Today’s lesson plan involves “Pokimon”, the massively popular — and totally inscrutable to adults — cartoon series about 150-plus different species of “pocket monsters” who beat the living hell out of one another at the behest of their humanoid “trainers” (who repay such loyalty by stuffing the creatures into tiny containers called pokiballs). “Pokimon” is precisely the sort of fare that makes consumer activists howl about capitalism’s insatiable need for new markets and the vanishing line between programming and commercials.

Such criticism, however accurate, is almost wholly beside the point. This is the world we and our children live in, and if it isn’t cartoon monsters being wagged in our faces while being told to Buy! Buy! Buy! then it is something else — whiter teeth, say, or an Ivy League degree, or flatter abs, or the moral satisfaction of pledging $100 to PBS and receiving an emblazoned tote bag.

This is hardly as dire as it sounds. As James B. Twitchell puts it in his recent book, “Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of Materialism,” “Consumerism is not forced on us. It is not against our better judgment. It is … our better judgment. We are powerfully attracted to the world of goods.” Twitchell suggests “we call them goods, not bads” for the simple reason that, at rock bottom, we like them.

To be sure, “Pokimon” is an unapologetic, nonstop pitch for an ever-expanding universe of toys, video games, action figures, backpacks, branded candy, clothing, you name it. When the first Pokimon condoms and cigarettes show up a few years down the road, no one will even think to bat an eye. The series’ tag line — “Gotta catch ‘em all!” — is a none-too-subtle directive to consume early and often, and that command is reiterated throughout the show’s ear-splitting theme song (“Pokimon!/Gotta catch ‘em all/It’s you and me/I know it’s our destiny …”).

Just to make sure the kids don’t forget any of the individual types of Pokimon they might want to hector their parent to buy in one form or another, most episodes conclude with a hip-hop chant that names each and every variety available, from the “psychic” Pokimon Abra, straight on through to the “ghost” Pokimon Zubat. If you’ve yet to experience it, consider yourself lucky. Trust me, it’s a rap far more obscene than anything 2 Live Crew ever performed in concert.

So what am I possibly hoping to teach my child by exposing him to such shameless — and insistent — shilling? Only this: How to choose wisely in a world of rapidly proliferating choices.

As economists W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm documented for the Dallas Federal Reserve in 1998, between the early ’70s and the end of the century, there has been a magnificent profusion of consumer goods from which to choose. These range from the trivial (there are almost 30 varieties of Pop-Tarts on your grocer’s shelves, up from three in the early ’70s) to the more important (we can choose among some 140 over-the-counter pain relievers, up from 20).

Vastly expanded choice covers virtually every aspect of the economy: New book titles (around 78,000 annually, up from about 41,000); two- and four-year colleges and universities (around 3,700, up from about 2,600); contact lenses (around 36, up from one); even McDonald’s menu items (more than 40, up from 13).

Although Cox and Alm don’t go into it, the proliferation of choices goes far beyond basic issues of economics and consumption — it extends into questions of personal and group identity, where Harvard Business School sociologist Grant McCracken has observed what he terms “plenitude,” or the “quickening speciation” of social groups, gender types and lifestyles (shades of “Pokimon”).

“Where once there was simplicity and limitation … there is now social difference, and that difference proliferates into ever more diversity, variety, heterogeneity,” writes McCracken in 1997′s “Plenitude.” “Teens, for example, were once understood in terms of those who were cool and those who were not. But in a guided tour of a mall life a few years ago, I had 15 types of teen lifestyle pointed out to me, including heavy metal rockers, surfer-skaters, B-girls, goths and punks.”

There is, then, not only more stuff in the world, but more ways of being in the world. The correlation is not accidental: Through buying in, holding out or negotiating our own terms, we use stuff to create our identities.

But a richer world means an increasing number of choices to be made: How exactly does one pick from the 87 national soft drink brands available, much less between being a goth or a punk, or for that matter, a carpenter or a lawyer? Which in turn requires not a shrinking away from the world — even and perhaps especially its expansionary commercial sector — but immersion in it, familiarity with it and an understanding that choosing one thing often precludes choosing another (at least in the short haul).

Stripped to its essentials, of course, this means simply that despite the cornucopia of things and choices around us, we still face that most basic human conundrum: How to square unlimited desires with limited resources? This is a question that wanders far beyond economics and into territory first mapped by existentialist philosophers.

“Choosing determines all human action,” wrote the eminent Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises more than 50 years ago, sounding more like Jean-Paul Sartre than Adam Smith. “In making his choice, man chooses not only between various materials and services. All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another.”

And so my son and I watch “Pokimon”:

“I want one of those,” says Jack, as a three-headed, ostrichlike Pokimon called Dodrio gallops across the small screen. “And one of those,” he says, pointing to an purplish, oozing mass known as Grimer. “And one of those,” gesturing toward Ivysaur, a blue-green toad with what looks to be a garlic clove on its back.

“Why do you want those ones?” I ask.

“Because they’re cool. I like them. This one runs fast, this one is funny and this is a good fighter.”

“How much do they cost each?”

“About $5.”

“And how much money do you have from doing your chores?”

“About $5.”

“So what do you want to do next?”

I look at my son as he furrows his brow and begins to ponder his options.

Imagine, if you will, the staff of your local alternative news source as a dysfunctional family. In the basement you have the rebellious teenagers, bucking tradition, subverting social norms and crashing the family car; we call them “editorial.” In the master suite you have the parents who earn the dough that feeds the brats and enables them to pursue their snotty dreams of journalistic glory — call them “sales.” For the most part, these two factions coexist in a peaceful, though tense, state. Once a year, however, the parents demand that the kids dress themselves up, grab a tin cup and make with the caroling.

The result: The dread holiday gift guide.

Hard-nosed city beat reporters waxing eloquent on the virtues of bed and breakfasts. Pessimistic rock critics raving about the new Frank Sinatra re-release. (“It comes with a bottle of red wine and a Santa hat!”) Jaded columnists praising the local sex shops’ latest batch of specialty lubes.

Of course, not all alternative weeklies buckle entirely when the holidays approach (as opposed to your local newspaper, which is at this very moment making kissy faces on Santa Cash’s fat, sweaty lap). After all, you can’t just go from ranting against all things capitalist to touting the glories of Anna Sui’s new Eau de Toilette without some kind of struggle. Can you?

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Socialist shopper: Consuming for the good of all mankind

The San Francisco Bay Guardian takes the high road with its consciousness-raising gift guide. Gifts for the spiritually inclined! Make your own, at this “make your own gift” store! Give the intangible: a gift certificate, perhaps? Surprisingly, the Guardian fails to suggest giving to charity or volunteering. But I forgot, good causes don’t advertise.

Ohhhh, irony!

“Obey Santa,” demands the Baltimore City Paper in a display of so very hip self-awareness. “You will enjoy our HOLIDAY GUIDE of yuletide ideas, happenings, and way-cool gifts.” The introduction to this quirky little gift guide (they recommend buying faux East German guard hats) is a veritable parade of conflicted ramblings. Christmas sucks, but it’s really great. We hate to tell you to buy stuff, but we’re now going to tell you to buy stuff.

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Gift guide? Where do we sell ou– I mean, sign up?

This technology-focused gift guide is just the first in a line of upcoming gift guides slated to run in the Seattle Weekly. There is no pretense of self-awareness or do-gooderism here. The first gift I read about was a $499 Bose stereo system, followed by a $199 electric self-cleaning litter box. There’s even a page listing holiday mall hours. Apparently, Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing are treating the city’s urban hipster demographic very well this year. The guide-lovin’ Weekly tops off its gift list with “Winter Fun!” This bundle of content tells you, the reader, where to ski, gamble, fly the friendly skies! Buy! Buy! Buy, dammit! Buy!

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Detroit Metro Times

“The real personal trainer” by Liz Langley

While not a gift guide per se, Liz Langley’s article on new products devoted to strengthening those invisible, yet powerful pubococcygeus muscles hits just the right note of humor as she describes wondrous products like the kegelcisor, or FemTone vaginal weights. “These are not weights designed to keep your vagina from drifting out to sea or floating off in a high wind. They are little elliptical objects of graduated weight (0.7 to 2.5 ounces) with thin cords attached so they look like tampons or surreally large nightmare sperm.” If all product guides read like this, I might find it in my heart to be jolly this Christmas. If Cosmo girls, with their obsession with all things vaginal, wrote like this, I actually might be inspired to pick up that insipid little glossy.

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Missoula Independent, Nov. 11-17

“Soldiers of Misfortune” by Ruth Thorning

On an entirely different topic, this provocative article looks at how budget cuts and an increasing number of retirement-age veterans have created a crisis in the six-decade old federal Veterans Administration. It’s hardly a new story, but Ruth Thorning’s examination is well worth reading. Instead of just raging against the machine, she stops to reflect on the personal, the local and the national costs of our country’s appalling treatment of its veterans.

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Village Voice, Nov. 17-23

“A Real Man” by Norah Vincent

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t seem to open a magazine, peruse Publisher’s Weekly or read a newspaper without stumbling across yet another published piece written about or by a real, live transsexual. Can someone please tell me what is the point of obsessing over this relatively rare operation? Every account reads the same. He used to be a she, or vice versa. Get it? He or she had therapy, took hormones, got surgery. It was difficult for his or her (pick one) parents/spouse/kids to accept. But, eventually, they did or didn’t. The journey was the destination. Love is more important than gender. Now he or she is happy with his or her life. If only society would accept him or her too. This is not interesting subject matter. It’s miniseries fodder.

Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have a lot of online shopping to do …

“It’s a scenario; it’s a what-if?; it’s a proposal,” Palahniuk insisted. He might have been mischievously signaling that he knew how radical his work really was. For “Fight Club” on film (as in print) is akin to the out-there satirical “proposal” that Jonathan Swift wrote when he suggested that the Irish could overcome their poverty if they sold their babies as food.

Of course, if I were facing a room of tired, testy radio journalists, I would have been tempted to present a full-blown position paper complete with polls and diagrams. There was a tense exhaustion in the air, as if the press didn’t want to deal with a 139-minute movie that serves up, with equal panache, perfectly cooked and half-baked ideas.

“Fight Club” tells the story of a representative Gen X-er, billed in the movie as “the narrator” (Edward Norton), who suffers from insomnia, depression and terminal consumerism. (The film contains an uproarious attack on advertising for the IKEA home-furnishings chain.) For a while he derives comfort from enrolling in support meetings for critical diseases. But he finds long-lasting relief only when he teams up with a mysterious new friend, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), to organize a counterculture that’s not about peace and love.

In Tyler Durden’s fight club, alienated guys get in touch with their inner primates via bare-knuckled scraps that leave them scarred and happy. To Palahniuk, these sessions are like “a Pentecostal Church meeting, or a mosh pit. Some very gestalt expression of rage to the point of exhaustion.”

“Chuck is connected to the whole underground world in Portland, and he makes it sound like Los Angeles is Dubuque in comparison,” screenwriter Jim Uhls told me later. Maybe that’s what gave Palahniuk the confidence to wield such wild tropes as “the rules of fight club” like a comedy hammer. (The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. The second rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.) His combination of verbal gamesmanship and quirky observations took the moviemakers to unexpected and unsettling places. Once Tyler Durden puts fight club on a solid footing, he assembles an army to execute an explosive nihilist/anarchist campaign called “Project Mayhem.”

I think the result is often potent: a cautionary parody of unhappy individualists sliding into fascism. (One critic has already dubbed the movie fascist, period.) When Tyler’s black-shirted legions fund their activities with luxury soap made from human fat, it’s difficult not to think of Nazis. But when I asked Palahniuk if the soap was meant to refer to the concentration camps, the short answer was no.

“The soap thing,” he explained, “was based on my friend Alice, she taught me one day how to make soap.” Alice regaled him with the myth that soap was invented when water seeped through the burnt pyres of human sacrifices and merged with melted body fat. That evening, when Palahniuk’s sister called from Canada, she reported “that the Canadian government was falling farther and farther behind in incinerating liposuction fat” and it was starting to fill up the Alberta prairies. Palahniuk thought he knew what they could do with bags of human fat. He said, “It just sort of clicked.”

“Just sort of clicked” — exactly! Both book and movie are at once hilariously self-aware and flippantly unexamined. For example, Palahniuk and his friends were complaining about emotionally absent fathers, so he put the issue into the novel and made it part of a Gen X anthem. The characters come off incongruously oblivious to everything boomers have discussed on talk shows for 20 years.

“Fight Club” will leave with-it audiences giggling, gasping — and scratching their heads. But it has set the mainstream press shuddering at the notion of hordes of impressionable youths leaving theaters and threatening law and order.

