Both the broader and the narrower sense, right? He says “flaunt our … sexuality” just below. Once that’s in the list, it’s hard retroactively to blot it out.

when a modest, pious man living in a poor village a world away looks at us, what does he see?”

I suspect by saying we live more promiscuously, he meant it in the broader sense…that we are able in the US to overfeed all of our wants and needs in a way the rest of the world is unable to….

I agree with everything here (and I am part of the problem in the way that I live). I too see the reaction of the poor villager and the midwest farmer who are afraid of what they see as the excesses of modern life in America and increasingly the rest of the world, turning to fundamentalist religions for more solid bedrock.

Here’s the TOC of the last issue–my piece is entitled “Turbulence Before Takeoff.” Surely some of the other pieces are much better…

http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/06-turbulence

Your reference to recycling and trains and library usage is very interesting as well. I was a vegan for 3 years and have done my fair share of recycling and wasting my time on buses and BART when a car was available to me… but yes, really, I found that those sort of moral palliatives could only take me so far.

In other words, if the personal is political, why not extend your “moral compass” (to quote an Enron exec) to what you do with the bulk of your time.

As a graduate student frequently interacting with more full-time “activists,” I often find myself pathetically resorting to classifying my graduate studies to “what I do to pay the rent” in a desperate effort to give some sort of functional relevance to the convoluted and footnote-pocked texts that I find myself driven to produce.

But maybe it need not go that far. I do believe that Pierre Bourdieu has a lot to say about this, as do the American “public sociologists,” Craig Calhoun and Michael Burawoy. If I keep going down this academic track, I’m hoping to find a way to reconcile Marx’s 10th thesis on Feuerbach (don’t just think about the world–change it!) and the necessity of carving out a career in academia.

Challenging to say the least…

I’m interested to see the entry you craft out of this. Will go try to figure out who the hell you are now.

Very well put. And you raise a very valid point. I am just increasingly worried about self-satisfied uselessness from the left. (In particular, in my case, the academic left.)

And my critique of Adbusters, down deep, is likely a self-critique. Lots and lots of my mental energy is devoted to very nearly useless feel good activities. I am a fervent recycler. I am currently on a “get my books from the library, not amazon” kick. I like trains, not cars. But if I worried as much about thinking how I might actually make my work socially useful rather than my lifestyle vaguely socialist and clean and pretty in a simple way, I think I would do myself a great favor.

In short, I am talking about myself in this piece as much as the magazine. (I’m going to try, eventually, to blow all of this up into a post in its own right…)

But I do definitely know what you mean about recruitment and sexiness and the like. I just wish we could come up with a new sort of sexiness….

Despite its 15+ years of existence, I would agree that it is still driven by a somewhat inchoate ethical stance. Ascetic on the one hand and (paradoxically?) young/hip/punk/fun/rebellious on the other, I’d say that it does a good job of holding in a productive tension the dilemmas faced by urban activists today. We still want our shiny computers to work fast and we need to make money to buy those overpriced beers at the hip, yet rebellious local bar (not to mention our backpacking equipment and plane tickets to Brazil or Thailand), but at the same time we’re questioning the materialist priorities of previous generations and the mainstream.

Is this a coherent ethical approach to the world? Maybe not.

Is this possibly the beginning of a lifetime of questioning authority and becoming an agent of positive social change in the world? I would say yes.

Adbusters in my mind has the function of a recruiting tool. Like the sexy subcultures of punk rock and hippiedom, Adbusters is a concrete example of something different. If you’re sick of your parents, your job, and your Time Magazine, Adbusters does a pretty good job of jumping off the shelf at you and giving you an up-to-the-month guide to a whole lot of stuff people in other parts of the world are trying to do to get out of the same cultural doldrums that you’ve found yourself in.

At least that’s what happened to me when I plucked it off the shelf at my local bookstore in 11th grade, growing up in the culturally sterile and status-obsessed Silicon Valley.

If it hadn’t been for adbusters, I might never have gotten so excited about becoming an activist or a social scientist or a documentarian or doing any of the other stuff I’m doing today.

Maybe one key final point is that adbusters is a magazine that needs to stay fresh and seems to recycle a lot of its ideas potentially at the cost of losing readership from veterans like us, but standing to gain a lot by staying sexy, young, and continuing to jump off the shelves at its target audience.

I don’t read Junior Scholastic or watch Reading Rainbow anymore, but if they still exist, I’m all for them!

Well, perhaps there is. But of course it’s important to make sure that someone somehow receives the fruits of your sacrifice, right? Sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake doesn’t do much for anyone. And significantly, I think, gets the ends wrong.

As a more general question. Is there any political value to sacrifice (the sacrifice of resources, which must also be the sacrifice of certain kinds of pleasure)? Or does it always serve the interest of an unsacrificing elite?