s musings have been packaged for easy consumption.
And Klein’s been on the front line of the marketing blitz for the book,
making the requisite rounds of media outlets and shilling furiously on her
volume’s behalf. Somehow, that’s not a sin when Naomi does it, even though
it’s bad when done by Starbucks or The Gap. Even though Klein says buying
Gap pants or Starbucks coffee makes you, concerned consumer, guilty by
association, it would seem buying No Logo earns you some kind of
indulgence that obviates your previous sins of consumption. Klein takes
great pains to detail the degradation of Third World workers exploited by
transnational corporations. But her exploiting their misery as a means of
juicing up her book is, apparently, just fine.
Klein rails
against copyright laws stifling creativity and cultural foment. But she
hasn’t offered the content of her book for free on the Web. Instead, she’s
got it prominently displayed on big chain book retailer Indigo’s Web site,
with a helpful hyperlink to Bronwyn Drainie’s glowing review. (Drainie’s
fulsome praise appeared as journalism in the Globe and Mail’s book
review and as advertising copy on Indigo’s Web site — Klein’s not the only
person who can suck and blow at the same time.)
So how are we
supposed to wrest any shred of autonomy from the marketers who’ve colonized
our every waking moment? Defacing advertising and having “reclaim the
streets” gatherings — part party, part riot — ought to do it, says Klein.
Consumption is the problem, but Klein doesn’t advocate not consuming. That’s
the province of Adbusters,
which she doesn’t like because it commits the same kinds of marketing sins
it’s supposed to be battling. Again, here’s something that’s bad when
anybody else does it, but okay for Naomi.
If you’re still
wondering how you can break the cycle of slick marketing and mindless
consumption, remember that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a
blister. Instead of buying No Logo, why not borrow it from your local
library? |
