Are You a Consumer or a Participant?
—SITUATIONIST GRAFFITI, Paris, 1968
Where’s my burrito? Where’s my burrito?
SLOGAN CHANTED BY HOMER SIMPSON,
Springfield Nuclear Power Plant strike, 1988
IN EPISODE 1F09 (“HOMER THE VIGILANTE”), Springfield falls victim to a rash of burglaries, leading Homer to organize a vigilante mob to guard the town and try to track down the perpetrator of the crimes. During one booze-fuelled patrol, Homer’s mob comes upon Jimbo Jones—the punk kid in the black, skull-logoed T-shirt and toque who is Springfield Elementary’s alpha bully—as he’s spray-painting the words CARPE DIEM on a wall. “You’re that drunken posse!” Jimbo exclaims with atypical admiration. “Wow! Can I join yuh?” In no time, he’s swinging a sack of doorknobs with Homer’s crew. Fast-forward a few scenes: the mob has been outsmarted once again by Springfield’s cat burglar, and Homer steps out onto his front porch to greet a mob of angry citizens. Jimbo emerges from the crowd and empties his sack of doorknobs at Homer’s feet. “You let me down, man,” he announces. “Now I don’t believe in nothing no more. I’m going to law school!” Homer erupts in a melodramatic “Noooooooo!” but it’s too late to save Jimbo. The best we can hope for him now is that he doesn’t take too much of our lunch money once he’s become a professional bully.
This is what happened all too often to the idealists of the Simpsons age: they threw down their sacks of doorknobs at the feet of their heroes. Drowning in cheesy corporate crap and syrupy boomer nostalgia, they turned so cynical they almost choked on it. They turned on themselves. They imploded. “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” says one jaded fan at the Hullabalooza music festival. “I don’t even know anymore,” his friend replies.
And so there were few unified responses to the hollow prosperity of the 1990s, no tightly woven web of icons and events and symbols that could be condensed into the kind of tidy montage that tends to pop up, for example, in films about the boomer counterculture. Many—perhaps most—merely joined the party. They got jobs at dot-coms (or in “bricks-and-mortar” businesses), collected stock options, bought houses in the suburbs, shopped in gargantuan “big box” stores, drank Starbucks coffee religiously. There were also widespread tendencies to either a) disappear entirely into a cozy, sequestered corner of the culture, attempting to build a whole society out of whatever happened to be lying around there (viz. conspiracy theorists, Trekkies and other Trekkie-like subcultures, hackers, Phish-heads, attendees of drum-and-bass and only drum-and-bass parties, proprietors of internet fansites, etc.); or b) watch the whole parade from a comfortable ironic distance. People who didn’t bowl wore bowling shirts with names sewn on the chest that weren’t their names. Kitsch became a robust cottage industry, propping up everything from the sky-high ratings of soap operas like Melrose Place and Beverly Hills, 90210 to the cult-hit status of films like Showgirls and Battlefield Earth to the ironic comebacks of oddball celebrities like Mr. T and Gary Coleman. “20 Percent of Area Man’s Income Spent Ironically,” read a revealing headline at the satirical online newspaper The Onion; the article detailed the consumer habits of a twentysomething hipster whose prized possessions included a Knight Rider lunch box and a rare Italian poster advertising the laughably lousy movie The Adventures of Pluto Nash. In Richard Linklater’s seminal 1991 pseudo-documentary, Slacker, there is a character who is attempting to find a buyer for Madonna’s pap smear, which nails several salient features of pop cynicism—backhanded celebrity worship, wilful obscurity, playful half-serious co-optation of the culture of mass marketing, and making a buck regardless—all in one precise anecdote.
Oh, but don’t even say the word “slacker.” Nobody was actually a slacker, nor a member of Generation X. The prevailing rock music of the day wasn’t really called “grunge,” and grunge sucked anyway now that corporate record labels were involved. The predominantly electronic music that was played at clubs and raves wasn’t a genre of music, either, and if you had to label it, you needed to understand that it wasn’t one genre but dozens, hundreds, and the surest way to create a new subgenre was to give a name to an old one. This knee-jerk cynicism and hip, offhand dismissal was much worse—much more poisonous—than the carnival of kitsch.
