Thanks for Nothing

This Thanksgiving holiday, while scarfing down turkey and contemplating American Indian genocide, take a brief moment to plan for Nov. 28, America's busiest shopping day. You could submit to the Mall and run up your credit card in the always-vain attempt to substitute gifts for friendship. Or, you might join the select but noble few participating in the worldwide phenomenon known as Buy Nothing Day.

Coined by the Media Foundation (a Vancouver anti-consumerism group), and later promulgated by Adbusters magazine, the Buy Nothing campaign aims to enlighten shoppers on the perils of over-consumption, otherwise called "affluenza." For 24 hours, participants refrain from purchases and instead perform street theater or irrational acts of generosity.

Some examples planned for the Bay Area: teams of men trying on lingerie while teams of women demand advice on lawn mowers, collective cutting-up of credit-cards, buying designer clothes and returning them five minutes later ("fanclubbing"), playing duets using touch-tone ATM machines, yelling "We're just looking!" upon entering a store or setting up a soup kitchen in the mall food court. You might also spot the snout-wearing power-lunchers, obnoxiously oinking into cell phones while surrounded by dozens of shopping bags. First-timers anxious to participate can join other actions from the Adbusters message board, which reads more like a list of economically informed high-school pranks.

Some street theater takes merciless aim at symbols of the holiday season. Zen Santas sit cross-legged and meditate beside their capitalist counterparts, staving off hordes of children trying to sit in their laps. Subversive carolers approach hired choirs and drown them out with off-key lyrics (instead of "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer": "Uh, we're in the red, dear").

Others have taken this idea further and come up with nonfinancial currency in the hopes of building a service-based mini-economy. Businesses in the Bay Area together created BREAD (Bay Area Regional Exchange and Development) which consolidates work hours otherwise valued at $12 an hour. BREADwinners can pay for baby-sitting, carpentry, dinner or clerical assistance with their bills (see breadhours.com). The Time Dollar Institute (www.timedollar.org) "turns karmic acts of kindness into a closed-loop system," in which "a group of neighbors can start to trade snow shoveling for counseling, plumbing for prayers, all on an equal, hour-for-hour footing" (Adbusters.com).

The Buy Nothing Day campaign recently came up with a series of ingenious commercials, only to be flatly refused airtime by all major TV networks. CBS responded, in terms sure to cause constitutional unrest, that the spots cannot be broadcast because they threaten "the current economic policy of the United States." Richard Gitter of NBC similarly declared: "We don't want to take any advertising that's inimical to our legitimate business interests." How does one get a network to accept as advertising an advertisement against advertising? So far, only CNN Headline News has consistently aired the commercials, which include a stroke victim watching his heart monitor as it displays McDonald's glowing arches, and a bulimic super model caressing the toilet bowl she vomits into, among others.

Even the Wall Street Journal has taken note of the Buy Nothing campaign as a legitimate threat. Potential support for the boycott appears strong, as a poll conducted last Nov. 28 by the Opinion Research group showed 62 percent of Americans plan to "buy nothing" on the day after Thanksgiving. Anyone who remembers the Great American Gasout of April 30, 1999, a 24-hour gasoline boycott, realizes the profit-damaging effect of temporary campaigns (oil company stocks registered a significant dent the following day).

Behind the irreverent, thought-provoking schemes lies a pressing message. In order to counter the increasingly economic patriotism ravaging the country, anti-consumerists have turned to Buy Nothing Day as the only true holiday left, an all-too-brief vacation from the financial institutions processing our lives. One inspired respondent put it this way: "(The day is) not a vain and selfish attempt to topple Empire, but to sow the seeds of a romantic notion of temporary disconnect from the grid, the matrix, whatever you wanna call it." This Friday, please stop the sad industrialization of our souls and do something priceless.

Tags: