WASHINGTON REPORT: Consumers Consumed

...Through advertising since about 1920 and intensely following World War II, the most distinctive, or at least the most spectacular features of the socio-economy had changed from hard to soft, from enduring to 136 lost forever the fairy tale land of Eden...

...Can Christian love become the impetus for a sharing, cooperating world...

...Still, the long-run odds are in her—and therefore, all our—favor, The transfiguration of consumerism in a single generation is astanishing to contemplate, which, no doubt, is why nibody much ever does contemplate it, but the curve of that radical change, a swing of just about 180 degrees in the meaning of the word in the course of about 25 years is promise enough that some form of government represenation for consumers at least comparable to the represenatation of the AgBiz in the Agriculture Department, the arms merchants in the Department of Defense, and business at large in Commerce, is inevitable and closer than those votes seem to show...

...If formerly they had carried on their own pecuniary emulation and vicarious consumption at Newport and along Fifth Avenue on the solid basis of the overt exploitation of the masses working from sun to sun for barely sustenance wages, now they could continue in even more exotic locales, even more extravagent modes of transport and social ritual, on the even more solid basis of covert exploitation of the masses by letting the masses into the front gate of the old leisure world and selling them tickets...

...Despite the fact we still worked all our lives and all our days, we had been miraculously transmogrified into members of the Leisure Class ourselves...

...COLLINS KILBURN Director of Social Ministries North Carolina Council of Churches 159...

...At the heart of the lonely crowd, taking the place of the work ethic, heroic virtue, inner-directed achievement and other widely shared goals of the past, was the supreme virtue of competence in consumership...

...Shortly after the publication of her article, Daniel Webster, one of the inmates of North Carolina's death row, took his own life with a razor blade, dramatically illustrating his own suicidal drive [News & Views, Dec...

...The consumer's lot was to consume and in the process to educate him...

...frank getlein values Veblen had discerned in the Leisure Class among the bulk of the people largely disregarded by the inhabitants of Veblen's world...

...Esther Peterson, the great mother of consumerism withia the government, said that the votes takea would not be the last word on the subject and she undoubtedly was right...

...self for ever-increasing, ever-refining, consumership...

...They were really just magnificent reporters and brilliant analysts of What they reported...

...Neither was found passable and the whole idea, much amended, was wrapped up just a few days after the groundhog correctly predicted a long, hard winter...

...History, as much as individual champions like Esther Peterson or Ralph Nader...

...Formerly all those bucks for bangs seemed to enhance the economy...

...Riesman and Denney did not presume to make the comparison, but their book actually charted the spread of certain of the distinctive ephemeral, from production to consumption...

...There have always been consumers, of course, and classical economics provides that whatever is produced has to be consumed to provide the profit margin enabling still more production to take place and so on and so on in an industrial-age version of the eternal return of Asiatic religions...

...In the face of incidents like this, it is hard to see how proponents of the death penalty can continue to believe that it is effective as a deterrent...

...Increasingly, we see that they really drain it...

...Through marginal differentiation among products not really very different, after all, the new consumer achieved the approbation of his peer-group and, not least important, fit himself into an essential niche in the society and economy...

...By exercising his freedom to choose, man becomes responsible for good and evil and can never be free of this responsibility to live the childlike existence of Eden...

...Obviously, Vietnam brought an end to all that...

...But, we cannot discharge this responsibility without the knowledge of good and evil, and the traditionalists' claim to this knowledge is being seriously challenged by those who clearly see the evil in the unloving consequences of what the traditionalists call good...

...marilyn kramer ______Death on Demand_______ Raleigh, N.C...

...The Lonely Crowd came out just about a quarter century ago and I'm surprised that no celebration of the anniversary has been announced...

...To the Editors: The article by Sister Lois Spear in the November 25 issue underscores one of the frequently neglected arguments against the death penalty, namely, that it most probably induces some persons to murder...

...Riesman and Denney, of course, were not advocating or blessing the now old-style consumerism they saw around them...

...That's the change that has taken place...

...It was an enormously important book, full of new formulations of social phenomena, equipped with new names that entered the language immediately and have been there ever since, including the title itself, outer-directed, in135 ner-directed and other-directed, peer-group and a raft of others...

...Nowadays to use the word consumer is to ask precisely those questions, to place oneself in an adversary positioa in relation to producers, to expect producers to be trying to rip-off what they can and to arm oneself against those efforts through cooperative action, through legislation and, eventually, through formal government representation...

...sumers' society had come into being...