Sniffing the potential for media disaster, director David Fincher seized the high ground and declared that what made the bloodshed in “Fight Club” different from that in, say, “Blade,” was this: “‘Fight Club’ puts violence in a context that is moral.” He testified that he’d even experimented with deleting some of the violence, but found that it made the remaining graphic episodes seem more vicious. Having preempted all the ethical arguments against it, Fincher went on to say that he saw the film as the journey of the narrator to maturity, and that he hoped it would appeal to people who are not doing what they want to do and are tired of letting others define them.

Fincher brought up his unique affinity for the anti-consumer angle as a renowned director of commercials who made “lifestyle” ads in the ’80s — lite-beer slots selling fantasies of nocturnal cities with sleek blonds in black cocktail dresses. Yet before Fincher could expand on turning commercial techniques inside-out in “Fight Club,” he was deflected into discussing a tentative adaptation of James Ellroy’s “Black Dahlia.” He won me over when he was asked whether he thought Ellroy was from another planet. “Yes, he’s from another planet,” said Fincher, “but in a great way.”

Also from another planet — Planet Gen X? — is the consistently brilliant Norton. The high point of his Q&A came early, when he characterized “Fight Club” as “this weird millennial ‘Catcher in the Rye.’” When asked the dangerous “What’s the message?” question, Norton gamely talked about the tangle of complaints and themes in the book, and how they called for a director capable of handling “dialectic” and “moral ambiguity” — as he thought Fincher had done triumphantly in “Seven.” He explained the dialectics of “Fight Club”: “Tyler’s practical execution of this idea of self-liberation through a kind of anarchism: Is that negative? Did that become negative in its own right? Did people who were surrounding him lose their identity as much as they had been before they got into this whole thing? Or was this narrator afraid to go the final mile?” Norton praised Fincher for leaving the audience “without essentially a pat theme or a glib conclusion; it doesn’t get wrapped up in a neat package for you so you can walk out and go, ‘Oh, the message of that film was this.’”

So far, so eloquent. However, when Norton spoke about chortling with recognition over Palahniuk’s book, he conveyed a Gen X tunnel-vision. Reading it, he said, “You instantaneously remember little passages, like: ‘We’re the first generation raised on television, and we’ve been raised to believe that we should all be millionaires and rock stars and everything, and we’re discovering that most of us aren’t, and we’re getting very upset about that.’” Norton turned 30 in August. He accepted the book’s notion that his generation is “having its value system largely dictated to it by advertising culture.” He agreed with Palahniuk that many of his peers thought they could achieve “spiritual happiness through home furnishing,” only to wake up to the emptiness of “acquisitions” and a “received value system.”

There may be something to Norton’s belief that “my generation is having its midlife crisis in its 20s.” Yet many another graduating class has claimed to be the first raised on TV; Sinclair Lewis was pillorying all the other stuff 70 years ago.

Norton keeps touting this movie as “The Graduate” for the ’90s. To a lot of us who saw “The Graduate” in the ’60s, what limited it was precisely its youth-centric self-absorption. Norton was particularly proud that Fincher had let him and Brad Pitt add a bit about bashing a new Volkswagen beetle with baseball bats. “There’s the perfect example of the baby-boomer generation marketing its youth culture to us as if our happiness is going to come by buying the symbol of their own youth movement.” But isn’t the VW bug the perfect example of boomers peddling their youth to themselves?

I happened to sit next to Jim Uhls, the screenwriter, at the press screening. He laughed all through the movie. And he had a functioning sense of irony: When I asked him to pick a place where we could meet privately to discuss this epic about the tyranny of brand names, he boldly suggested Starbuck’s.

Two days later at Starbuck’s, Uhls was still laughing. Why wouldn’t he be? “Fight Club,” his first produced script, will at least be a cause cilhbre. Uhls, who studied theater and film at UCLA from 1983 to ’85, had been peddling a spec script that suggested he had the temperament to transpose Palahniuk’s novel.

Uhls describes that script as a “romantic comedy, but not a typical romantic comedy. It has to do with the characters’ attitudes toward a healthy relationship, which is a lot of behavior which seems unhealthy and harsh to each other, but in fact does work for them — because both characters are out on the edge psychologically.”

