Open up your closet, your refrigerator, your medicine cabinet, your garage. Turn on the TV to your favorite show, the news, the game. How much control do you think you really have over these choices, and how much are you being controlled?
Award winning documentarist, and social activist Kalle Lasn woke up to the true state of media control in America when he tried to air an environmental expose of the disappearance of old growth forests in the Northwest and was met with closed doors. This control of the airwaves infuriated him and was a catalyst that propelled him into action, creating The Media Foundation and Adbusters magazine, as well as launching a revolution against the powers of consumer capitalism and corporate control in America and the world.
In Culture Jam, Lasn prophetically announces a wake-up call to the American people, describing the adverse affects of this “consumer binge” and calling for social change on grassroots and corporate levels.
So What’s Wrong With Consumerism Anyway?
Motivated by his passionate desire to unveil the truth as he sees it, Lasn offers no shortage of doomsday examples of the damages caused by consumer capitalism: our detachment from the natural world, our chronic psychological disorders (77% of the adult population has at least one psychological ailment [9]), a reduction in free speech and the destruction of our environment at an alarming rate. Lasn offers a very grim outlook, stating that, “our whole social communications system is rotten to the core.” (35)
Is There Any Hope?
America needs a “Second Revolution”, according to Lasn, an act of “reversal, recovery, redemption” (145). It is in desperate need of being liberated “from its own excesses and arrogance” (61). Lasn fills this book with examples of how we, the people, can fight back. Fight the corporations, he says. Fight the powers and the media and the underlying beliefs and ideas of our culture. Find the “leverage points” within the powers (similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point or Robert Linthicum’s lateral power in his book, Transforming Power), and fight there. America is in a crisis of astronomical proportions and we need to fight, fight, fight.
What Are We Fighting For?
I think Lasn stands in a role of prophet, indicative of the Old Testament Isaiah and Jeremiah. I can just picture him standing on the street corner jolting us out of our small perspectives and ignorance. “Woe, to you, oh, America, for you are on a path to certain destruction if you do not repent and turn away from that which will destroy you!” And I think we need to hear the message. We need to be jolted. All this fighting against the powers is great, but what are we supposed to be “for”? What should the powers within culture look like? What role should they play in our lives? I think Lasn does hit on the idea of “transforming the powers” in many ways. He’s inherently using media, power dynamics, “jolts”, for a new purpose, redeeming them in a sense. But he needs a strong foundation on which to build his revolution. He needs the hope of a Kingdom not of this world. The revolutionaries need to be rallied around more than a list of what they’re against and need to fuel their passions with more than just rage. As Christians, I think we should be just as passionate as Lasn is, if not more so. Because, we don’t just have today’s doomsday realities in our vision- we have a hope for the future.