...Father Greeley should have asked whether Christian theology and liturgy will be able to make Christians aware of the awesome mystery and paradox of this gift and give us the sense of direction, purpose, and humility to discern and follow goodness without creating a crutch, a fantasy, escapism, that allows us to avoid responsibility for good and evil...

...We have to count our pennies and when we do, the old-style consumerism seems ridiculous to all except those who were cutting the game...

...The Lonely Crowd's consumerism was tied to victory in World War II—the brave new world for the victorious American Boys and their faithfully waiting American Girls—and hence also to the economic escalation brought about by the early years of the cold war as a continuation of the economic shot-in-the-arm provided by World War II...

...A state senator said to me several months ago with regard to capital punishment, "We do not know if it is a deterrent or not, but we have to do something...

...We can no longer afford to be the jolly free-spenders in the Lonely Crowd...

...These were headed by David Riesman and Reuel Denney, whose epoch-announcing book was The Lonely Crowd, a study, like all epoch-announcing works in that field, of the way we live now, as contrasted with the way we lived until the day before yesterday and the way we think we live...

...WASHINGTON REPORT CONSUMERS CONSUMED About the first major action in the House of Representatives in the new session was the defeat of the effort to establish an Agency for Consumer Protection or even an Office of Consumer Representation, offered as a better than nothing substitute...

...Cooperative efforts on hunger and poverty are encouraging, but certainly Christianity is failing to meet this challenge in the abortion issue...

...Thus, in our outrage at violence, we collaborate with it and encourage it...

...The people are demanding it...

...The proposed Agency would have practiced direct intervention in commerce and industry on behalf of consumers...

...When the book actually appeared, we all became sociologists, practicing our new art upon ourselves...

...He consumed, as Henry Ford, for example, produced...

...That transmogrification, however, had taken place at the instance of the descendants, both direct and spiritual, of Veblen's world...

...That process of refinement they reported undoubtedly has grown into the consumer rebellion of recent years, spliced onto the old, quiet, small-scale consumerism of Consumer Reports, buying clubs, union stores and similar essentially private manifestations...

...Watergate and the end of cheap power, effectively ended the joyride of war and warspending...

...I expect that this kind of desperation and frustration lies at the base of much popular and legislative support of executions...

...Or will Christianity remain a haven for those who want the comfort of a commitment to the loving Jesus without the discomfort of a commitment to help and share with their fellowman, a platitude to justify selfinterest, with love distorted into the self-righteous duty to save the world for our own personal salvation, becoming a force for evil rather than good...

...From another point of view, the collapse in Vietnam, followed swiftly by...

...Can Christianity find a broader criterion for morality that will bring goodness closer to the loving that frees others from selfconcern to love in their turn, as Jesus did...

...We do not know how many murders are motivated by a desire to destroy themselves, but there have been studies which document increases in homicide rates before and after highly publicized executions...

...That element of increase and refinement was not perceived by Riesman and Denney as having much to do with the already existing, but miniscule, consumer movement...

...The endless, specious arguments between pro- and anti-abortionists serve, merely to solidify these positions, while obscuring the one approach on which the majority could agree—cooperative efforts to reduce the need for aibortions...

...What wrought the change...

...To read the book for review, as I did, that is, before a word about it had appeared anywhere, publication dates being much more respected in those days than in these, was to feel like stout Cortez or skinny Galileo, gazing into a vast new world previously undreamt of, yet instantly recognizable as logical, coherent and, most convincing of all, making structural sense out of a whole rag-bag of one's personal observations of people and institutions, including oneself...

...The con...

...Increase and refinement expressed themselves through upgrading and uptrading, not at all through asking embarrassing questions about why the toaster doesn't work, the car is a death-trap, and the cereals and cosmetics are full of poison...

...There are those of us who would be tickled pink to see Esther Peterson become the first cabinet secretary of consumer affairs, but on the basis of that vote, that elevation does seem fairly futuristic...

...the new style consumerism, part of everybody's survival kit...

...Around the time of World War II, however, and especially in the years immediately after that war, there was an intensification of the idea of consumerism in economic thought and practice in this country and a small group of economicsociologists was quick to catch on to the change...

...the proposed Office of Representation would merely have presented the case for the consumers' interests and point of view before appropriate already existing organs of government...

...From one point of view, if you can question a four-star general's optimistic view that the Tet Offensive was the end of the war for the Vietnamese, the beginning of victory for the Americans, you can sure as hell question General Motors's assumption that what's good for them is good for the American motorist...

...Those votes and their turning back the dread threat of justice for the outraged victims is a good occasion to review the enormous change in the very idea of consumerism that has taken place roughly over the period of the cold war, a juxtaposition of time periods not necessarily merely coincidental...