And now, a Tomato Nation first: the follow-up column. I have an unofficial policy regarding follow-up columns, namely that I never write them because, if I didn’t get the job done the first time around, a follow-up would come off like those letters to the editor in Vanity Fair in which the author, portrayed negatively in an article published months ago, answers each and every charge leveled against him or her by sneering, “Well — well — well, my father could beat up Dominick Dunne’s father, so neener neener!” and it’s just so undignified, like, let people think what they want. But last week’s “Kulturreich” column dealt with that very idea — with letting people think what they want — and furthermore, I rushed through said column in order to get it written and posted before I had to leave the house for an Aimee Mann concert, and a handful of important points and distinctions evidently got stepped on as a result.

First of all, let me clarify something. One reader pointed out, in a bone-dry email, that my telling people to shut up about their pop-cultural tastes amounts to fascism of a different sort, so perhaps I didn’t explain myself properly last week. If you like the Velvet Underground, that’s fine. I don’t care. If you enjoy reveling in film obscurity, that’s great. Not my thing, but great. If you feel that you must boycott large corporations and their products in order to live according to the principles by which you define your life, good for you. I don’t like VU so much, as I’ve said, and Buñuel often gives me a headache, and I can’t shift myself to protest the Gap’s stranglehold on sartorial culture, but like the Isley Brothers once said, it’s your thing — do what you want to do. I can’t tell you who to sock it to. You don’t have to agree with me. Well, only to my face. (Heh. That’s sarcasm, ‘kay?) And if you want to recommend a VU album to me, or bring me to a Warhol film festival, or share a few factoids on a few of the uglier cutting-and-clearing practices of the South American production arm of Starbucks, feel free to do so — once. Or twice. And if I don’t respond, drop it. See, I don’t object to the culture fascist’s opinions per se; it’s the way in which the culture fascists present those opinions. The culture fascist knows best; the culture fascist knows all. An opinion ceases to function as an expression of personal taste, becoming law (theirs) or foolishness (mine) as they see fit, and as such it’s arrogant and tiresome, because it’s forced on me forever and ever without end amen. Calling me “stupid” because I don’t like Patti Smith will not make me like Patti Smith, and it won’t do a whole lot to make me like you, either. There’s a reason Jehovah’s Witnesses get doors slammed in their faces, people, so until I come over to your house and make you listen to my Billy Joel tapes — which I won’t do, because I have a fragment of class — just agree to disagree. Graceless evangelizing will get you nowhere.

Neither will accusing me of “defensiveness” or “contrarianism,” viz. the following questionably thought-out missive from a reader:

your culture facist essay was pretty shallow when it came to talking about Market forces. starbucks is successful for a lot more reasons than having the best coffee. everyone from a right wing economics professor to a lefty labor organizer would agree. i guess you think mcdonalds has the best burger? and whatever movie is at the top of the boxoffice is the best movie? and the richest person in the world must be the best person in the world?sigh. you are not as smart as i thought you were and it seems to scare you that you are actually a pretty mainstream person with very mainstream tastes. nothing to be ashamed about. a lot of people are. that’s why it’s called the mainstream. but, heheh, it means you are not very cool. so face it and stop lashing out at us cool people.

See? That’s what I mean. Asking others to respect my tastes and choices makes me unintelligent and shallow, apparently. Apparently, my “mainstream”-ness makes me wholly ignorant of market forces. Yeah, hi — I didn’t just fall off the melon wagon. I think I understand how capitalism works. Not something we can say for our self-righteous correspondent, who seems to have as weak a grasp of what makes a business work as she does of correct English usage, so let me break it down for her: no, Starbucks doesn’t make the best cup of coffee on earth. A guy I know, Dr. Ocean, makes the best cup of coffee on earth. But Dr. Ocean deals in a niche market known as “people who come over to his house,” and Starbucks deals in a much larger market known as “the world.” Starbucks isn’t trying to make the best cup of coffee. Starbucks is trying to make the cup of coffee that the most people will buy. Ditto McDonald’s. Ditto Columbia TriStar. Ditto Bill Gates. The letter above epitomizes everything I cannot abide about culture fascists. If it’s mainstream, it’s bad, and if you defend the mainstream, or even have the gall to not totally hate the mainstream in all its incarnations, you suck, fuck the man, fight the power, blah dee fucking blah. Give me a break. Successful corporations attain their success by offering a dependable, consistent product that appeals to a wide cross-section of consumers, and they continue to succeed by continuing to do that. That. Is. How. A Consumer. Economy. Works. If you don’t like how a consumer economy works, and you object to mass production bred for mediocrity, that’s certainly your right, and I don’t disagree with you in theory, but I must ask that you 1) exhibit even the feeblest understanding of demand-side principles before you begin lecturing me, and then 2) stop lecturing me posthaste because I don’t NEED a damn lecture IN THE FIRST PLACE, so go stand on a bread line in the former Soviet Union if you want to make a point. I never claimed that Starbucks has a superior product, because it doesn’t, and I’ve never thought it did. Still, my hankering for a Starbucks gingerbread latte does not double as an invitation for you to serve up a piping-hot side order of condescending post-Woodstock blather about how I’m contributing to the destruction of the rainforest. Okay? Because I’m not. I ordered a coffee drink. That’s it. Go talk to the guys with the machetes.

