This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Travails of the Flawed Consumer

I’ve liked this phrase, flawed consumer, ever since I came across it... where? Maybe in a book by Juliet Schor, an economist. Anyway, l’etat, Madame Bovary, and now le flawed consumer... c’est moi. The flawed consumer is that freakish American who fails to follow market commands; i.e., she doesn’t buy enough stuff, and/or she fails to buy stuff at a constant rate. The core cause of my particular flawedness consumptionwise is my failure to buy the one essential consumer object: a television. ‘Tis from there that most of the commands issue; and since I haven’t got one, I’m out of the loop.

Just as in America the failure to promote oneself, as Gary Trudeau once noted, is
considered a sin, so in America the failure to buy things at a level commensurate with, or ideally beyond, your means, is also punishable. I’ve gotten hectoring letters from my bank - “We’ve noticed you’re not using your new gold debit card. Please begin doing so - now!” Today, after I returned home from my regular beginning-of-the-academic year shopping at my local mall, I received my regular beginning-of-the-academic-year phone call from my credit card company: “We’ve detected highly unusual activity on your card! A thief is racing through your local mall using your card before they get caught!” Er - that’s me. I don’t like to shop, you see, and I do it very seldom and very quickly...

The American credit business shrugs at suicidal overspending. It’s only when it detects patterns of restraint that it screams bloody murder.