Consumerism

Max's Marauders have not gone into winter encampment. They are still on the move, stamping out the vineyards where the grapes of greed are grown. Indeed, the holiday season has been a virtual blur of offensives against those who would dive into the consumer's hip pocket and come up clutching. First, Max Weiner's little army - which most people know as the Consumers Education and Protective Association (CEPA) - marched into court and filed a lawsuit challenging the $55 million city water and sewer rate increase scheduled to go into effect this month.

"We're going to do some damage in this town," David Duchovny merrily declares to his beautiful wife, daughter, and handsome son as their gleaming SUV rolls up behind the big moving truck in the driveway of their new McMansion. And damage they do - but mostly to themselves - in The Joneses , an overobvious and underwhelming satire about American consumerism run amok. For all its timely allusions to living beyond one's means - to credit card debt, mortgage foreclosures, and financial ruin - writer/director Derrick Borte's film fails to add anything new, or illuminating, to the Great Recession debate.

IHAVE RECENTLY come to discover that my academic advancements are being limited as a result of our worsening economy. I am currently a student at one of the most populated and diverse universities in the country and I am becoming increasingly displeased with the amount of privileges being revoked due to the limits on our economy. I more than understand that our country is in a time of economic crisis, and with that said, my problem lies in the severe prioritizing issues of Americans.

George Saunders' fiction is so twisted that sometimes it even shocks the man who wrote it. "I'll be reading the earlier stories to a crowd," he says, "and if I haven't read them in a while, I'm often struck by how sick they are. " His new short-story collection, In Persuasion Nation, is another blast of savage Swiftian satire, a vision of an America well past its expiration date, of a society marinating in rancid consumerism, marketing doubletalk,...

Not everyone will be out and about today to buy and revel in one of the biggest-selling retail days of the year. Instead, some may observe "Buy Nothing Day," a day of activism for the anti-consumerism crowd, who oppose what they say is the massive consumption that Black Friday promotes. Although there are no planned "Buy Nothing Day" events in Philadelphia, there are scheduled activities set for many cities worldwide, including Oklahoma City, Kyoto, Japan, and Minneapolis, where organizers plan to screen the Morgan Spurlock documentary "What Would Jesus Buy?"

Candy-making, consumerism and creative carving will be among the subjects of an eight-week Food Club that will be available to local children 10 to 14 years old. The program will be sponsored by the Gloucester County 4-H Clubs. The sessions will be held on Fridays from April 24 through June 12, at the County Office Building in Clayton. Registration will continue until Friday of this week. Different subjects will be covered each week, said Helen Wojciechowski, a program assistant for the Gloucester County 4-H Clubs.

Objective review It never hurts to fantasize in times of crisis. In the 1993 film Dave, the president's double, in an attempt to prevent service cuts, recruits an objective financial analyst to review the numbers. Relentless pork surgery yields a budget that cuts costs but not services. A similar initiative here might well reveal alternatives to closing libraries. Can the "Next Great City" shut down vital connection centers before exhausting every possible measure? No doubt Mayor Nutter would embrace less wrenching austerity measures.

Americans recycle with a vengeance. They pressure businesses into reducing pollution. They contribute heavily to environmental organizations. But most never dream of taking the ultimate step in environmentalism - cutting their consumption, curbing their ravenous appetites for all those goods whose manufacture chews up raw materials and energy and clogs up landfills with production wastes. That may be changing. In a recent survey sponsored by the Merck Family Fund, 28 percent of those interviewed said they had made lifestyle changes designed to give them more balanced lives - that is, geared more to their families, their communities and the environment.

THE "T" WORD If you want to be trendy, don't be trendy. "The latest trend . . . is to balk at trends, to put our collective tail between our legs and plead forgiveness for the go-go '80s," according to an article in Adweek magazine. "We're asking ourselves what has lasting value and what is destined to go the way of the power shoulder pad. Consumerism has become consumeritis - an ugly itch we're trying not to scratch. " SNEAKING AROUND Having said all that, here's news on what sounds like some pretty trendy athletic shoes.

The play Affluenza! is all about money, fully written in rhyming iambic pentameter, as in moo/LAH moo/LAH moo/LAH moo/LAH moo/LAH. The story's impossibly rich dad has scads of it. His avaricious, ethically empty son can't wait to stuff his own accounts with it. His scorned ex-wife considers it hers. And his little-girl mistress may be after it, so sonny-boy can't take chances. It's amusing throughout in Tom Quinn's staging at Montgomery Theater in Souderton, where Quinn is artistic director.

