Month of March , 2005

According to an Inside Higher Education article:

The chancellor of the Boulder campus, where Churchill teaches ethnic studies, said Thursday that Churchill's comments were protected by the U.S. Constitution and that there was no evidence that his views interfered with his teaching duties.

But the speech could still result in Churchill's dismissal -- many months from now. That's because the outrage over Churchill's comments on the victims of 9/11 led to scrutiny of his record and numerous charges of misconduct -- primarily plagiarism -- against him.

Translation: We're gonna string up that Injun, but not while everyone's watching. We'll wait a few months for things to cool down.

Forbes has a strange article about Whole Foods up. I don't shop at Whole Foods because, as the article notes, it is quite expensive, and as the article doesn't mention, they are anti-labor. But my not shopping there has nothing to do with the article, which notes that Whole Foods is wildly successful, earning a profit-rate 3 times higher than the average supermarket and dominating the health-food/organic/gourmet market. Super-crazy capitalist success story, you'd think. But then why is Forbes -- essentially capitalism-porn -- so dismissive? Listen:

Just about every food has a story behind it at this small but remarkably profitable chain, known for luminous, loving displays of succulent and savory foodstuffs and prices so obscenely high they prompt gasps of disbelief. Every Whole Foods store is a bountiful temple of wholesome eco-righteousness, a refuge from fears (valid or not) of synthetic pesticides, growth hormones and genetically modified Frankenfoods. (Emphasis added)

The whole article is like that -- from the title, "Food Porn", to a sidebar entitled "More Organic Than Thou". The contempt with which the author (one Seth Lubove) holds Whole Foods (and their customers) is palpable in sentences like "Mackey [founder and CEO of Whole Foods] further entices the Volvo and Range Rover set by promoting do-gooder causes, from more humane treatment of farm animals and "bird-friendly" coffee to "sustainable" seafood..." and depictions of the chain as "a glutton's paradise" that hypocritically "present[s] food as theater, playing up the pious organic angle even as it peddles tempting offerings of culinary excess."

Now, if Whole Foods was any other corporation -- say, Enron -- you know Forbes would be on its knees begging to "service" Mackey. Whole Foods is practically a case-study in free marketeering: find an underserved market niche and serve it, innovatively and profitably. No other supermarket has come even close to the success Whole Foods has had in its niche -- and in fact, some of them aren't doing as well as Whole Foods in their own markets! They're incredibly profitable, driving costs up because their market will bear it, underpaying employees and breaking unions -- what Dow-fearing capitalist could object to that?

The only explanation I can think of is hinted at in the last paragraph: "Beneath this booming business, however, Whole Foods still hews to its hippie, health-food roots." That they are, in fact, the "granola-crunching hippies" that the company's co-president Walter Robb insists they aren't. Or, more importantly, maybe, that their customers are granola-crunching hippies, wooly-headed liberals that refuse to swallow the industry wisdom that agri-chemical farming, heavy hormone use, anti-environmental policies, and the like are Good Things. As Doc Searls has noted repeatedly, a lot of corporate-types simply abhor their customers (not least by thinking of us as "consumers", passive open mouths at the end of corporate-controlled production and distribution conduits). Although I won't shop there, it has to be noted that Whole Foods has succeeded -- has succeeded even in bilking its customers -- by treating their customers as people and their customers' concerns as important and valid ones. And that goes flatly against the central principle of "Forbes Capitalism": Give the customers what they want, as long as what they want is what we're giving them.

A few years ago, Wilco recorded an album. It was a great album, but their label thought it was crap. So they told Wilco to fuck off and put the album in the can. Wilco bought back their masters and put them on the Internets. It was a great album, and many downloaded it, thinking as they listened to it, "this is a great album, those folks at Warner Bros [iirc] are a bunch of dillwads." Warner Bros.' loss was Warner Bros.' gain, though, when another division of WB went to Wilco and said "please let us release your really great album" and Wilco said "ok" and it was released and it was, for my money, the best album of the New American Century. And God saw this, and was pleased.

