Free Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? by Steve Lowe, Alan Mcarthur, Brendan Hay Page A

debutante days under his father’s rule in the 1970s, he’s accumulated a truly world-beating entourage, including a multinational team of personal chefs. While “his people” starved—North Korea endured a famine—he imported ovens and two Milanese cooks to prepare his favorite dish: pizza. Extra capers? You bet. “What do you mean, only one visit to the salad cart? With these words, my friend,
you will die.
”
    In 1978, when he decided he wanted to build a native film industry, he simply kidnapped the South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choe Eun-hee. Kim forced the director to make twenty propaganda films, and sent him to prison for reeducation classes when he tried to escape.
    We can but hope that, in years to come, capricious, famine-ignoring, velour-tracksuit-wearing dictatorial kook Kim Jong Il might decide that he needs his own velour-tracksuit-wearing hip-hop/fashion mogul and spirit away Diddy. Maybe Donatella, too. And Mariah. For them, what’s the difference? This is the promised land of lifts in your shoes, and a penchant for foreign liquor.
    ESTATE AGENTS SHOWING PEOPLE AROUND HOUSES ON TV
    ESTATE AGENT: So, here’s the bathroom.
    PERSON ON TV: Okay . . .
    ESTATE AGENT: And, uh, the second bedroom—quite a nice size . . .
    PERSON ON TV: Mmm.
    It’s amazing how often you can see estate agents showing people around houses on TV.
    ETHICAL CONSUMER SCAMS
    Spotting liberal soft touches from a distance of forty miles, supermarkets have been known to mark up fair-trade goods to make them more profitable than non-fair-trade items. So the small coffee producer is getting slightly more for his goods. The conscience-driven consumer, on the other hand, is getting fleeced to fuckery. This is “ethical,” apparently.
    Even if you don’t buy your Nestlé in a supermarket, world capitalism is not exactly quaking in its Jimmy Choo boots. Clearly a few small producers getting more for their coffee beans is not a bad thing, but fair trade accounts for only 0.001% of world trade. Even in areas where fair trade is strongest, their market share is puny: 3% of the UK coffee market and 4% of the banana market.
    Meaning that, as a strategy for changing the world and challenging the structures of global power, “buying coffee” is possibly not the most effective.
    So . . . thank fuck we’ve got those wristbands as well.
    ETHICAL LIVING
    Throughout our history, we have wrestled with the complex webs of emotions and reason and social relations and aspirations and power and freedom that define us. Thinkers and activists alike have debated who we are, what we are, and how we should be—from Aristotle’s belief that virtuous behavior is inherent to us and would see us flourish as ideal, happy human beings; to Kant’s assertions that we should obey immutable moral rules—categorical imperatives to be good; to Marx’s ideas that we can’t understand humans without considering their social context—that for humans to flourish as Aristotle had foreseen, there can be no slaves, no aristocratic society like Aristotle’s, no classes. Plato, Ayer, Nietzsche. Liberals, Christians, Muslims, Marxists, James Lovelock—all of them addressing two questions:
How should I live, what actions ought I to perform?
and
What sort of person should I be?
In essence: Can I be good? How should I be moral? What is right?
    And all of them could not see the truths that were staring them in the face and which now we hold to be self-evident. What sort of actions ought I to perform? Buying fair-trade coffee, hemp Frisbees, and a GIVE PEAS A CHANCE organic baby onesie. What sort of person should I be? Smug.
    The salvation of humanity lies through the judicious purchase of ethical goods. You can read up on all the new products in special magazines while you fire one out on your compost toilet. You can even buy stuff you don’t want or need—it all helps. Let us now take a moment for reflection and self-congratulation by