In the midst of all of this, satire alone could be safely, unequivocally embraced, because it acknowledged the sanctity of nothing at all. And so satire has triumphed. The Simpsons is the age’s greatest pop institution, and it has begotten a whole subgenre of satirical TV. As I’ve mentioned, The Onion is one of the internet’s most beloved websites. The satirist Michael Moore frequently tops the bestseller lists with his books and breaks box-office records with his documentaries. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, meanwhile, is a nightly satirical newscast that is surely more trusted by Simpsons fans than anything on CNN. As voter turnout among young people has plummeted to all-time lows throughout most of the democratic West, politicians have taken to hiring humorists to make their speeches more accessible. There was at one point an ironic and self-referential TV commercial for Parkay margarine, of all things—this among countless other ironic and self-referential TV ads.1
The most strident pop-cultural manifestation of this pose, though, was another TV show: Seinfeld. It was “a show about nothing.” No sincerity, no emotion, no meaning. Just nothing, nothingness, the void. In fact, one excellent Seinfeld sequence involves the main characters—ostensibly best friends—becoming emotionally involved in each other’s lives for the first and only time in the show’s run. If The Simpsons was to some extent a weekly portrait of the world as a pile of bullshit, Seinfeld was a once-a-week argument in favour of the bleak existential notion that even bullshit was bullshit. When the heavily hyped final episode of Seinfeld appeared, it hammered home the essential absurdity of existence in an extended homage to Camus’s The Stranger. Seinfeld was a total renunciation of moral authority, and it seemed to lay to rest the confident optimism that had been the engine of the American Dream.
Satire was America’s most exciting pop-cultural export in the 1990s, so it’s worth recalling how sharply this contrasts with the prime pop exports of previous ages. Consider, in particular, rock & roll, which in the 1950s and 1960s was a powerful and boisterous declaration of American supremacy. Rock & roll was a sound so full of youthful energy, sexuality and joy that it could legitimately claim to be the theme music of utopia. When the free world looked to America for inspiration—and it often did—it was greeted with a gleeful burst of pure unadulterated hope in 4/4 time. America’s moral authority in the postwar world was assured at least as much by Elvis Presley as by the Marshall Plan. By the 1990s, though, many of America’s pop broadcasts were distress signals of one sort or another: there were the ultra-violent cartoons of hip-hop and indie film, alternative rock’s soul-sick howls of rage and—perhaps worst of all—mass-market spectacles so homogenous and glossy they felt like they’d been rubber-stamped for export by some Department of Capitalist Realism (see, for example, the shopping-as-freedom subtext of Pretty Woman, the triumphalism of Independence Day or the glosssy kiddie porn of Britney Spears videos). Indeed the corporate logo of Rick Rubin’s American Recordings (which, among other things, resuscitated the career of Johnny Cash, the troubadour of the American outlaw hero, after he’d been cast aside by corporate Nashville) is an inverted American flag. A distress signal. To some degree, so is The Simpsons. From a certain angle, it can indeed be read as an unencouraging diagnosis from an observant doctor, or even an autopsy of the American Dream.
Ultimately, though, there is more hope than this in The Simpsons, and this is a major reason why it’s been so completely embraced by a global audience in the millions. Satire comes from deep anger, and it is at its best when it is ruthless in its assessment of the subject’s ills, but its final message is that the sickness, once satirically diagnosed, can possibly be cured.
Okay. Look: whatever hope there is in The Simpsons, it isn’t enough on its own. I’m speaking just for myself here. It wasn’t enough. Circa 1997, my abiding cynicism was about the only thing I trusted. I sneered, therefore I was. I’d find myself—just for instance—thinking of a particular line from Pump Up the Volume. (For the uninitiated, this was a 1990 Christian Slater movie about a teenager who operates a pirate radio station out of his parents’ basement that gives comfort and hope to the freaks at a bleak, conformist high school.) “Everything decent’s been done,” Slater’s character sermonizes during one of his broadcasts. “All the great themes have been used up, turned into theme parks. So I don’t really find it cheerful to be living in a totally exhausted decade where there is nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to.” I’d think of this line, and it’d ring true, and then I’d chastise myself for getting all earnest and reflective over a goddamn Christian Slater movie that had a totally cornball ending, even if it had its moments. But at least the Slater character pauses after this little sermon and then half-sarcastically declares, “That was deep.” Did it redeem my cynicism that the cinematic moment I found so meaningful was cynical and self-mocking? I’d fret over that kind of crap.
