WHILE YOU were watching Access Hollywood, I was watching Ralph Nader. Yes, that old warhorse of the left brought his act to Charlottesville last Thursday, delivering his new lecture, "While You Were Watching 'Big Brother,' Big Brother Was Watching You," to a full house at Old Cabell Hall. "Civic values always contend with commercial values," Nader told his audience, and it's the task of students to combat the creeping corporatization of modern life by engaging in the political process and bettering a society in which they are, by virtue of health, wealth and education, among the best placed to make a difference. In a few short years we'll all be old, so the time for action is now.
That the youth of America needs to get off its ass is an important message for a generation more likely to watch Daily Show clips on YouTube than to pick up a newspaper and which, as John Mayer put it, is just waiting on the world to change. Unfortunately, the message was largely obscured by the factual and non-factual detritus of Nader's long career as a consumer advocate and dead end presidential candidate.
In the span of an hour, Nader criticized the aerospace, agriculture, auto, banking, biotech, computer, defense, energy, fast food, media, mining, paving, pharmaceutical, shipping, timber and tobacco industries. He criticized economists for failing to investigate shady dealing in the student loan industry and criticized law schools for failing to offer classes in corporate crime. He accused the "criminal outlaw government" of George W. Bush of war crimes and negligence in its conduct of various armed conflicts, but forgot to mention his dubious role in that government's rise to power.
At one point, Nader noted that his listeners were among the top one percent of humanity as far as their ability to impact future events, leading this listener to wonder whether he was at last reaching some stirring call to action. But he quickly lost sight of that subject and launched into an extended discussion of the sufferings of the other 99 percent, beginning with starving children "doubled over with twenty inches of worm in their gut" and ending with the poor state of municipal infrastructure, taking a brief detour to critique our continued spending on aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons.
Perhaps after 50 years in the trenches, Nader regards a simple recitation of problems as all the kick in the pants his audience needs, but his talk might just as well have been an impediment to action. "Your generation is characterized by a heavy propensity to be discouraged and overwhelmed by the problems of the world," Nader said, yet throughout the talk, every empowering statement was a false start, sidelined almost immediately by some dusty tale of corporate misbehavior just then occurring to him. Whatever the accomplishments of Young Nader may have been, Old Nader is left to hack through a dense jungle of past crusades in order to reach a new generation that takes for granted the personal freedoms and consumer protections that their elders fought for.
Indeed, the biggest barrier to political activism may now lie in the identification of targets. In an era of unprecedented personal freedom and material prosperity, the only thing left for the middle and upper classes to flail against is some vague feeling that everything we eat, drink, wear, watch, buy, see and do is set before us by remote corporate interests over which we have little control.
And so liberalism has morphed into an unfocused anti-corporationism that leads young people to drink fair trade coffee, wear tattered clothing and picket gatherings of corporate and government leaders without ever wondering whether their activism is anything more than a fashion statement. The student politics of the 21st century are an all or nothing proposition, with a small set of self proclaimed activists making a superficial critique of everything modern and Western while their peers remain blithely disengaged.
Ironically, the birdshot politics of our generation found perfect expression in the lecture Nader delivered last week, which flitted from one subject to the next without any apparent order or priority. On several occasions, he approached the big point that individuals ought to demand more control of the corporate and government entities that, legally at least, were created to serve them. But time he backed away, settling for the little and, frankly, discouraging point that corporate and government entities have done a lot of things wrong over the years. Throughout the lecture Nader asked rhetorically, "What makes you angry?" But all we heard about was what makes him angry.
Alec Solotorovsky's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com.
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