On the important French Fry Question

Dennis Perrin/Nancy Bauer bauerperrin at mindspring.com
Sun Jan 21 09:45:15 PST 2001



>By John's criteria, only the rich who can afford _not_ to eat fast
>food, shop at Wal-Mart, etc. can live morally correct lives. What
>the masses buy is cheap mass products of sweatshop labor; what the
>truly rich buy, in contrast, is expensive products of relatively
>well-paid artisanal labor. Haute couture & formal dining at
>fashionable restaurants (or better yet, _your own personal cook_,
>well compensated year-around to provide meals _at home_, to your
>taste & convenience) are good examples of the latter. Morally
>correct consumption is a luxury that only those who don't & can't
>count their own money can afford.
>
>Yoshie

Well, yes and no. Firstly, there is no such thing as "morally correct consumption" in a corporate oligopoly. Everyone, no matter how poor or rich, is compromised to some degree. You can call yourself a Marxist, a socialist, an anarchist, whatever, but you still practice capitalism and think, by necessity, in capitalist terms. As I said earlier, all you can do is make certain choices, assuming you're aware that certain (false?) choices exist.

As for the masses and their reliance on all things cheap and corrupt, it is true that, economically speaking, most average people must shop where they can afford to shop. But where does that stop? And can it? A lot of the masses enjoy the WWF and will no doubt tune into the XFL. Police "reality" shows are big hits among the very class that is shown being harassed and locked up onscreen. Is it elitist to criticize this form of "entertainment"?

About a year or so ago I saw a video of some white PETA activists following an Oscar Mayer hotdog mobile that was giving away free food. When the hotdog mobile stopped in a black neighborhood, the PETAites began to denounce slaughterhouses and meat consumption to the utter bafflement of the black consumers gathered. They were eventually hooted down, and I think for good reason. But does that mean the critique of the meat industry is elitist or unsound? Or should it be expressed in more upscale surroundings?

DP



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