Many people will find this article unpleasant, as it
challenges the very nature of personal identity. Firstly,
we live in a consumer culture and freely admit-it.- We
consume all sorts of wonderful products for our enjoy-
ment, popular entertainment like music, television.and
newspapers. How does this affect our individuality?
It’s simple really, when we seé someone on T.V. behav-
ing ina way we admire, it’s natural to want to emulate
them or believe whatever they're saying. It happens all
the time: middle income suburban kids talking like
urban gangsters, teen girls dressing like Spears and
chanting herdyrics like holy mantras. Hit me baby, one
more time.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? In countries like
Canada and the States with such diverse cultural bases,
what's wrong with people uniting under one big stan-
dard culture? After all, homogenous culture stabilizes
fragmented societies like Canada and the U.S, divided
along ethnic and economic lines.-The problem is that
the ‘standardized’ culture of North America isn’t exact-
ly a natural one. It’s designed specifically to benefit the
profiteers who designed it over the last three hundred
years. The founders are long dead, but their grand-
children inherited their fortunes and are now benefit-
ing from the manipulation of American culture
towards consumerism. These people are now the
Fortune 500, the richest five hundred families. in the
U.S. (0.000005%?) who control about 70% of the power
and resources. These are the people who sell us almost
all of the things we buy,

Let me introduce the phrase American Corporate
Mono-culture, referring to all the culture we get
through American big business, which means pretty
much all the culture we have. Everything you see on

T.V. coming from the US is part of the Corporate Mono-
culture: magazines, newspapers, industrial equipment,
any article of clothing you can purchase from American
retail outlets. Even Tim Horton's, originally a
Canadian company, is now in service to the Mono-cul-
ture.

The important thing to keep in mind is that ‘to con-
sume’ is ‘to destroy’. When we consume a Big Mac
we're not only destroying the burger, but a plot of
grass somewhere in the world that the cows ate to get
so meaty and delicious. Did you know, when you eat
a burger from McDonald's the chances are you're eat-
ing beef from about 1000 different cows? Those 1000
cows probably turned a grassy area into a dry, dusty,
now worthless plot of land somewhere in Brazil.

So, some of the products we consume have to

destroy other things before they even get to us. Not a

big surprise, we already know that consumption is
destruction. But what about consumer products we
buy and don’t destroy, like clothes from the Gap? We
consume those clothes by purchasing and wearing
them, yet we do not destroy them. What then is being
destroyed by consuming clothes from the American
Corporate Mono-culture?

The answer is culture. Your family’s culture (based
on heritage and ancestry) is being consumed when you
buy from’ standardized American culture
Everyone has a cultural heritage, some people have
more than one, and wearing brand name clothing is
forsaking the unique cultural heritage that composes
your identity. This is the nature’of the American
Corporate Mono-culture; it consumes other cultures.
This process is called assimilation, incorporation, even
digestion of one culture by another.

shops!

Clothing is an

13

MARCH 24, 2004

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easy example, but the consumption of culture occurs
many less visible levels.

Allow me to make you aware of a Global cultural cri-
sis that’s occurring in every impoverished’ country
with access to American television.

I first witnessed this crisis when I was living in India
for six months. To the average Indian, television is
such a rare luxury that someone with a_T.V. will rou-
tinely find their house surrounded by neighbors look-
ing in the windows to see what's on. One television is
often surrounded by at least fifteen people gazing
wide eyed and slack jawed into the electric fire.

The young people in these countries are watching
our lifestyle as it is portrayed in all of our favorite sit-
coms, but more importantly commercials. They see
two cars in every garage, beautiful people doing the
things we do like wearing expensive Nike shoes, eat-
ing mouth-watering fast fobd, wearing three hundred
dollar sun glasses, et cetera.

These kids see out lifestyles glorified, and want it for
themselves. The psychological effect of this exposure
on young people in poor countries is anger, but not
towards us. They get angry with their own societies for
not providing the luxuries we have, feeling the desire
to forsake their cultural heritage for a shot at the
American Dream. This means leaving the family. and
moving to the nearest city where the money is; proba-
bly factory work making the clothes we buy. The cycle
of consumption and destruction continues.

Our culture is currently the most powerful consum-
ing force in the world. How much responsibility
should we feel for the power? ®