Much like its third chapter, the
fifth chapter of Niall Campbell Douglas Elizabeth Ferguson's Civilization in My Pants, which discusses the
"killer app" of consumerism, has some useful things to say and some
vapid and silly things to say. Our Man
Niall opens this chapter by arguing, quite correctly in my view, that there
would have been no Industrial Revolution in the West without a previous
consumer revolution, and that Western consumerism began with the manufacturing
and consumption of inexpensive, high-quality clothing. In Britain, the consumer age began (as Joyce Appleby* noted) with widespread demand for imported calico, which
British, European, and American weavers then began to manufacture domestically. When countries like Japan
wanted to Westernize, Ferguson observes, they did so most conspicuously by
adopting European-style clothing. And
when Soviet citizens looked West in the mid-twentieth century, they
coveted its high standard of living, and one particular Western export, blue
jeans, came to symbolize all that capitalism could offer and communism could
not. On the way to the fall of the
Soviet Union, Ferguson offers a useful structural explanation of why the
Industrial Revolution began in Britain – expensive labor and cheap coal – and
introduces, though does not develop, the fascinating idea that the
industrialization of the East Asian "tiger" economies in the 1960s
decisively shifted the balance of power against the Soviet bloc. In the end, though, it was consumerism, the
West's better "version of a civilian life" (237), that brought down
the Berlin Wall.
There is much in this chapter that
would give American conservatives brain embolisms, which is to say there is
much to like about it. Ferguson's idea
that economic development requires growing aggregate demand is textbook
economics, but it is unlikely to win favor from Rand-Paul-type Republicans, who
ascribe economic growth solely to the labors of a few great-souled geniuses
whom the lumpish masses owe adulation and tax exemptions. His ascription of the fall of the Soviet
Union to economic causes is a bit simplistic, but it is more consistent with
the available evidence that the American right-wing dogma that Star Wars
killed the Evil Empire. Ferg even has a
kind word to say about John Keynes, whose proposals he credits with releasing
the United States from the deflationary "trap" of 1929-32. This is of course heresy among Anglo-American
conservatives, and suggests that the author may in fact favor counter-cyclical
deficit spending, as long as it benefits politicians who are either A) dead or
B) people he likes.
Ferguson's more valuable insights,
however, are interwoven with the clumsy prose, half-baked observations, and
cheap shots characteristic of his earlier chapters. In discussing Karl Marx, for example, he
pauses to denounce the philosopher as a personally "odious
individual" (207), which is not relevant to a discussion of Marx's
ideas. In his account of the rise of American-style consumerism, he includes
the ghastly mixed metaphor "The [blue] jeans genie was out of the bottle,
and the bottle was more than probably distinctively curved glass container
of…Coca-Cola" (242). Ferguson may
consider this a beautiful and thought-provoking image, but it's more likely he
gave that sentence little thought while he was writing it. Finally, Niall-o spends several pages toward
the end of the chapter discussing not consumerism but the Western youth
movement of the 1960s, whose damnation he considers an essential part of his
own mission civilisatrice. What young male protesters in Berkeley and
Paris wanted above all else, Professor Jackwagon asserts, was "unlimited
access to the female dormitories" (245). "In the West," he continues a few pages later, "students
indulged themselves with Marxist rhetoric, but what they were really after was
free love" (248). These DFHs, as
Ferguson would probably label them without irony, were not merely sexual
reprobates; they were also responsible for a wave of violence that hit Western
countries in the form of "race riots" and terrorism.
As one of my college professors once
told me in a seminar meeting, this observation is so wrong that one is nearly
at a loss at how to respond to it. While
I can't speak for students in Paris, the fundamental issue for young male
American protesters in the 1960s was not sexual freedom but avoiding the draft
and, if possible, ending the Vietnam War.
Mssr. Ferguson seems so impatient with '60s-era protesters – or,
perhaps, so obsessed with other people's sexual behavior – that in reading the
slogan "Make Love Not War" he loses interest after the first two
words. And blaming race riots and
terrorism on sex-crazed juvenile delinquents is ridiculous. Race riots were a recurrent phenomenon in
American cities from the Civil War through the early 1990s; those of the 1960s
were reactions to poverty and police brutality, not generational strife. International terrorism in the 1970s,
meanwhile, had much more to do with cheap machine guns, dysfunctional Arab
nation-states, and covert Soviet manipulation than Youth in Revolt.
Ferguson's excoriation of DFHs is not entirely
gratuitous. He probably intended it to
be part of an ironic observation: that while young people in the rich,
consumerist West were embracing Marxism and taking off their clothes, young
people in the Eastern Bloc were embracing American culture, represented by
blue jeans, and trying to throw off Marxism.
Niall-o's heavy-handed treatment of Western youth, however, and his
dismissal of their actual ideas (muddled as they were) suggests he is more
interested in indulging his own disgust than drawing readers' attention to the
ironies of history. Either that, or he
hopes that condemning the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll generation will make him
more appealing to These Kids Today.
* The Relentless Revolution (New York, 2010), 103-104.
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