Following up on yesterday's post, I think Zygmunt Bauman's Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts applies very well to the people of Angola and their current plight -- the tip-of-the-iceberg result not only of a quarter century of hugely destructive internal warfare, but also of the economic and social globalization dynamics Bauman writes about so brilliantly. However, the following comment, somewhat tangential to the direct object of the book at hand, and delivered as an en passant observation by the reviewer, struck me as genuinely profound. Aimed at the "First World" rather than the "Third," it seems worth pondering deeply.

from: Wasted Lives, book review by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
source: Tikkun, 1 July 2004
via: HighBeam™ Research

Bauman has long been a penetrating critic of the self-help and counseling booms so endemic to life in the overdeveloped world, through which women and men become convinced that they can find biographical solutions to problems that are in fact much more systemic than individual.

Here's a clip from the book itself...

...consumables embody an ultimate non-finality and revocability of choices and an ultimate disposability of the objects chosen. More importantly yet, they seem to put us in control. It is we, the consumers, who draw the line between the useful and the waste. With consumables for partners, we can stop worrying about ending in the refuse bin.

Inadvertently, marketable consumables incarnate the ultimate paradox of the culture of waste:

First, it is the horrifying spectre of disposability -- of redundancy, abandonment, rejection, exclusion, wastage -- that sends us to seek security in a human embrace.

Second, it is from that expedition that we are diverted to the shopping malls.

Third, it is disposability itself, magically recycled from terminal disease into therapy, that we find there and are prompted to take home and store in first-aid boxes.

[p. 131, emphasis mine]

Heidi Marsh... looked like what a Bellevue Square shopper is supposed to look like, I think, except that she was wearing flip flops.

"I get dressed up for Bellevue or Alderwood, but this is like my daily mall," she said.

Marsh, blond, blue-eyed, slender, was wearing khaki capri pants and one of those sweaters with a hood that I saw a lot of at Bellevue Square earlier in the day.

Before I went to Southcenter, I sat outside the Bellevue Square Nordstrom jotting down descriptions of the people walking by.

There were people who were stylishly dressed and coifed, with perfect makeup. But there were also lots of folks who didn't look that way.

Both malls had a wide spectrum of shoppers, though one leaned more toward coifed and the other toward comfort.

Your hairstyle, the clothes you wear, the way you carry yourself are all full of messages that other people use to place you in the social spectrum. That's been true as long as people have had a choice about their appearance and for as long as we have lived in large, stratified societies, but the lines are often blurred nowadays.

People with money wear styles that originated with poor folks, and people without money can use a credit card to dress up.

[incredulous emphasis mine]

from: Mall mogul says: You are where you shop
source: The Seattle Times (via Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service), 18 April 2005
via: HighBeam™ Research