Culture Briefs

Status stamp

“Japanese consumers probably prefer the [Louis Vuitton]-stamped version for the same reason everyone does — status signaling — but they voice this preference in an unusually conformist and superficially classless culture. In a milieu not always kind to individualist expression, luxury brands are a socially acceptable mode of signaling. …

“This self-branding may be most evident among the luxury-soaked Japanese, but the impulse is universal. As Tom Wolfe documented in his 1976 essay ’The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,’ a society whose material needs are met is one that turns its focus to individuation. Luxury goods, while accessible to greater numbers of people, still signal heightened status, elevated taste, and mastery of a system of tacit rules that govern consumer choices. They allow consumers to buy into idealized identities.”

— Kerry Howley, writing on “Vuitton Values,” in the March issue of Reason

Dumped on

“Most of the eager [’Dumped’] contestants assume they’ll be flying abroad, perhaps to a remote island or a tropical rain forest to do something good for the earth while experiencing the glories of its natural wonders. They wish. The group travels by bus to a dump outside Croydon in South London, where they’ll spend the next three weeks living off the junk that their fellow Brits have thrown away. …

“Will staring into a giant pile of trash through the lens of reality TV inspire any viewers to change their profligate consumer ways? Maybe. Just as watching video of horribly abused cows going to slaughter renders some squeamish viewers vegetarians, surely there is someone out there who will be grossed out enough by the staggering mountains of trash in ’Dumped’ to commit to using the recycling bin more often, or taking those old clothes to Goodwill instead of tossing them out.”

— Katharine Mieszkowski, writing on “ ’Survivor’ in the Rubbish,” March 8 at Salon

Moral equals

“The streets of Gaza were packed with thousands of joyous revelers on Thursday following the terrorist attack at a Jerusalem rabbinical seminary that killed eight people. In mosques throughout Gaza, according to news reports, many residents went to perform the prayers of thanksgiving. Armed men fired machine gun bursts into the air in celebration. Others passed out candies to random passersby on the streets. …

“[I]t must be noted there has never been a recorded celebration in the Israeli streets over a counterterrorism incursion into the Gaza Strip. Indeed, Israelis are typically saddened by the necessity of such operations. Meanwhile, the international community takes great pains to cast the Palestinians and Israelis as having equal responsibility in the ongoing bloodshed.”

— Jonathan Schanzer, writing on “Morbid Celebrations,” March 10 at the Weekly Standard

Despair generation

“On the first day of a lectureship I gave recently at Oxford University, the Oxford newspaper carried the story of the suicide of the student body president of an area college. After my lecture at the town hall that morning, I cannot begin to tell you the number of students who came to me to say that suicide is something they have toyed with.

“In my travels across the globe, I have found this scenario to be conspicuous among our youth in universities everywhere as these institutions deliver meaninglessness in large doses. On campus after campus, in culture after culture, I have listened for hours to intellectuals, young and old, who testify to a deep-seated emptiness. Young, honest minds seek answers and meaning. No amount of philosophizing about a world without God brings hope.

“I have seen that this sense of alienation and meaninglessness is the principal malady of young minds. Academic degree after degree has not removed the haunting specter of the pointlessness of existence in a random universe. … I am writing to tell young men and women — all who ask the hard questions about the meaning of life — that atheism is bankrupt for answers. The emperor has no clothes.”

— Ravi Zacharias, in his new book, “The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists”