[Craic] Fwd: [New post] Lee Camp: Ads All Tell Us To Kill Our Future. Worth Discussing?

Thu Dec 24 11:26:15 PST 2020

Here is a really good piece that sums up our consumer culture to a tee!

Enjoy!

Greg

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: scheerpost.com <donotreply at wordpress.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 2:15 PM
Subject: [New post] Lee Camp: Ads All Tell Us To Kill Our Future. Worth
Discussing?
To: <greg.j.gillis at gmail.com>

Editor posted: " "Ethical consumerism" by edmittance is licensed under CC
BY-NC-SA 2.0 By Lee Camp / Original to ScheerPost Forgive me, Father, for I
have sinned. I am a hypocrite. (Although I’m not sure why I’m talking to my
dad about it. He doesn’t read my"

New post on *scheerpost.com <http://scheerpost.com>*
<https://scheerpost.com/?author=14765177> Lee Camp: Ads All Tell Us To Kill
Our Future. Worth Discussing?
<https://scheerpost.com/2020/12/22/lee-camp-ads-all-tell-us-to-kill-our-future-worth-discussing/>
by
Editor <https://scheerpost.com/?author=14765177>
"Ethical consumerism" by edmittance is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
------------------------------

*By Lee Camp* / Original to ScheerPost

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I am a hypocrite.

(Although I’m not sure why I’m talking to my dad about it. He doesn’t read
my columns because he’s too busy watching survival reality shows set in
Alaska. . . . Maybe I’ll factor something about eating a squirrel into the
coming paragraphs to attract his attention.)

It’s the holidays. It’s the buying season. You’re supposed to run out
immediately and buy everything you can afford — and actually much more than
you can afford — because you can dump everything on credit cards and not
worry about paying it off until *later*. And *later* won’t suck — the
stores promise! But of course truthfully it will. *Later *will suck. *Later
*always sucks
<https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/05/consumer-debt-hits-new-record-of-14point3-trillion.html>,
for most people. But no matter — go quick and get the brand new model of
the thing you didn’t like the first time around. Better yet, buy it for
someone else because even though they might get as little use out of the
gadget as you did, they won’t be able to tell you that — so they’ll just
say “Thank you!” because it’s part of the social code. They’ll say you’re
the *bestest *aunt or uncle or cousin or friend or Uber driver who
awkwardly gave them a gift for no reason.

So go run out to the stores right now! Better yet, you don’t even have to *run
out *anymore. You can just go online. It’s all right there, at your
fingertips, your Doritos-orange fingertips. You can buy all of the things
all of the time — and they’re all half-off for a limited time! *All the
time for a limited time!*

That’s how it sounds, the entire holiday season, even during a pandemic.
And we practically never hear criticism of this all-encompassing gush of
consumerism painting over our mainstream airwaves because in order to get
the career that allows someone to be on mainstream airwaves, they have to
be a part of it, let it fill their veins and give it final edit on their
thoughts. Even I am a small part of it. I’m not on the mainstream media,
but I have a TV show and a touring comedy career (on non-pandemic years)
and therefore at various points in the past I’ve sold books and mugs and
CDs. I still sell my books. And when you’re a part of this system, you have
to make a choice: Do I behave like a bit of a hypocrite and critique a
system that *absolutely *needs critiquing? Should I be the fish critiquing
the water he himself swims through? Or do I never criticize this
consumerist system because I’m a part of it?

I’ve chosen the first path but the vast majority of on-air personalities
choose the second path. Never question capitalism, never question
consumerism, because doing so might be deleterious to your career, your
brand, your *business*. And that’s why the class war perpetrated by the
assholes at the top continues unabated, with so little criticism on
mainstream TV. Sure, you’ll see an article here or there about how the
billionaires have gained $1 trillion
<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/billionaires-pandemic-1-trillion-wealth-gain/>
during the pandemic, but such coverage isn’t common and even those articles
can’t say the holy words “capitalism” or “consumerism.” The system will not
be critiqued or questioned because at the end of the day, the rapaciously
rich are the ones who hire the on-air personalities who *could* ostensibly
rhetorically tear apart the machine. And in the rare case that a
“personality” scores the job, fails to self-censor, goes rogue, and then
questions our unfettered market economics — then they’re let go, forced
out, or otherwise put out to pasture.

Point being, even though I’m not on the mainstream airwaves, I’d rather be
the slight hypocrite than the useful idiot of disaster capitalism. There’s
a great book called *Advertising Shits in Your Head*
<https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=967> by Matt Bonner
and Vyvian Raoul. It’s funny and smart and beautifully done. But guess what
— it’s a book with a cover. What is the cover? It’s basically an
advertisement for the book. And since that book is put out by the same
publisher as my book, the publisher — unbeknownst to me — put an ad
for *Advertising
Shits in Your Head* in the back of my book
<https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1080>. . . . Let me
repeat that. There’s an *ADVERTISEMENT* for *Advertising Shits in Your Head*
in my book! I don’t want that promotion shitting in your head in *my *book.
My book is meant to shit in your head *all by itself.*

Despite that, the book *Advertising Shits In Your Head* is great and on
point. And I’d rather see a small level of hypocrisy than allow the
insidious manipulative nature of advertising to go uncritiqued and
unobstructed.
Anti-consumerist protester.