A movie executive who had read “Fight Club” in galleys remembered Uhls and guided his spec script to Fox 2000, where the novel had landed. Before Uhls began his adaptation, one of the producers, Ross Grayson Bell, got him and Palahniuk in a room together for a creative bonding session. Uhls didn’t share Palahniuk’s hard-knocks background, but he did identify with the emotions in the book.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been in a physical fight,” Uhls says, “but I do remember that a lot of strange emotions come out, not all of them bad. It’s an adrenaline experience. When I read the novel I warmed to it, not because I have exactly the same sensibility as Chuck but because I felt a connection to the emptiness and the numbness of the lead character’s life. I think everyone’s gone through periods like that, and has questioned the overlay of consumerism and commercialism in the society around them. The book is more of a dream than the movie, in the way it establishes the emotional logic of why something would follow something else. But Chuck was enthusiastic about us trying to create a more realistic structure. And he was very complimentary later about the way we had aligned the story.”

For example, in the film, as Tyler veers crazily into non-fight-club activities, he terrorizes a convenience-store clerk at gunpoint. “In the book, it was the narrator who does it,” says Uhls, “and he does it at a time when cause-and-effect wouldn’t necessarily lead him to that point. We thought it was more powerful for Tyler to do it, to affect the other character. And when Tyler does it, it’s part of an escalation. Especially in the second half, we wanted Tyler to be pushing things further and further.”

When Fincher left to do his post-”Seven” picture, “The Game,” Uhls found time between “Fight Club” rewrites to tackle his next big script: an adaptation of “Last Train to Memphis,” the first part of Peter Guralnick’s two-volume Elvis Presley biography. Uhls comes from Cape Girardeau, Mo., a small city on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and Memphis that is flavored with Delta culture. Uhls wound up writing “essentially an original script about Elvis Presley, drawing heavily on Peter’s research and on his feel for the people.” He contrasted Presley’s relationships with his nurturing Sun Records producer Sam Phillips and his glitzy breakout manager, Col. Tom Parker.

“Elvis really wanted to be a movie star, and he needed Tom Parker to make that happen,” says Uhls. In his script, there’s “a sad transition” from Presley’s authentic music-making with Phillips to his association with Parker, “who represented the slickness of show business, and if you got right down to the core of him, the carnival. That’s where he came from. The carnival influenced how Parker thought of merchandizing Elvis Presley.” Uhls uses the death of Presley’s mother after he went into the Army “as the closure to this part of his life. That devastated him psychologically and changed him as a person and emptied him out emotionally.” But in Uhls’ vision, Presley is less a victim than a tragic hero — he participates in his own diminishment from grass-roots sensation to hound-dog-man in a gilded doghouse.

Working on “Fight Club,” Uhls found Fincher to be a “terrific” writer’s director, “focusing in on the story and the philosophy of it, and the tone.” Uhls and Fincher wouldn’t touch some of Tyler’s misdeeds — not because they were too extreme, but because they muddied the issues. “We thought Tyler wanted to get rid of the construction of society, but not kill people; we wanted him to have a clear philosophy, and it was not about killing people but about creating a world to leave behind for people.”

In general, the adapter’s task was one of aesthetic refinement, not wholesale invention. Uhls took Palahniuk’s pungent first-person prose and supplied a narration as torrential — and modulated — as that of “Trainspotting.” “We didn’t want the voice-over simply to help support the narrative or to bridge one part to the next. We wanted it to be ironic commentary and maybe even somewhat of a counterpoint to what you see take place in the scenes.” Did the finished film have the tone they’d wanted? “Oh yeah — at least for me, there was nothing so dark it couldn’t be funny. It’s got a harsh, edgy, textured sort of feel.”

Adapting Palahniuk’s powder-keg of a novel, Uhls had to be sure where to place the detonations. “I think that fight club begins as a simple empowerment of the individual. People who have elected to do this with each other get together in basements and fight. It starts out as a natural magnet, picking up people however they happen to hear about it. But after Tyler realizes what fighting can do for you, and that going back to a sterile, consumer-driven society is purposeless, he decides that society has to be dismantled, and he changes course. Basically, when Tyler forms an army to generate whatever the verb for anarchy is, he and the narrator separate.

“Everything happens in slow increments. But at one point the narrator says, This has gone too far. When you go out and blow up a building, you’re not doing it in agreement with the people who own the building. Even if care is taken that no one is in the building, it’s a destructive act to civilization as we know it. One way this might work for an audience, is: If you come a certain distance with Tyler, and continue to follow his logic, you realize at a certain point that he’s going to have to tear everything down — and you may not be ready to tear everything down. What should be done? What is the answer? In the end, the movie leaves the questions in the air.”

