4A - The Michigan Daily - Monday, November 17, 2003 OE OP/ED Ule £toimxda1 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 letters@michigandaily.com EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 LOUIE MEIZLISH Editor in Chief AUBREY HENRETTY ZAC PESKOWITZ Editorial Page Editors Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's editorial board. All other articles, letters and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. NOTABLE QUOTABLE "The nose ... was sticking out with its teeth hanging out." - Jennifer Hejdak, a Milwaukee postal employee, explaining an alligator found in a shipment on Friday, as reported by The Associated Press. SAM BUTLER THE SOAPBOX i i i ; r 1 L 'ri+ i ~ J l . 1 v , . ..._ a _. i -- , 4 . --. {, ---- _ ,.' : : . . - r. d, , ,. \l i , ._._\ . lt \\,, "W J v w++w r tA& Do you really need all that stuff? STEVE COTNER MY BACK PAGES n Thursday, Nov. 27, you're going to stuff yourself with obscene amounts of food as a way of showing thanks - to God or the Indians or your divine birthright or the Third World - for letting you have obscene amounts of food, and then the next day you're going to The Mall. You're going to buy sweaters and mittens because you can't knit; you will buy posters of basketball stars because you don't like art, or posters of artwork because you have no artistic talent; you will buy electronic toothbrushes and cell phones for the whole family, because circu- lar motions are tiresome and prearranged meet- ing times are impossible; you will buy all of page 27 in the American Eagle catalog, because it matches perfectly, and you will look devastat- ing on your road trip to Vail, which you read about on page 28; you will buy your little broth- er a combination car-chase-shooting-hand-to- hand-combat video game, because this year the blood is more real, and you both identify vague- ly with '80s new wave music; you will buy "I'm a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch story" for an inspiring member of your community; you will buy ties for your father and chocolates, wrapped in an elaborate ribbon, for your mother; and then you will buy cards, lots of cards, for everyone - beautiful red and green cards, with passages of good will written in ornate, glittering script, followed by an anonymous poem with an A/B A/B rhyme, to be undersigned with love by you. And then you will wait for that moment when you can make everyone you know incredibly, unceasingly, inarticulately happy - when they see what you bought. Your pur- chases will show your love and dedication in a way no other gesture could, for only you could know your father prefers paisley, and acting on another's consumer preferences is the truest sign of affection. And, of course, this year will be different. Your girlfriend will not comment on her thighs when you give her candy, because she finally has the right skin moisturizer, and along with it the perfect body image. Your friends will switch to cleaner burning gasoline, cure their halitosis, get off the anti-depressants and get with the pro- gram. And by the time New Year's Day comes around, you will feel as if you've arrived at a new plane, where technology and economic progress extend without limit past the horizon. Or does that sound a bit hollow? Do we all think that goods are always good and more goods are better? After the attacks of Sept. 11, Rudy Giu- liani told New Yorkers to go shopping and to buy anything, even if they didn't need it, to keep the economy afloat and to calm fears about an increasingly troubled world. Shop- ping was our patriotic duty. It sounds strange now, but it sounded even stranger then, because in our moment of peril our leaders did not call for anything new. Before, when things were good, we consumed. Now they're bad, so we consume more. It is the essence of our nation, and it is what defines us as Americans. According to Adbusters, the average citizen consumes six times what a Mexican consumes, 47 times the average African, and over 500 times an Ethiopian. Our agriculture has become so cumbersome that, whereas farmers used no petroleum in the process of planting a hundred years ago, they now put 20 barrels of crude oil into an acre of corn. Our wastefulness with livestock is equally appalling, as five pounds of crude oil go into one pound of beef. And out of innumerable species of plant and animal, many thousands of which would be nutritious to humans, our country relies on just 20 for almost all of its food. All of this comes at a time when, for the first time in the history of the world, more people live in cities than in rural areas. We have experienced a complete reversal of our relationship to nature and of our understand- ing of what nature is. Art-eco professor Joe Trumpey reports that teenagers can recognize 85 corporate logos but can barely name 12 species of plant. In the book "Confronting Consumption," media historian Robert McCh- esney says, "Although people may have once been critical of hypercommercialism, perhaps they are becoming inured to it. In a political culture where commercialism appears to be a force of nature rather than something subject, that would be a rational response over time." Americans have gotten to the point where they can't imagine anything else. And most of them don't have the means to go to other coun- tries, which are termed "underdeveloped" by the world's powers, in order to see for themselves that the United States is in fact overdeveloped. The Buy Nothing Day campaign by Adbusters magazine aims to spread the word, and the once-a-year appearance of its ad on CNN is a minor miracle. Most of you will not see the urgency in rants like this one. But a few of us understand that we owe our environmental concerns, resource wars and growing North/South disparities to the burden of feeding this insatiable monster, and so we're going to keep ranting. And on Nov. 28-- or