Anyway, one drab Thursday—February 20, 1997—I reluctantly agreed to go to a rock concert. I hadn’t heard of the band, and plain old rock & roll seemed pretty much played out, and—well, I could always find lots of reasons not to do things back then—but I was invited, so I went. The show was at the Horseshoe Tavern, a venerable live-music venue in downtown Toronto. The band was called Wilco, and they were touring in support of their breakthrough album, Being There. And that night Wilco restored my faith in rock & roll.
There was one moment in particular, midway through the show, that has stayed with me ever since like a talisman. The band was playing “Misunderstood,” the opening track on Being There. Jeff Tweedy, Wilco’s lead singer and main songwriter, has said that the album was the product of his own crisis of faith in rock & roll—a failed attempt to prove to himself that it ultimately didn’t matter. For Tweedy, it did matter, and Being There was the proof. “Misunderstood” is the short version of all of this, an epic tale of frustration and lost faith told in a series of lyrical vignettes that unfold like grainy black-and-white photos. Over a quietly strummed acoustic guitar, a misunderstood kid returns to his old neighbourhood. He wonders whether he should go to a party there that night, whether he still loves rock & roll, whether the fortune inside his head will ever pay off. As groaning feedback and slapping drums invade, the kid sits listening to a hard-rockin’ album in the middle of the night, studying the cover art, wondering if the guitarist he’s listening to will ever escape the shadows of rock’s golden age that haunt him.
On that night at the Horseshoe, “Misunderstood” seemed to last for hours, building to an endless, roaring crescendo, as Tweedy—on behalf of all of these characters, and of himself, and of every musician and fan—screamed himself hoarse. “I’d like to thank you all / For nothing / I’d like to thank you all for nothing at all / I’d like to thank you all for nothing, nothing / Nothing, nothing / NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING …;” Tweedy had his back to the audience, facing his band, all of them—all of us—rising and falling as one with each ferocious NOTHING, the tension building with each one until all at once there was a final chord, a final scream—NOTHING AT ALL—and then Tweedy spun to face the crowd. He was dripping sweat, exhausted, ecstatic and grinning. His eyes dancing out over the crowd. Guitar sort of swinging from his shoulders, the echo of its final scronking chord still banging around the joint. A single delirious look, a joyous look, a sincere look. The look of a man who has discovered rock & roll for the first time, invented it just then. He has cast aside a lifetime of deities and demons—thanked them all for nothing at all—and he now turns to face the crowd to reclaim the void from cynicism and absurdity, to teach us all how to see it not as a black hole but as a blank canvas.
That night, Wilco become for me a little oasis of sincerity. I’m sure many Simpsons fans found their own—something other than the show itself, something that didn’t need to predicate its sincerity on withering criticism. Maybe it was music of another sort, maybe the endorphin rush of a rave or a ten-kilometre run. Volunteer work for a local charity, growing a garden, joining a book club, publishing a zine. Some personal passion, anyway, that could be embraced completely, without qualifications and without irony. Something pure. Something you might have hoped would become an emblem of the whole culture, the way, for example, you’d play the new Wilco album for friends, sure it would blow them away and confident that in a parallel universe every other song on it was a number one hit. But aware, too, that you didn’t live in that universe, and that this excellent music would likely remain sequestered in its little shrine. And then maybe you’d get a happy surprise—maybe your little oasis would face the howling storm of the mainstream head on, and you’d find your faith redoubled as it survived on little more than the strength of its own integrity.
That, anyway, is what happened with Wilco in 2001 and 2002. It started when the band delivered its new album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—a brilliant, somewhat experimental record about love and loss and faith—to the executives at its record label, Reprise Records. Now, Reprise had been Wilco’s label since its first album, had watched it build a small but loyal following, had been nothing but supportive. But there had been big changes at Reprise’s parent company—Time Warner—since Wilco last released an album, and they soon reverberated down the corporate ladder. The previous year, Time Warner had joined forces with AOL in the largest merger of media conglomerates the world had ever seen, and the new entity, AOL Time Warner, was hard hit by the bursting of the internet bubble and thrown into internal chaos by the clash of the two companies’ dissimilar corporate cultures. At the moment Wilco happened to deliver its new album, the prevailing wisdom was that a certain level of projected sales was necessary to warrant AOL Time Warner expending its enormous marketing might on an artist, and the prognosis for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot wasn’t promising enough. Wilco was asked to change the album, clean it up, make it more accessible. The band declined. In short order, Wilco was cut loose—and then signed, soon after, with Nonesuch Records, another arm of AOL Time Warner. A somewhat marginal, uncompromising rock & roll band had stared down the largest media conglomerate on the planet, had found itself hard against its enormous grinding gears. Had held its ground and lived to tell the tale. And even to triumph: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was released in the spring of 2002 to widespread critical worship and the band’s usual solid sales.