Yet, for all its modern trappings, Arizona Mills reflects an outdated school of urban planning. There’s no need to create insulated, faux universes — unless, of course, it’s 104 degrees outside. Minimalls are sprouting up everywhere. One day you’re driving by Auntie May’s antiques and oddities store and the next — kerplunk — an Old Navy-Starbucks-Jamba Juice-Target has landed in its place. Auntie May is in her brand-new Porsche doing donuts on the front lawn of her glam Palm Springs retirement home.

What does this mean for the rest of us? Several recent articles seek to answer this very question.

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The Stranger, Aug. 12-18

“Welcome to the Great Mall of Seattle” by Eric Frederickson

Eric Frederickson looks at recent commercial development in low-income Seattle neighborhoods and develops a larger thesis on current trends in urban planning. He decries “the replacement of town squares by malls as the primary gathering places for citizens,” but struggles with the fact that economically deprived regions are being revitalized by the creation of these outdoor shopping destinations. He calls the proliferation of cookie-cutter storefronts “postmodern Potemkin villages” that hide not poverty, but malls. Frederickson’s discussion of private security guards taking over public streets is chilling, and his analysis of the “disposable architecture” of commerce is the best I’ve read in a general interest forum.

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The Memphis Flyer, Aug. 5-11

“Strip Commercial” by Jim Hanas

Jim Hanas grounds the debate over new mall construction in Memphis in historical context. What do the malls built in the 1950s and ’60s mean to the neighborhoods they are part of now? “The all-but-abandoned commercial strips … reveal their age in ways other than vacancy and disrepair. Their storefronts sit right on the sidewalk, dating them to a time when bus lines, rather than highways, fueled the eastward suburbanizing drive,” he writes. (In his Stranger article, Frederickson points to a return of sidewalk malls, but he’s addressing trends in a far more cosmopolitan region.) Hanas points out many of the same issues Frederickson does, such as community activities being increasingly focused on commercial centers. His descriptions of urban ghost towns makes you imagine what Arizona Mills will look like 40 years from now. Not a pleasant thought.

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Village Voice, Aug. 11-17

“B is for Bistro” by Norah Vincent

Perhaps the finest, most balanced take on gentrification I’ve seen yet. Norah Vincent understands that “finding the balance between the squalor that used to be Avenue B and the circus that is now Avenue A won’t be easy.” Even so, she rightly denounces the wiping out of blue-collar housing and multicultural community centers, although her characterizations of so-called yuppies are as tiresome as any class-based slur. She longs for the return of bohemian culture — like that of the beatniks — to the area, in addition to a good racial mix, yet who does she think brought cappuccino to the ‘hood in the first place?

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Metro Times Detroit, Aug. 11-17

“Outsides In” by Jerry Heron

The Natural Wonders store, which sells souvenirs that remind you of nature — like little globe key chains, stuffed toy hummingbirds or fossils — is coming to a mall near you. Jerry Heron discusses the disturbing irony in the popularity of this Nature Company knock-off as well as cammo-and-ammo stores like Bass Pro, which thrive where forest once stood. Heron evokes Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg in his humorous lament. I found myself uncontrollably humming a certain Talking Heads song.

Feed, Aug. 4

“The Year’s Skin” by Steven Johnson

Interface expert Steven Johnson explores the implications of computer interfaces designed to look like their real-world equivalents. Hence virtual CD players, alarm clocks, telephones. What fascinates Johnson, in particular, is that computer interfaces have advanced so rapidly while real-world systems — your VCR, for example — are still damn near unworkable. Do we really want to imitate these flawed devices on our computer screens? Johnson has the rare gift of explaining the technical in layman’s terms and appreciation for the aesthetic functionality in commonplace objects.

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Tucson Weekly, Aug. 12-18

“Food Chain-Gang” by Kay Sather

A whole cover story about seeds. Is it actually possible that there’s nothing happening in Tucson that’s more exciting than this?

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Washington City Paper, Aug. 6 – 12

“Kidland”

There are no large statements here, just snapshots of kids in action — at the arcade, the pool, the hospital, camp, eating pizza, working, fishing, playing. It’s a unique concept, and a fine alternative to Newsweek-type doom and gloom pieces: Are your kids stupid? On drugs? Violent? Evil? I’m not sure who’s having more fun here, the kids or the reporters, almost all of whom are clearly jealous of their subjects.