Then Fiona Apple recorded an album, and by all accounts it's a great one, but their label (Sony this time) thought it was crap. So they told Apple to fuck off and put the album in the can. Some DJ thought Sony was a bunch of crap and put the album on the Internets. It is, apparently, a great album, and many downloaded it, including One Man who is downloading it as I write this, thinking as they downloaded it, "this could be a great album, but even if it isn't, those folks at Sony are a bunch of dillwads." Sony's loss might become Sony's gain, though, if they pull their heads, earbuds and all, out of their collective asses and go to Apple and say "please let us release this album that your fans are begging us to release so they can pay for it instead of downloading it free which many are doing even as we try to work out how to relax our sphincters enough to get out heads out of our asses. "get out of the fucking record business and let someone who fucking likes music take over. It's very clear -- if you don't want to release good music, fine, go be carpenters or racecar drivers or some other shit and leave us the fuck alone. If you refuse to give a crap about the people who actually like music and want to buy great music -- you know, your customers? -- then please, just go away. Quit moaning about how we owe you a fucking living and definitely quit thinking that you have anything to say about music. Look at the indies -- they're releasing great music all the time and making pretty good livings doing it. Sure, they don't wield much influence over national governments and they can't afford to take clients on 6-day Thai sex cruises to have sex with minors, but that's not the business you're supposed to be in. Remember, way back when, pr'y you were teenagers and couldn't get laid so you lay in bed listening to great albums and thought "when I grow up and my willy works better, I want to be in the record business"? Well, you're not -- don't even try to fool yourself. You're in the advertising and jerking off Senators business. So why don't you leave us alone, let us have our music, and go the fuck away?

Before you give me a reason to be angry or bitter or something.

We are, it seems, a storytelling species. Narrative is not only the most natural and most persuasive way of telling things to other people, some theorists (such as David Carr) see narrative as the structure of our own understanding of our lives. That is, we tell ourselves, to ourselves.

Marketers are storytellers. Look at a beer commercial, a Levi's ad, a car commercial, and you see a marketer telling you a story about the kind of person you will be if you buy their product. Seth Godin, author of (among other books) the forthcoming All Marketers Are Liars : The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World, has launched a companion blog collecting some of the stories that marketers (using the term loosely -- in Godin's estimation, an art collector with a Pollock on the wall is a marketer, marketing themself) tell about their clients. Consider Evian:

Of course, it's not just water. You can solve your thirst problem for free. You buy bottled water because of the way it makes you feel, because of the impact the story has on your mood, not because you need the fluid.

Or the Moleskine notebook:

Yet the story, the story that says it was the key tool of the great European writers gives me pause every time I pick it up. Maybe this time, maybe, just maybe, some of the magic will rub off on me.

The marketers of these products aren't positioning them in relation to the truth about their products -- "this product meets such-and-such need because of whatever" -- but rather in relationship to our concepts of self. Some of the stories are lies: credit card companies printing their junk mail envelopes to look like there's a card inside, because for some reason people are more likelyto open envelopes if they think there's a card inside. But the Evian and Moleskine stories above aren't strictly lies -- there's no particularly malicious intent, unless you think maximizing profit is malicious (and I suppose that's an argument that could be made). Rather, they are fictions, made-up narratives whose truth lies not in their referential value but in their evocative value.

In this sense, I disagree with Godin's assertion that marketers are "liars". They (and to the extent that we are all marketers of one sort or another, we) are crafters of fictions, tellers of stories. On a truth-value scale, there's little difference between "Moleskine notebooks are the notebooks of the greatest writers" and "In the beginning was the Word" or "There once was a prince named Hamlet". None of these are accurate reflections of historical truth (for the Believers out there, that's an accurate statement -- "in the beginning" was, technically, before history). But all of them convey -- or, better yet, evoke -- a story about the world that their tellers would like us to take as a truth, if not as The Truth.

In a way, fictions are more true than truth. After all, while we might debate endlessly about who killed John F. Kennedy, there can be no question of who killed Hamlet. Perhaps that's the difference between lies and other stories (rather than the "malicious intent" standard I referenced above): a lie can be proven false, and once that happens, they no longer have any power over us. Stories are always already false, which makes their falseness irrelevant -- and thus, paradoxically, makes them vehicles for truth.

