Oh, but what a clamor you have created!
Ha.
I’ve got another one for you anyway.
I’ve recently become preoccupied with lettuce. Pre-washed, bagged lettuce, to be precise. No need for a salad spinner, or even a knife. Washing lettuce has long been my least favorite kitchen activity, so I’m incredibly happy to give it up. Happy, happy, happy I am, deriving true delight from the simplicity, the ease of bagged, cold-water-washed lettuce.
Then, however, I pick up an Adbusters, and self-doubt coalesces into small bubbles in my bloodstream. A few flips of the page, and it’s clear I’m just a pawn of the bagged lettuce industry. They spy on me late at night with red-eye goggles. They watch me leaning on the kitchen counter, shoulders swaying under the weight of the working girl’s cares. They see me faltering in the face of the complexity of the salad spinner, too tired, giving up. They stalk me to the grocery store the following week, where I stall at the hefty price tag of prewashed lettuce, then remember my late-night exhaustion, and throw the lettuce into my cart. They know me so well! They know how to make my bland heart beat with a neat, small pleasure – efficient lunch preparation. I feel delighted when it’s achieved. But lo, I am not delighted. I am not. I’ve merely been played by agribusiness turned lifestyle product company! When I am happy it is merely an illusion. I am not happy.
Adbusters generally makes me sick to my stomach; the tone is just a constant level of sarcasm I can’t muster, and I can’t really get on board with the whole ironic twisting of images thing. If the problem is the overabundance of branded logos, then how does reproducing them yet again, with a subtle, mocking twist, contribute to their destabilization? I’m ready to go on the record saying that the human mind is not that quick, or that sophisticated. The subtle mocking twist is only noticed way too late, long after the nearly palpable mapping of the graphic onto the well-worn grooves of the mind, grooves that are just waiting for the image to fall softly and neatly into their mold. (It’s kind of like drag…but that’s for another day.)
That was a brief detour. I think the problem with Adbusters and political orientations of similar ilk is that they maintain that we can’t have fun, can’t win, can’t trust our own emotions and desires until the revolution comes. Such an approach does not believe that change and authenticity can happen this very minute, in this very space.
Yesterday I read a statement on the Sylvia Rivera Law Project website that struck me pleasantly, and it is relevant. In a section explaining why they operate as a collective, they write, “We believe that in the struggle for social justice too often change is perceived as a product and not a process. We seek to use a non-hierarchical structure to support work that aims to redistribute power and wealth for a more just society.” For them, it’s not worth having a more common or efficient management structure to hasten liberation day. Instead, small pieces of liberation can happen right now, because SRLP is already structured the way it would be at the post-revolutionary sunset. It’s a process. Even with their conditioned, automatonic brains, some of it can happen every day, as they go along, instead of in one big fell swoop at the very end.
So I don’t need to beat myself up about buying bagged lettuce. I can trust myself to make okay decisions based on authentic feelings, here and now, even with my own conditioned, automatonic brain.
(Do you think SRLP would be angered to hear me co-opt their mission statement to get myself off the hook about bagged lettuce?)
Maybe, actually, bagged lettuce is just the smallest part of life, and I’m the least obvious, and most free, when against all good reason my roommates and I start making our most ambitious of dinners at 10pm, hauling out not only the salad spinner but the blender and the garlic press and mortar and pestle, playing music loudly and talking and talking, just because we like to eat together.
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