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New York Observer, Week of Aug. 16

“Who’s Your Office Nemesis?” by Andrew Goldman

This humorous little essay points out a great truth: Nothing is more inspiring to a career than an office enemy. And yet, when you consider that hate-filled employees are barging into office buildings armed with loaded weapons and taking out everyone in sight, it’s not really that funny at all.

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Boston Phoenix, Aug. 11-17

“Why People Kill People” by Jason Gay

This interesting interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explores one possible explanation for recent outbursts of criminal violence. Rhodes’ latest book, “Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist,” profiles the life and work of criminologist Lonnie Athens. Athens and Rhodes trace criminal violence back to childhood abuse, though Rhodes concedes that the widespread availability of guns facilitates mass killings, like those that just occurred in L.A. and Atlanta.

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Orlando Weekly
“Pot Crock” by Andrea Brunais

Andrea Brunais reports on the latest weapon against marijuana, currently being proposed in Florida: a fast-growing, pot-killing fungus. Onward Christian soldiers! Fight killer weed with killer fungus now!

Uh, the fungus also kills other plants, like tomatoes, and destroys natural habitats for furry bunnies and other cute stuff. But who needs tomatoes when there are people getting stoned and watching “South Park” marathons? A little more reporting could have improved this piece significantly. But the stupidity of the proposal comes across crystal clear.

The question isn’t a practical one; it’s a genuine paradox — and the authors strain so hard in solving it that each ends up catapulted into a state of perfect, implosive no-mind. Fukuyama finds refuge in human nature, while Twitchell raises a peculiarly silent round of applause for consumerism, demonstrating the sound of one hand clapping. These are stunning books, if not exactly in the way their authors intended. What sends them over the deep end is a problem that’s been plaguing conservative thought since the Reagan years: the difficulty of reconciling the forward-moving principle of free-marketism with the backward-looking principle of “traditional family values.”

The right needs to accomplish this in order to shore up its fragile coalition of business elites and concerned citizens; but the task has been seen as essentially wrong-headed since the days of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke — the fathers, respectively, of market economics and modern conservatism. Smith and Burke regarded unrestrained capitalism and traditional values as mutually hostile entities that, if you take your eye off them for even a minute, will set to work trying to kill and eat each other. Put as simply as possible, the free market offers rewards for antisocial behavior, while societies set up barriers against free trade — which isn’t a radical notion in the least. But neither Fukuyama nor Twitchell is able to acknowledge it without an incredible struggle.

Fukuyama and Twitchell are what you’d call crypto-conservatives — fellow travelers and fig-leaf-pasters on the rightward side of the academy. Imagine Fukuyama as a moderate gone ’round the bend. After studying classics with Allan Bloom and turning out policy studies at an establishment think tank (the Rand Corporation), he published a wildly influential essay entitled “The End of History” in Irving Kristol’s right-intellectual journal, the National Interest, and found himself transformed, almost overnight, into a neoconservative superstar — his scholarship chained forever to ideology. Fukuyama is a genuine academic celebrity in a field that rewards punditry and wowserism far more handsomely than it does scholarship, but he enjoys his privileges at a cost. Fukuyama is, by all indications, a good and centered man, but he knows why the caged bird sings.

If Fukuyama weren’t quite so fortunate (or so brilliant), he might’ve become Twitchell — a clever but middling academic pulling his oar at a provincial university who champions, in a deeply inconsistent way, the triumph of consumer capitalism over normative values, and vice versa. Twitchell’s 1992 book, “Carnival Culture: The Trashing Of Taste In America,” delivers just the high-middlebrow broadside the title promises, while 1995′S “Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture” is a sustained jingle to the is-ness of wow. His “Lead Us Into Temptation” attempts to take both sides at once — working up a good fair-weather toot for the eternal Christmas of boom capitalism, while pointing at all junctures to the gross spectacle of the American consumer, who drops each new present unexamined only to tear into the next. Significantly, Twitchell holds a dual position in the University of Florida-Gainesville departments of English and advertising.