Still, in my original piece, I should have drawn a distinction between pop-culture Nazis and anti-corporate Nazis, because it’s not really the same animal. In the same way that the pop-culture fascist prizes obscurity, the anti-corporate fascist smells conspiracy and the death of free expression in every franchise. Consider a note I received on an unrelated mailing list last week, which reported that the Gap at the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco gets its front window smashed every couple of weeks. Consider the lovely and talented Lulu Bates, some of whose friends give her shit because her boyfriend is a district manager for Starbucks. What the hell is that? Believe me, I like a good underdog story as much as the next girl. I giggled gleefully when Bill Gates took that pie in the face — sure I did, and so did you. Big corporations do kind of suck. A lot of them don’t treat their employees very well. A lot of them engage in horrifically bad environmental practices like clear-cutting trees and dumping toxic waste in rivers; a lot of them use sweatshops, steal intellectual property from the little guy, lobby the government for undeserved tax breaks, and sap their workforce of the will to live. HOWEVER. I get it. I’ve got it. I’ve gotten it. Consider it well and truly gotten. Don’t talk down to me, and don’t whine about the corporatocracy if you don’t plan to do anything about it — and no, “whining” is not “anything.” Don’t like what Starbucks and Timothy’s New World Coffee have done to the rainforest? Join the Rainforest Conservancy or a similar organization as an active volunteer. Don’t think the Gap and Nike should use sweatshop labor? Go to an anti-sweatshop protest in Washington, DC or in your town, or join one of the organizations devoted to enforcing fair labor practices in Third World countries and here at home. Announcing to me in an astringently self-satisfied tone of voice that you don’t patronize a given establishment isn’t going to make a meaningful difference — not to me, and certainly not to the corporation. Not to burst your bubble or anything, but…come on. Nobody cares whether or not you use Windows except you.

And now, an epistle from a regular visitor to TN:

You seem to have lumped together people who hate corporations like Microsoft because they are pervasive and people who hate those corporations because they genuinely dislike the product. While I do have a lot of criticisms of an economic system that allows the sort of systematic concentration of wealth that Bill Gates has made his life’s work, my primary ire for Microsoft is reserved for their products. I use Microsoft products because I have no real choice. Yes, I could install Linux or BeOSand code up my own word processor in Perl or Java or something, but I don’t really have that kind of time or programming expertise, and while I can send papers to journals or proposals to funding agencies in my own personal “.njc” format, I don’t think that’s a terrific way to further my scientific career. Thus, due to what amounts to a lack of realistic options, I use Microsoft products, and they drive me nuts. They take up increasingly huge chunks of my hard drive with each incarnation. They crash. Repeatedly. Their help files are so uniquely useless as to be a source of black humor. This is not a situation like Starbucks, where I go to them willingly because, as you said, they do their job well and there’s always one nearby. This is a situation where a uniform desire for standardization has forced me to use software that I hate, and that makes me loathe Microsoft as much as anything. So, while I understand and agree with much of your dislike of cultural snobbery, I don’t think it’s quite fair to say that people who criticize large, pervasive corporations do so solely for their lack of obscurity. Sometimes, those of us who hate the Microsofts of the world have a good reason for doing so, and writing our opinion off as snobbery does us a disservice.

The man’s got a point, and as I said above, I shouldn’t have conflated the two. The two issues really belong in two different articles, for one thing, and for another, Microsoft is a special case. Microsoft generates a shoddy product, and most of us use it because we don’t think we have a choice — or, more accurately, because the so-called choices available to us make our lives more difficult than the effort warrants. I swore by Macs for years, myself, but eventually I switched to Wintel, because all the programs catered to Wintel machines and users, and I’d long since gotten tired of the buggy crap ported over to the Mac OS (as well as the high price points of Apple products). Microsoft has positioned itself brilliantly, and ruthlessly, but whether or not Microsoft as a megacorporation “owes” the buying public something better isn’t the point. The point is that maligning Microsoft and Bill Gates, and hectoring those of us who have thrown up our hands and elected to use Wintel products, doesn’t do any good. It doesn’t change anyone’s mind. Not that that’s what the correspondent above suggested — I’m just saying.

And before I go, let me zigzag over to another cultural-snobbery pet peeve which I’d completely forgotten about until another TN regular reminded me of it: The People Who Don’t Own TVs. Lord in Your Heaven, please deliver me from the smug souls who habitually run TV down as “mindless pap,” who stand around at parties drinking expensive vodka and sniffing about Americans suckling at the electronic teat and the dumbing-down of our society and wouldn’t you rather read a book and on and on and on and on. Listen up, people. Television is a legitimate art form. The fact that you do not own a television does not make you smarter than those of us who do. It does not make you a better, more well-rounded person. It makes you a person who does not own a television. THAT’S IT. If you don’t want to watch TV, don’t. If you want to decry the sad state of TV writing and the icky stereotypes of women and minorities prevalent in programming, do it — I watch TV for a living, and god knows I decry my head off on a weekly basis. But don’t expect the rest of us to elect you to the college of saints when you announce that you only watch PBS and then shrug dismissively that nothing else on TV is “worth” your time. Sure, we should all watch less, I guess, and PBS is great, but a woman cannot live on “The Three Irish Tenors” alone.

The opinion isn’t the point. The expression of the opinion is the point. It’s all about the delivery, people. There’s observing neutrally that you don’t go to Starbucks because of their business practices, or that you don’t have a TV, and then there’s handing down an indictment of the proletariat. I’m not a huge fan of most mainstream stuff either, but I don’t think that makes me “cool” or anything, and I’ll rave about stuff that I think is cool, but when I see my victim’s eyes glaze over, I assume that I’ve once again reverted to DefCon Flail and I shut up about it, and that’s the point.

Share!