A question: If we have come, gradually, begrudgingly, perhaps, to the understanding that our elected officials do not represent the overwhelming opinions of the American people — that, in fact, they represent merely corporate and lobby money — I wonder why we don’t try something different than (or in addition to) our moot calls on senators and congresspeople to take up the causes of their constituents. It seems to me that even if our present political class are shame-proof, and utterly inured to conscience, money does at least flow away from pressure points and toward opportunity. And I wonder if we might not wield a little bit of our own, monumental power, our purchasing power, that impacts that flow.
I’m just thinking aloud here, but I wonder if boycotts, divestments, and popular sanctions might help at least stir some real political momentum. The recent study published by the great UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, outlining several corporate entities complicit in Israel’s genocide made me wonder why we do not have better reporting on this more broadly (I say that with all the requisite irony; I know why we don’t have that reporting — though BDS has some). With all the various media entities we have reporting around the clock on things that we should buy, things that will make us happier and more fulfilled, more desirable, I wonder why I cannot find something on the companies that either passively or actively support the genocidal state of Israel, for example. I mean, Substack itself seems to me to be primarily a chorus to become better consumers, to create covetousness in us all, to make us better buyers of things. And still, I cannot find anyone asking IBM or Reebok or Estee Lauder to even clarify their support for Israel, let alone calling for a reevaluation of our consumption of their products. When I gave up buying my beloved Kiehl’s products 15 or so years ago, because their parent company L’Oreal operates warehouses on stolen Palestinian land, I was totally unable to get comment or clarification from the company about their policies. I think they ought to be morally obligated to do so, now, as they were then.
I recently turned down a commission to do a lifestyle story about a family-owned brand whose stakeholders regularly send money to Israel. When I asked my editor, who is a friend, how we could do a piece of that kind when the state the owners sponsor is actively committing a genocide, he said, “I think we don’t focus on that.” Not that I am finding fault with him. At all. I understand the complications of navigating money in media. And there are seemingly fewer and fewer ways to make ends meet in that world, as others, without an asterisk these days (I certainly am yet to do so). I hope, for example, that all the great journalists who left their morally compromised publications in the last couple of years are doing superlatively fulfilling work for brands as pure as the driven snow (and if they’ve found such a Narnia, to send me the coordinates posthaste). Ed. note: For those not clicking on the Albanese report, the companies she implicates are far and wide — and include brands I-you-we use all the time, from AirBnb to Booking.com, from Amazon to Barclays, CAT to Volvo. Their support for the state has, ostensibly, little to do with ethnicities and religion. And everything to do with institutional power. Settler colonialism. Profit. Might. That is what is at issue.
Neither am I finding fault with booking on AirBnb, or wearing Reeboks or a Chanel bag, gassing up at Chevron. Not exactly. But isn’t now the time to ask where our money is going? Where we put our enthusiasms, our support, and tacit endorsement? Do I want to know how the hospitality brands benefiting from real estate cleared by genocide rationalize their operations? I do. Do I want to know how brands square their connections with mass slaughter and starvation? Don’t you?
Isn’t now the time to make our voices heard in that way, if we cannot be heard in any other? Is it not worth wondering, for example, at what point convenience (I want to stream the latest movies, and get two day home delivery on my toothpaste) turns into something else, something like complicity with an actual gestapo? If we don’t interrogate that kind of behavior, what does that make us? If we are not thinking of alternatives to Amazon, to Google, to Chevron, if we do not demand better sourcing, better clarity from the brands we use, do not demand better for ourselves, what is that, if not capitulation? I am asking for me, for myself. I would like to do better.
And I know, I know, the above snark about Substack is more cynical than practical. But really, I wonder if we can use the means and platforms of these questionable-at-best companies, and even the tactics that seem to work within their various systems (talking about commerce, what to buy, who to be), to serve us better right now. To work our way toward better habits, behavior. To be the versions of ourselves to which we really do aspire.
Well said