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"Hair: Public, Political, Extremely Personal" by Diane Simon
Part how-to manual, part cultural history -- what hair means and what the hell to do about yours.
By Maggie Jones
[05/10/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
Out of the past
Now that I'm in a committed relationship, my ex-boyfriends are coming out of the woodwork. Do I have to turn them away?
By Garrison Keillor
[05/09/00]

Reviews
"Shopping" by Gavin Kramer
A doomed East-West romance set in a Tokyo of brand-name whores and green-tea-flavored condoms.
By Matthew DeBord
[05/09/00]

Book Bag
Data dazed
The author of "Music for Torching" recommends five books for the information-addled.
By A.M. Homes
[05/08/00]

Reviews
"Day of the Bees" by Thomas Sanchez
A Picasso-like painter and his muse and model play out a tale of love and lust in occupied France.
By Rachel King
[05/08/00]

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My nephew understood immediately that the book was about sharing, but he is also at the age of the perpetual "why?" and trying to answer his whys about R.F.'s epiphany, I felt queasy. It's important that children learn to share, but this clumsy little book's more prominent message is that people will like you if you give them your possessions, particularly the possessions they envy. The unwitting moral of "Rainbow Fish" is that you can buy love.

Anyone who reads to children knows that such ill-conceived homilies abound, but what's interesting about these sloppily reasoned kids books is what they tell us about our own atavistic beliefs. It seems to me that "Rainbow Fish" unwittingly exposes the confusion inherent in one of our most deep-seated convictions -- that materialism, the love and acquisition of things, is intrinsically evil.

In her interesting new book, "Do Americans Shop Too Much?" Harvard economist Juliet Schor laments what she calls the "new consumerism," a frenzy for "high-status" goods she attributes to the increased concentration of wealth at the top of the economic ladder: "Trophy homes, diamonds of a carat or more, granite countertops, and sport utility vehicles are the primary consumer symbols of the late 1990s." This rampant consumption is unfortunate, she argues, not only because it squanders environmental resources but because it forces people on the lower rungs of the income ladder to try to keep up.

Schor believes that we consume competitively, with an eye on the consumption habits of the proverbial Joneses -- except that the Joneses, who used to live down the street and were probably our socioeconomic peers, are no longer our frames of reference. Now, because of television, more sophisticated marketing techniques and the fact that most women are working in jobs, our new frame of reference, she argues, is "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."

This, Schor says, explains one of the more disturbing trends of the past 30 years: that while our buying power has doubled, we are increasingly dissatisfied. Her solution? To limit consumption by taxing luxury goods. This, she believes, would take the pressure off those of us struggling so hard to keep up with all the new stock-market and dot-com millionaires.

But the urge to buy is so much more complicated than Schor -- perhaps limited by the brevity of her essay, perhaps by an academic discipline whose theories have often proved irrelevant in the real world -- even begins to suggest. Status is clearly not the main reason most people buy things. Just because I see the Joneses' SUV and think, "I, too, would love to own an SUV," doesn't mean that I am competing with them. It could simply be that I think owning an SUV seems like a pretty good idea.

Personally, I can't stand SUVs because they guzzle gas, block my view and represent a transportation menace. But I don't have children; both of my sisters, who own Chevy Suburbans, do. One borrowed a Suburban for a vacation with her husband, his mother and the couple's three small daughters and became addicted to all of that wonderful space. The other has a weakness for labor-saving devices and imagined easily carting her two sons and all of their friends to Little League games and having plenty of room in the back to stash their equipment.

Wanting to acquire the things that we see and like is as natural as breathing. Babies want to touch things, taste them, bash them against the wall. We appease them with shining objects, distract them with new toys. When one child sees another child playing with a toy, he or she wants it not because of envy of the other child's relative social position but because it looks like fun. When we see other people having sex, eating an ice-cream cone, setting a table with pretty dishes or using a clever new tool and want to do the same, it's not necessarily because we're jockeying for position. It could be that we, too, just want to have fun.

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