On Mon, 3 Apr 2000 21:42:23 -0400 "Peter K." <peterk at enteract.com> wrote:
> [On page A6 today, there appears a rare installment of the Times's profiles
> in radicalism series. "The most visible face"? Kenneth Mackendrick, any
> thoughts?]
I must be excluded from vast parts of 'Canadian' culture. I knew about the book but have not read it, and the only time I hear about Klein is when I read her editorials in the Toronto Star (I think it's the Star...). I must admit, I'm fairly cloistered when it comes to this sort of thing. The only Klein I regularly come into contact with is Melanie Klein.
> "Branding means selling us our desires," said Ms. Klein, whose new book, "No
Logo," has made her Canada's 29-year-old media meteor and the most visible face
of a sometimes scattershot anti-corporate youth movement, which is planning a
show of force in Washington in mid-April.
"Most visible face?" Not in my experience. Mel Lastman's 300 plastic moose have received more attention. Lastman, the major of Toronto, is building 300 plastic moose and scattering them in downtown Toronto, in the hopes of attracting $200M in tourism. This is modeled after a Chicago event, which had Cows invade the city last year. I suggested cockroaches instead of moose, but I think I went unnoticed. Maybe we should have beavers ridding on the backs of the moose... oh no, *that* would be silly, and this is "Toronto the good" not "Toronto the silly."
> Mixing activism with analysis, she has filled university auditoriums, has won
a column in The Globe and Mail...
Well, I guess she used to write for the Star...
> At the same time, she remembered that when advertisements started to
infiltrate bathroom stalls at the University of Toronto, students fought back,
wielding felt-tip pens against the omnipresence of marketing.
In the "men's" washroom(s) there is an ad campaign by an electronics company (right in front of the urinals) - featuring certain body parts of a woman in a wet T-shirt. It hasn't been marked up yet. I guess this signals the de-Klein of the left on campus.... I'll contradict this in the next paragraph.
> Four years later, her book contains some of her favorite "culture jamming"
> examples: perky models morphed into skulls; Nike's "Just Do It" slogan
> tweaked into "Justice. Do It"; Apple Computers' "Think Different" campaign
> mysteriously embellished with a photo of Stalin and the ominous slogan
> "Think Really Different."
This campaign is still in progess, although it hasn't seemed to reach the "men's" washroom, posters and ads around the university and business / fashion districts (Bloor and Yonge, King and Bay, Queen Street) are regularly defaced / re-written. The most notably in recent times was one for life-savers - the ad featured a huge life-saver with a tongue in the middle. It read, "It screams GRAPE." The G had been scribbled out.
> In such an economy, Ms. Klein's anti-multinational message has appealed to
people who complain of a loss of local economic control.
My impression is that Klein has tapped into something that hasn't yet been translated into public discourse - and I think she's doing a really excellent job articulating this. The typical "leftist" message falls on deaf ears in most parts of Canada (so it seems to me). Instead of turning left in the downsize, it seems that the far right is making gains - with their "no-nonsense" message of "common sense" or "national unity" (or "separation" in some parts). The leftist organizations focus on community... the right on family... and the family message seems to be the one people listen to more often than not (when the right does employ the rhetoric of community, it always refers to the corporate community without acknowledging it) (education and health care are the two issues predominantly discussed right now, both "appeal" to the family as relatively isolated and autonomous - "what will happen to us when we're sick, and what about our kids future"). Klein is changing the focus a bit by targeting commercialization, which a good many people are sick of. As a strategy, it changes the public discourse a bit, and I can't help but think this is a good thing.
A fairly wise professor once mentioned to me that people, in general, are a lot more radical than they seem, but this doesn't often translate well into public discourse. I take this for granted. It is a matter of phronesis, practical wisdom. Klein's arguments, I suspect, are probably moderate claims that she's advanced for the purposes of generating a public discussion.
ken