It was a victory of the band’s artistic vision over the market-research abstractions and corporate priorities of a media titan. The perseverance of What Is in the face of a powerful assault from the forces of What Should Be. A rare and wonderful thing, especially in an age in which What Should Be was again ascendant.
In Episode EABF09 (“Mr. Spritz Goes to Washington”), which first aired in March 2003, Krusty the Clown runs for Congress as a Republican. Like many American families in this uncertain post-9/11 era, the Simpson family turns to Fox News for biased and jingoistic information on the election: in this case, interviews with Krusty and his Democratic opponent. “Welcome to Fox News,” the cable-news network’s anchor intones. “Your voice for evil.” As the ludicrously one-sided interviews progress—the anchor refers to Krusty as “Congressman” and the hapless Democrat as “comrade”—a news crawl snakes along the bottom of the Simpsons’ TV screen. One item reads, “Do Democrats Cause Cancer? Find Out at Foxnews.Com;” another declares, “Oil Slicks Found to Keep Seals Young, Supple;” still another argues, “Brad Pitt + Albert Einstein = Dick Cheney.” All in all, it was a fine little parody of Fox News’ unique approach to journalism.
A few months after this episode first broadcast, Matt Groening turned up on National Public Radio for a friendly interview. Talk turned to his show’s fondness for pushing boundaries, and the interviewer asked what the show had done lately that fit that description. Groening: “One of the great things we did last year was we parodied the Fox News Channel and we did the crawl along the bottom of the screen. And Fox fought against it and said that they would sue, they would sue the show. And we called their bluff because we didn’t think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself, so we got away with it. But now Fox has a new rule that we can’t do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it ‘might confuse the viewers into thinking it’s real news.’” By the next day, media outlets around the world were reporting that Fox had considered suing its own show—a claim that was promptly denied by Fox executives. In due course, The Simpsons itself felt obliged to issue a statement. As quoted in The Washington Post, it read, “Matt was being satirical and certainly there was never any issue between the show and Fox News. We regret any confusion.” Variety’s report on the foofaraw added, “Insiders say Groening was clearly being satirical during the interview.”
I can’t speak for these “insiders,” but I heard the interview, and I wouldn’t describe Groening’s tone as “satirical.” Bemused? Yes. Delighting in the absurdity of the situation? Also yes. Anyway, he retracted it, so officially it didn’t happen, and perhaps we’ll never know what Fox did or didn’t do in response to The Simpsons’ pointed parody of their news channel. What this anecdote made abundantly clear, though, is that the advocates of What Should Be were once again preaching at top volume in the free world. And this time it looked like even The Simpsons had to back off from its defence of What Is.
The first years of this new century felt quite a lot—quite terrifyingly a lot—like one of those historical eras in which enormous decisions that will reverberate for many decades to come were being made, and the What Should Be camp seemed to be calling the shots. The deranged Wahhabists who destroyed the World Trade Center advocated with blunt brutality on behalf of a nineteenth-century interpretation of a seventh-century vision of What Should Be. The Bush administration, meanwhile, overflowed with true believers in other competing ideas of What Should Be, including several followers of a literal interpretation of the Bible (the president himself and his first attorney general among them), several more who believed in the “Noble Lie” statecraft of a deceased University of Chicago professor who based his theories on a gnostic interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy, and others who saw the current crises through a distorted Cold Warrior’s lens. Tony Blair, a strident Anglican, was a devotee of What Should Be, and so were Sharon and Arafat and KGB nostalgist Vladimir Putin. Saddam Hussein was so psychopathically dedicated to his own twisted vision of What Should Be that he actually built a model of it in Baghdad. The world over, our leaders talked of new eras and different priorities and changed circumstances, and then they pushed on in favour of the same old What-Should-Be geopolitics. They believed that democracy would spread through the Middle East in a benevolent inversion of the domino effect that never did send Southeast Asia tumbling, that evil was a finite thing that could be hunted down and executed, and that terror was not a tactic but an ersatz nation-state.
As defence against all of this, the satirical barbs of a clever cartoon seemed less than adequate. The Simpsons, like all TV shows, was delimited by the shallow commercialism of its corporate parent and the intrinsic meaningless of its medium. Did it really matter? Does it still? What difference, in the end, can any TV show really make?
