Christmas looms, and with it the customary slew of admonitions that it's all gone horribly wrong. Traditionally, these come from a Christian perspective, warning that the core message of the festival is being obscured by tinsel and Xboxes.
Recently, however, a new trend has taken hold. Rather than fretting about the need to remember baby Jesus, commentators point out that the consumer society, exemplified by the madness of Christmas, is also putting our physical wellbeing at risk. If we're not condemning ourselves to cardiac shutdown from the brandy butter, we're destroying the planet with our unstoppable desire to consume, to own, to buy.
And it's true, consumerism has gone barking mad, reaching its zenith of insanity every December. As the philosopher John Gray put it: "Where affluence is the normal condition of the majority of the people, continued economic growth depends on manufacturing insatiable needs." Which Madeleine Bunting countered last week with the entirely sound, but politically indigestible notion that consumer-driven economic growth cannot be allowed to continue unchecked, for all our sakes.
And she's right, of course. Except that, soon after reading Bunting's piece, I checked the Amazon page for my latest book, and was heartened to note that, after a period of moribund sales, it was shifting units pretty quickly. I wondered what had provoked this second wind. Was there a glowing review that I'd missed somewhere? Had some style guru been spotted reading it in public?
No, you dolt. Look at the calendar. People are buying copies as Christmas presents. You're profiting from the seasonal consumer frenzy that you affect to despise. We can sneer at people who buy books just once a year, and even then for someone else: but a major chunk of the publishing industry would go under without that late rush to the tills.
At least I'm in good company. Radiohead - the subjects of my book - are noted for their uneasy relationship with the economic framework within which they operate, and frontman Thom Yorke is renowned for his invective against globalisation and capitalism; their pay-what-you-like policy for the download of their latest album, In Rainbows, was perceived as a thumb in the eye for the mainstream record industry. But look at what's freshly available for the Radiohead fan's ethically sourced Christmas stocking: In Rainbows on CD or vinyl; a book of Radiohead artwork; even (and what sort of record industry cliche is this?) a limited edition box set of the last seven albums.
I'm not knocking Radiohead for this: like all of us, they've got to put food on the table. But the apparent contradictions serve as a reminder that, cogent as Bunting's anti-consumerist rhetoric may be, many of us are more deeply implicated in the scam than we might wish. And it's not just writers and musicians, of course; millions of people working in retail or marketing or manufacturing or agriculture might gag at the obscenity of a modern Yuletide, with the moral, emotional, economic and environmental carnage it wreaks, only to realise that, directly or indirectly, they depend on it for their financial survival. Christmas, supposedly the season of peace and goodwill, makes hypocrites and whores of us all.