on any other day -we won't be anywhere near The Mall. Cotner can be reached at cotners@umich.edu. a LETTER TO THE EDITOR Borders not to blame for strike, high wages will lead to lower employment TO THE DAILY: From an outsider's perspective, I find the insistence upon "fair wages" for the Borders Books and Music staff humorous- ly ludicrous, albeit consistent with the Michigan mentality. Proselytized by years of labor union power, many here are still convinced that it is more just to pay nine persons a fair wage than 10 persons an ostensibly unfair wage. The lack of fore- sight and appreciation for consequence is equally as humorous. Someone, some- where will be subsidizing this proposed wage increase, whether it be the poor soul in this or another Borders store who loses his job when Borders grows less competi- tive, the corollary price increases that come out of consumers' pockets, or in the end, lower returns making Borders less attractive to investors, lowering stock price. Picketing the store does nothing more than exacerbate this process by low- ering the sales of this store, possibly con- vincing someone in corporate headquarters that this Borders may be overstaffed. It is not Borders that you should be blam- ing but yourselves. If you can find one Bor- ders employee willing to give up his job to subsidize his co-workers' raises, or cajole customers into agreeing to pay higher prices in a nearly commoditized industry, then fine. Otherwise, you are treating symptoms but ignoring the disease, and asking others to pay for your self-righteous workers crusades. If you truly want to pay workers better, create a fund for the East Liberty Street Borders staff and ask those people who truly value this cause to subsidize it, not the entire Borders customer base. I for one like cheap books. AL SHEKH AscHKAN ABDUL-MALEK Reader Visor ouR wwsrm ~AT WWW.MIHIGAI0IIZCOM 0 6 VIEWPOINT Brown v. Brown: the masochistic minority BY MANISH RAIJI I have been away from Ann Arbor for so long, but the same arguments ring with annoy- ing frenzy in my ears - one side claiming moral superiority while the other screams of the pot calling the kettle black. It is not just about India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine. It is about modalities of thought, about attempts to construct meaning and identi- ty, about deciding to shun one's culture or embrace it. It is about the lack of a fine line, a distinguishing paradigm. The Arab argument: India/Israel are not democracies, it is all a sham, a throw cover to hide the unsightly. "Brutality" and "massacre" and "manipulation" are the words of the day, and comparisons between veils and genocide get played up as the real divisive element between the two worlds. Arab governments do not really represent the Muslim conception of justice because they are all flawed, they all interpret Sha'ria incorrectly, they are all wolves in Mus- lim attire. We demand that India and Israel uphold the strictest level of free and fair elec- tions, even though there is nothing free, fair, or elective about the governmental processes of our nations. And anyway, Israel bombs people and India sets trains on fire. So there! voice, would somehow hold sway is preten- tious to an almost absurd degree. This issue is one of such extreme passion, especially in Ann Arbor, because it is a match between two people vaguely aware of the disconnect between their cultures. Indians wage a war against themselves by practicing extreme assimilation (hip-hop Bharatanatyam? Get a grip, please) while simultaneously trying gen- uinely to know what it means to be Indian. We get Indians who hate Indian politics, Indi- an religion, Indian culture, Indian everything (the so-called "apathetic Indian" or, more insensitively, "the coconut"), versus the pro- nounced, pro-actively pro-Indian professional (the "nationalist Indian" or, more insensitive- ly, the "FOB"). And here we have people who claim that Kashmiri elections are gorgeous examples of democracy at work, that Israel's defense follows a pattern of logical escalation, or that moral arguments can be made compar- atively - that values are judged according to the worst possible counter-example. Other side: Arabs and/or sub-continentals who consider the popular perspective of Mid- dle Eastern countries (the two most notable nations in American press right now have both been blown to proverbial bits by Ameri- can weapons), while simultaneously recogniz- ing that culturally important attributes (dress, warlords with the right-wing trifecta of Bush/Sharon/Vajpayee is to negate the time- honored tradition of intelligence. I think my politics are clear. But my politics are not at issue. Ultimately, even a modicum of time away from Ann Arbor will demonstrate the nearly deafening silence that collegiate debate has on the world at large. When do we ground ourselves? When do we realize that we are attacking unassailable truths and defending flawed arguments simply because of the color of our skin or the pronunci- ation of our names or the supremely different smells of the foods that turn us on? When do we realize that our politics are mired in our pas- times, our passions tied to our paternity? There comes a point where these questions start to matter. The debate that has so many brown faces in America turning an unnaturally rosy color has less to do with the atrocities seen in our native lands and more to do with the fact that we are not sure which role we play. From American-born desis struggling to retain a lan- guage they barely practice to ex-pats pulled between American possibilities and native responsibilities, this debate is fueled by a weak- ening cultural definition. Speaking solely as an Indian, I see the political debate as important, and I recognize the instinct to rebut in favor of n ner t, T hI av alenaran nn In Ainn nn- .. .. .. .......... . ..... . . . . . . . . .