THE OTHER day, while shopping for jackets for my youngest daughters, I noted that one of my favorite department stores was a big disappointment with its preholiday sales. Instead of the carefully displayed, high-quality items that used to be the hallmark of that store, it was packed with cheap items much less substantial than their usual fare. But I knew the sad truth that many retailers engage in this type of marketing to capitalize on the Christmas shopping season. They ignore the fact that some consumers are still looking for quality merchandise, and may not realize that by lowering their standards, those quality-seekers might not return when the holiday season ends.

"We're going to do some damage in this town," David Duchovny merrily declares to his beautiful wife, daughter, and handsome son as their gleaming SUV rolls up behind the big moving truck in the driveway of their new McMansion. And damage they do - but mostly to themselves - in The Joneses , an overobvious and underwhelming satire about American consumerism run amok. For all its timely allusions to living beyond one's means - to credit card debt, mortgage foreclosures, and financial ruin - writer/director Derrick Borte's film fails to add anything new, or illuminating, to the Great Recession debate.

Not everyone will be out and about today to buy and revel in one of the biggest-selling retail days of the year. Instead, some may observe "Buy Nothing Day," a day of activism for the anti-consumerism crowd, who oppose what they say is the massive consumption that Black Friday promotes. Although there are no planned "Buy Nothing Day" events in Philadelphia, there are scheduled activities set for many cities worldwide, including Oklahoma City, Kyoto, Japan, and Minneapolis, where organizers plan to screen the Morgan Spurlock documentary "What Would Jesus Buy?"

Objective review It never hurts to fantasize in times of crisis. In the 1993 film Dave, the president's double, in an attempt to prevent service cuts, recruits an objective financial analyst to review the numbers. Relentless pork surgery yields a budget that cuts costs but not services. A similar initiative here might well reveal alternatives to closing libraries. Can the "Next Great City" shut down vital connection centers before exhausting every possible measure? No doubt Mayor Nutter would embrace less wrenching austerity measures.

IHAVE RECENTLY come to discover that my academic advancements are being limited as a result of our worsening economy. I am currently a student at one of the most populated and diverse universities in the country and I am becoming increasingly displeased with the amount of privileges being revoked due to the limits on our economy. I more than understand that our country is in a time of economic crisis, and with that said, my problem lies in the severe prioritizing issues of Americans.

The play Affluenza! is all about money, fully written in rhyming iambic pentameter, as in moo/LAH moo/LAH moo/LAH moo/LAH moo/LAH. The story's impossibly rich dad has scads of it. His avaricious, ethically empty son can't wait to stuff his own accounts with it. His scorned ex-wife considers it hers. And his little-girl mistress may be after it, so sonny-boy can't take chances. It's amusing throughout in Tom Quinn's staging at Montgomery Theater in Souderton, where Quinn is artistic director.

George Saunders' fiction is so twisted that sometimes it even shocks the man who wrote it. "I'll be reading the earlier stories to a crowd," he says, "and if I haven't read them in a while, I'm often struck by how sick they are. " His new short-story collection, In Persuasion Nation, is another blast of savage Swiftian satire, a vision of an America well past its expiration date, of a society marinating in rancid consumerism, marketing doubletalk,...

Somewhere in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania, independent miners are picking and pummeling their way through the earth as deep as 2,000 feet below the surface. These men - soot-covered, deeply lined - are blasting and digging vertically, rather than horizontally, for anthracite, a form of clean-burning coal that could play a crucial role in energy conservation. Yet they are considered bootleg miners, being fined and shut down by the federal government that no less than a dozen years ago cited their dedication.

Consumerism is the latest rage in health insurance. Employers are pushing it in hopes of saving money and improving the health of workers. Insurers are marketing health savings accounts and health reimbursement arrangements to attract subscribers. And millions of people have jumped from managed-care policies into consumer-directed plans. Except in the Philadelphia area that is. While employers here are interested and the region's major insurers all offer an array of such plans, the number of people embracing consumer-directed health plans is tiny.

It's been a year of consumer scandals for big global brands in China, and Haagen-Dazs, the specialty ice cream purveyor, faced a doozy earlier this summer. A newspaper report in the southern city of Shenzhen slammed the ice cream maker for keeping a toilet near a production kitchen and for failing to have a sanitation permit. The report, some of it unverified, quickly spread on the Internet. "I shut down the kitchen. I destroyed all the product. But then it became a national and international issue," said Gary Chu, managing director for Greater China for General Mills, the food company that owns Haagen-Dazs.