But of course the problem is far larger than just advertising. Our modern
culture, due in no small part to the market economy, values and favors and
supports and highlights materialism and competition and domination and
selfishness. For the most part, it does not highlight helping others. While
almost every mainstream commercial is based on wants or fears (and I
suppose even fear is a want of security), we don’t see ads telling people
to go sit at the train station and help old people down the stairs. There
are no commercials during *Monday Night Football *pushing Americans to feed
a hungry person or house a homeless woman or plant a tree or sexually
pleasure a lonely guy. No, there is *never *any promotion of altruistic
behavior except for the occasional massive corporate charity advertisement
that essentially says, “Send us money so that we can spend it on
commercials like these!” That’s the closest you’ll get to a promotion for
helping others.

Sure, around this time of year there are myriad television spots about
giving gifts to people, but at their core, those are still commercials for
buying things (to give to others). There aren’t ads for simply and purely
helping people. There are no ads for regifting in order to save resources.
Our airwaves do not runneth over with publicity for volunteering. So at the
end of a day — it’s all still about buying and consuming and spending. Any
activity that isn’t at least tangentially related to consumption is
actually a tiny little threat to the capitalist system. Such activities
intrinsically — in a subconscious manner — promote behavior that does not
feed into the beast.

Every time you avoid what the market economy wants you to do, you help push
towards a better system, towards an evolution beyond this shithole machine.
Every time you donate something to someone, every time you volunteer with
no reward or payback, every time you repair something rather than buy a new
one, every time you refuse the plastic shit pushed upon you by a cashier —
you are moving our culture subtly, imperceptibly toward a new horizon.
(Honestly, trying to get a grizzled mustachioed cashier *not *to give you
12 plastic bags and 7 plastic straws and 42 napkins when you buy a single
bagel with cream cheese is a *Sisyphean task*. He’ll fuckin’ fight you to
make sure you walk away with a whale-suffocating amount of plastic to wrap
around your single onion bagel. Saying, “No bag, no straws, no napkins” to
him is somehow worse than telling him his recently-deceased mother had a
tryst with a mangy donkey. I don’t know why. I don’t know what goes on in
the heads of cashiers that make them so eager to give you enough plastic to
replace an entire sex shop’s dildo collection.)

Point being, as our world fills with plastic
<https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/plastic-planet-waste-pollution-trash-crisis/>
and fumes
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-10/los-angeles-had-its-worst-smog-in-26-years-during-heat-wave>
and garbage
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/the-world-is-drowning-in-ever-growing-mounds-of-garbage/2017/11/21/cf22e4bd-17a4-473c-89f8-873d48f968cd_story.html>
and oil
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2020/04/23/a-decade-after-deepwater-horizon-oil-still-flows-from-this-prolific-patch-in-the-gulf-of-mexico/?sh=2acffd0143a9>
and oil <https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88941151>
and oil <https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063234239>, it becomes evermore
clear that we cannot dominate nature because we *are* nature. Ironically by
fully dominating the natural world — we kill it. Because we have forgotten
our place, we have forgotten how the ecological system works. We have
forgotten that nature feeds and sustains us. And every time someone buys a
car “because the Christmas commercials said it was a good idea. I already
have one, but they said I should be good to myself and reward myself with a
backup SUV just in case the first one doesn’t match my outfit that day” —
every time we buy shit we don’t need, throw out food we don’t want, trash
clothes we shouldn’t have bought, buy people five gifts when one would
suffice — every time we do it, we die a little.

These are small, miniature deaths — for the environment, for our souls, for
our beings. (I guess there’s a reason that the secondary definition
<https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consumption> of “consumption”
is “a progressive wasting of the body.”) Each of these consumptive,
wasteful actions makes us feel good for a moment, for a brief fleeting
instant, and then that feeling quickly fades as the emptiness rushes back
in like tidal water filling a hole on the beach. While we all work in large
ways to evolve past this system, you and I can also take small steps. They
won’t change the big things. Avoiding buying from Amazon and avoiding
filling up your car at ExxonMobil and avoiding getting the plastic bags
won’t save the planet. (I’m sorry to inform you.)

Only true revolutionary change will create a sustainable future. But each
of these smaller actions is an ideological wisp that can make up gale force
change. They are the droplets that fill a raging river of awakening. Those
small steps are the reminders that you and I live in the Matrix[image: ™],
in a false reality — an inverted moral universe — that rewards consumerism,
selfishness, greed, and war while scoffing at minimalism, altruism, and
peace. Those small reminders help us step outside the garbage virtual
reality. They are small victories, they are small voices whispering that we
are human, we are more than our economic system, we *are *nature.
[image: Lee Camp]
Lee Camp

*Lee Camp is the host of the hit comedy news show “**Redacted Tonight*
<https://youtube.com/RedactedTonight>*.” His new book “Bullet Points and
Punch Lines” is available at* *LeeCampBook.com* <http://leecampbook.com/> *and
his stand-up comedy special can be streamed for free at*
*LeeCampAmerican.com* <http://leecampamerican.com/>*.*
Author Page <https://leecamp.com/>
*Editor <https://scheerpost.com/?author=14765177>* | December 22, 2020 at
11:12 am | Tags: advertising
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=advertising>, amazon
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=amazon>, capitalism
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=capitalism>, christmas
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=christmas>, climate change
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=climate-change>, consumerism
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=consumerism>, environment
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=environment>, featured
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=featured>, gifts
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=gifts>, holidays
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=holidays>, humor
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=humor>, incremental change
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=incremental-change>, lee
camp <https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=lee-camp>, lies
corporations tell us
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=lies-corporations-tell-us>,
revolutionary
change <https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=revolutionary-change>,
satire <https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=satire>, xmas
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=xmas> | Categories: Lee Camp
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=category&term=lee-camp>, Original
<https://scheerpost.com/?taxonomy=category&term=original> | URL:
https://wp.me/pbNvZt-1E0

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