Acting Schmuck-for Life Bill O'Reilly is upset about the Buster Bunny/lesbian family incident. It's just common sense, as everything he says is -- if he can't imagine something, it must be absolutely and irrevocably wrong. So, Buster Bunny -- who is a hip, modern dude -- heads up to Syrup Country and hangs with a family headed by *gasp* lesbians! This bothers our Secretary of Education and Bill O'Reilly, who feel that they should shield our young from the realities of sexuality.

Many Americans believe that little kids should have a childhood and not be subjected to any kind of sexuality. I don't want to be offensive here, but who in their right mind wants to explain Norma and Barbara's lifestyle to their 4-year-old? Give the kids a break, OK?

But, of course, they still don't really get the difference between "sexuality", which is, like, part of your identity, the way you approach the world, and sex, which is two people (or more, or even less) doin' it. I agree that it's probably not in the best interests of our society, the way things stand right now, to be showing sex on PBS. Unless it's, like, hot wildebeest-on-wildebeest action, but then, only after 10 pm, please.

So here's the thing, Billy: kids are "exposed to... sexuality" -- even your twisted, weird, phone-based, falafelesque sexuality -- all the fucking time. When they meet you, god forbid, they are "exposed" to your sexuality. It's part of who you are. When they meet anyone, they are exposed to that person's sexuality -- it's part of who they are. Believe it or not, they even got their own sexualities -- maybe not full-grown, pass-the-tahini-please sexualities, but still. It's part of who they are.

Here's another thing, Willie -- there's lesbians all around! No, they're not coming to get you -- you don't have to hide. Nor order another vibe (but if you do, remember: color code them so you know whose is whose!). But there's lesbians, and people in same-sex relationships, all over the place (especially in your Republican families, for some reason...) and children, no matter what you might do, are meeting these lesbians and gay men and queers and bisexuals and polyamours and intersexed folks and all manner of sexualities that are neither a) strictly heterosexual, nor b) yours (whatever you want to call it). They meet them among the parents and older siblings of their peers, among the doctors and firefighters and police officers that come to their schools for demonstrations, among their teachers and school staff, among the shopkeepers and employees they come into contact with, and so on.

What you're asking is for a world in which what kids see on TV is vastly different from what they see in the world around them, every day. You're right -- there was probably no specific reason why the maple farmers in the Buster Bunny episode had to be lesbians. Except, just this: some people are. Sometimes you go over to your friends' house and their moms are lesbians. Or their dads are queer. Or one of their dads is bi, another is gay, one mom is strictly gay, and the other two are bi. And you know what? Unless the people are the kinds of freaks who would call their employees up late at night and make odd insinnuendoes about naming vibrators, they probably aren't exposing their kids and their kids' friends to any sex. There's nothing dirty for a Moral Paragon like yourself to have to explain.

What you, and the rest of us, do have to explain is why the family structure is unlike our own kids'. And then we have to explain why there's hardly any families like Johhny's or Mary's on TV. We have to explain how some people are afraid of people who love wrong -- try getting that across to your "innocent" 4 year old imaginary friend. That some people absolutely hate families like Johnny's and Mary's -- that they'll go out of their ways to make families like that suffer -- because a man loves another man the way Mommy loves Daddy.

Nobody "in their right mind wants to explain" that, but you and the other Immoralists with your message of shame and outrage make it necessary, every freakin' day.

CODA: This post was inspired by the cease-and-desist letter sent to Newshounds for linking to O'Reilly's article. The people at Stay Free! Daily thought it would be a good idea if everyone linked to the article. Since I like doing things that upset B.O'REilly, I thought that sounded like a grand idea. This before I even read the article -- but on reading it, I decided that, hey, it really is a piece of shit, and deserves more than a meaningful but ultimately futile symbolic jab. What the O-man needs is a solid mocking, which I hope I have administered thoroughly.