> As consumers we *are* individuals, individuals living the best as we can
> in this damn capitalist world. We make our decisions according to what
> is best for us
> as private persons. So we buy our books from borders, from wahrs, from
> hole-in-the-wall used book stores, wherever, just as we buy our food and
> our shoes and our x's and y's and z's on the same general principle.
> Merelly private decisions, merely private preferences. (I got used to
> boycotting Folgers during the 80s --it was an organized boycott -- and
> discovered other coffees I like better, and don't buy Folgers anymore:
> mere personal choices now, since the organized boycott is over. I would
> not dream of saying anyone else should boycott Folgers.)
FRUIT INTERLUDE:
I LOVE Guava necter. Perhaps because we had a pineapple guave bush when I was a kid, and so looked forward to the tiny handful of fruit it yielded every year.
Some years ago Nestle bought Kerns, which in many places is the ONLY available brand of Guava necter. The boycott against Nestles was over years before that. But the idea of buying a food I so loved from a company I so despised physically sickened me. I have never bought another Kerns Guava Necter since.
To my mind, Nestles is so heinous it is forever anathema. I will gladly tell ANYONE and EVERYONE that they should NEVER buy anything from Nestles, even though I realize that capitalism is the real bottom-line culprit.
Carrols absolute dichotomizing between individual consumers and organized boycotts is only *slightly* less idiotic than the naive belief that personal choice alone is sufficient to bring about a perfect world.
If people have NO sense of morality except when it's organized by someone else, then we are surely done for.
BACK TO BOOKSTORES:
Patronize the chains and you are underwriting the death of the mind.
For all their foibles, independent bookstores provide diversity in the marketplace. With 2 chains that means any one book may face just 2 buyers who will determine its fate. Think a moment about what this does to publishers. And what this does in turn to writers.
It hasn't gotten this far, of course, there are still plenty of independent bookstores out there, but this kind of pressure is already being felt, on top of the pressures in the publishing industry itself.
We're supposed to be able to think in terms of systemic causes and effects. The systemic effects here are about as transparent as one could wish for. And it has to do with the fucking LIFE OF THE MIND for cryin out loud!
You can have a fascist revolution without a life of the mind, but you damn sure can't have a Marxist revolution that way.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"