In Episode 9F21 (“Homer’s Barbershop Quartet”), the Simpsons attend a swap meet, where Bart stumbles upon an album by Homer’s old group, the Be Sharps. “Dad, when did you record an album?” Bart asks his dad. “I’m surprised you don’t remember, son,” Homer replies. “It was only eight years ago.”
“Dad,” Bart answers, “thanks to television, I can’t remember what happened eight minutes ago.” The whole family starts to laugh. “No, really,” Bart exclaims. “I can’t! It’s a serious problem!” More laughter from the Simpsons, and in time Bart joins in, and after a good chuckle he says, “What are we all laughing about?” And no one remembers, and nuts to you if you’re looking for a meaning in any of this. Right?
This has long been the prevailing wisdom about TV’s importance, beginning with Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism about the medium being the message. Regarding the tube’s debased content, McLuhan reckoned Shakespeare had summed it up best in Romeo and Juliet: “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? … She speaks, yet she says nothing.” There are few who would dispute McLuhan—or the Bard—on the basic thrust of this assertion. Even Matt Groening himself has claimed, echoing McLuhan, that TV’s ultimate message is this: “Nothing matters.”
So how does this resolve itself with Groening’s more frequent claims that his TV show aims to “entertain and subvert”? The entertainment part’s no problem, but how can subversion happen in a vacuum?
In the introduction to the 1986 essay collection, Watching Television, sociologist Todd Gitlin wrote:
For the most part, television lets us see only close up: shows us only what the nation already presumes, focuses on what the culture already knows—or more precisely, enables us to gaze upon something the appointed seers think we need or want to know. Television may do private service as a time killer or a baby-sitter; but for the society as a whole, it is the principal circulator of the cultural mainstream.
Here is where Groening’s promised subversion comes in, and where The Simpsons might well become something more than another outpost in a vast wasteland. For if The Simpsons is a reflection of the cultural mainstream, then it suggests that its audience—a significant slice of mainstream Western society—is deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. It suggests indeed that there is a large segment of Western society whose priorities and values contrast as starkly with the “mainstream” as The Simpsons does with The Cosby Show or the nightly news. A parallel universe of sorts, defined and even shaped to a significant degree by The Simpsons. Planet Simpson, if you will. And its existence goes a long way toward rebutting the argument that nothing on TV matters.
Though most of its citizens reside in the English-speaking nations of the world, Planet Simpson is not entirely a geographic phenomenon. And although its core constituency was under the age of forty, during its Golden Age, it is not strictly a demographic phenomenon, either. Planet Simpson is a state of mind, a loose realm of shared consciousness. It is a place populated by folks who watch The Simpsons every week or even twice a day, who maintain Simpsons fan sites, who never lose at the Simpsons trivia board game, who used to watch it every chance they got, even if these days they don’t watch it as much as they used to. It’s a place where the show’s characters are a kind of makeshift pantheon and their adventures are parables, a place whose citizens carry scenes from the show in their heads as a critical framework for understanding their society. It’s a place where conversations consisting almost exclusively of Simpsons dialogue can go on for hours at a time, and where there aren’t many arguments that can’t be summarized with a quote from the show. I don’t know how many people live on Planet Simpson, but I know I’ve met a great many people who do, and I know there are a lot more of us—probably millions more.
Anyhoo, I know that my worldview can be accurately represented by connecting Simpsonian dots.
I know Homer-sized desires, born of my own privileged upbringing in one of the globe’s richest enclaves and enhanced by a relentless assault of TV ads and branding exercises that has made the jingles of fast-food franchises and the climate-controlled corridors of shopping malls at least as familiar to me as the twittering of birds and the warmth of a summer rain. And I know Homer’s panicky fear, a Wauggghhh! of terror that confronts me every time I bag up my garbage or step outside into a eerily balmy Canadian spring, every time I turn on the TV to see the fires of another explosion or hear another blast of Manichaean rhetoric. And I too have quietly murmured an escapist Woo-hoo! as I changed the channel to the latest reality-TV hit or a rerun of my favourite cartoon.
I know Bart’s rage. I spent most of my early twenties furious with almost everything, including myself. I have yelled at my TV and my morning newspaper. I have silently wished terrible harm on the drivers of Hummers and Lincoln Navigators, and I kind of wish I had the wherewithal, as Bart would, to deface their bumpers with clever graffiti.2 My opinion of almost every single leader elected since I reached voting age—federal, provincial and municipal—is pretty close to Bart’s estimation of Principal Skinner.
I’ve never had to work for Mr. Burns, thankfully, but I see his predatory visage everywhere—in the corporate logos that encrust suburban boulevards, in the windows of office towers, in news footage of the carefully preserved oil ministry building in postwar Baghdad. Most of my firsthand experience of cold, unfeeling bureaucracy has come from corporations, not government agencies. I’ve found it far more dehumanizing to navigate through an automated customer-service menu on the phone than to visit a passport office, and I learned about the Kafkaesque absurdity of arbitrary rules and hypocritical power working as a drone in the service industry. The faces behind much of this—the same ones responsible for changing my climate and copyrighting my culture—often look like Lindsey Naegle, but their logic is all Burns. It wouldn’t surprise me all that much if I picked up the paper one morning to learn that one of them had blocked out the sun (or at least privatized it).
Like Lisa, I’ve tried to fight back. I’ve marched against wrong-headed budget cuts and against the American conquest of Iraq. I’ve signed petitions. I’ve been saying for years that I’d become politically active if I ever stumbled on a politician who talked intelligently about the things I cared most deeply about, and so just last year I joined a political party to help elect the first leadership candidate I’d ever heard speak inspirationally on the subject of sustainability.3 I try to patronize small businesses, and I recycle diligently. Alas, I find myself despairing that this will amount to nothing far more often than Lisa does.
I cling, as Marge does, to family and close friends, and to a hazy theology that I hope comes clear one day. I worship as well at the altars of an assortment of pop icons, and some of them are surely as callous as Krusty the Clown or as venal as Troy McClure.
Above all else, I am a citizen of Planet Simpson. The Simpsons debuted just as I was awakening to the shape of the world and the scope of its problems. Right around the time I’d begun to suspect that my society was a very large and powerful machine moving steadily in the wrong direction, The Simpsons entered its Golden Age to vividly chart the movements of the beast and the chinks in its armour. I believe, nowadays, that extreme solutions are pretty much never necessary and no mob is much smarter than any other. I’d like to think a better world is possible, but I know that achieving it can only begin from an honest accounting of What Is. What Should Be is, as Lenny Bruce told us, a dirty lie.
If I have a worldview—a philosophy, a political persuasion—then I’d call it Simpsonian. And I think that’s as good a place as any to start.
In Episode 3F03 (“Lisa the Vegetarian”), Homer and his daughter squabble over her newfound activism. In the episode’s final scene, though, they set aside their differences and reconcile. “I still stand by my beliefs,” Lisa tells her father. “But I can’t defend what I did. I’m sorry I messed up your barbeque.”
“I understand, honey,” Homer replies. “I used to believe in things when I was a kid.”
And then Lisa hops on her father’s back, and they walk off together into the sunset, giggling.
Cut to credits.
1 Hippest. Margarine Tub. Ever. If memory serves, the self-referential Parkay commercial ran sometime in the mid-1990s. I can’t remember the lead-up, but the ad ended with a shot of a tub of Parkay margarine, which since the 1970s had been opening its lid to mutter the word “butter” until the star of the commercial acknowledged that it did in fact taste like butter, at which point the Parkay tub would sassily reply, “Parkay!” In this mid-1990s incarnation, however, the shot of the famous margarine tub was accompanied by a pregnant pause, after which the tub muttered, “Uh, you know.”
2 Ask Them How: In 2000 a pair of culture-jamming activists in San Francisco named Robert Lind and Charles Dines launched a clever campaign to peacefully (if not quite legally) confront the menace of SUVs, a guerrilla sport they’ve dubbed “Big Game SUV Hunting.” Lind and Hines have pioneered the practice of surreptitiously attaching bumper stickers to the largest SUVs. The stickers read: I’M CHANGING THE CLIMATE! ASK ME HOW! Free sticker templates and how-to guides are available at their virtual headquarters (changingtheclimate.com).
3 Full Disclosure: The candidate in question was Jack Layton, who won the leadership of Canada’s federal New Democratic Party in the fall of 2002. As far as I know, my membership lapsed in 2003; since then, Layton’s NDP has backburnered its enlightened sustainability plan in favour of empty posturing on behalf of “working people” and rhetorical shrillness-as-usual, so I’ve seen no reason to look into a renewal.