Fukuyama’s solution to the problem starts with the standard complaint that community and family life have been going to hell in recent decades, as shown by increasing rates of divorce, illegitimacy, crime and a general withering-away of trust and common decency. He blames this “great disruption” on such phenomena as the decline of the nuclear family, the liberation of women and the rise of moral relativism — in short, on all the things that we generally associate with the 1960s. To the book’s credit, the statistics that Fukuyama uses to establish the existence of the great disruption are highly convincing, and the idea that morality and community are in decline has become so widespread in America that even much of the left now gets a secret thrill from seeing “moral relativism” worked over the coals. Also to its credit, he says that the overarching cause of the disruption has been the rise of the information age — which, Fukuyama says, has brought “creative destruction” to both the marketplace and the world of social relationships. But he doesn’t examine that idea more closely, and his solution to all the problems he enumerates is simply to trust in the healing power innate in human nature — to take refuge in biology. Human beings, Fukuyama claims, naturally create social order. The nuclear family is biologically determined, men and women are naturally Mars- and Venus-like, and no matter what the free market (or anything else) might do, society will probably adapt and return to normalacy.

The book gets from the first point to the last in a thundering gallop through ethnobiology, political theory, German philosophy and game theory. It covers every roadside stop along the route, and noses down every detour and footpath, sniffing the pies in every kitchen window. Just when you think it’s going somewhere it’s already rumbling back the other way, carrying a theorist who’s barely holding on for his life. The book is well-grounded — an impressively thorough, micro-nuanced work of scholarship. But as far as its basic argument goes, the appeal to human nature is the political theorist’s equivalent of saying “because-I-said-so.” And whatever the biologists might be saying about human behavior (which is lots, these days), Fukuyama himself noted in the September 1997 issue of Commentary that “it should be clear that there is no simple transition from a biological ‘is’ to a social ‘ought.’” The “is” and “ought” dichotomy has, in fact, been a problem for Fukuyama since the beginning.

“The End of History and the Last Man,” the book that sprang from his first influential essay, suggested that liberal democracy (i.e. the “capitalist state”) represents the final development of human civilization and that eventually the entire world will be ruled by liberal democracies, forever. The idea isn’t a new one: It’s nipped from Hegel, the most obtuse, boring and influential of all German philosophers, who claimed the same thing about the Prussian state of the early 19th century. But had either man lived in the first century A.D., he might’ve made the same argument for the Imperial Roman state — or, some centuries later, for the Roman Catholic Church as it spread throughout Europe. The fact that a system is, is no guarantee that it represents the end of history, or even that it’s the best one possible at the time. Without the “ought,” in other words, you’re left with a book that proves, meticulously, that things are more like they are right now than they’ve ever been before. Which isn’t exactly a “stop the presses” sort of observation. When you detangle the biological “is” from the social “ought” in the great disruption, the first thing you notice is that there’s an elephant in the room — one that Fukuyama keeps tripping over, and that keeps goosing him with its trunk while he’s not looking, but an elephant that he’s determined to ignore in the hope that it’ll just go away. The book’s obvious conclusion is that capitalism keeps kicking the props out from under society, which keeps replacing them as fast as it can.

Almost at the end of the book, Fukuyama devotes a brief chapter to the question of capitalism as an agent of disruption, which begins by conceding that there is, in fact, an elephant — but that it’s not really in anyone’s way. He dismisses what he calls the “contradictions of capitalism” literature with the observation that capitalism “has not collapsed yet,” adding, “We can accept the fact that capitalism is often a destructive, disruptive force that breaks apart traditional loyalties and obligations. But it also creates order and builds new norms to replace the ones it destroyed.” To establish this point, he directs the reader to a body of scholarship in the field of spontaneous order research — which is a playground of radical free-market economists and right-anarchists, founded by the Austrian hypercapitalist F. A. Hayek. It doesn’t suffice. This chapter should be the guarded solar plexus of his argument, the omphalos of the text, but it reads like a singularly conflicted attempt at base-covering, in an otherwise stunningly researched piece of work. In the final sentence, Fukuyama at last gives up the ghost. “Capitalism is so dynamic, such a source of creative destruction,” he writes, “that it is constantly altering the terms of exchange that go on within human communities, This is true for both economic exchange and moral exchange, and was,” one can almost hear the sigh and the faint pop as he vanishes into Nirvana, “the source of the great disruption.” Twitchell’s “Lead Us Into Temptation” goes even more softly into that good night, but it makes quite a ruckus as it crashes about in search of a position on its topic.

“One of the most helpful ways to understand modern American materialism,” it begins, “is to watch Steve Martin in ‘The Jerk.’” And right away, you know you’re in for a rather flexible analysis. But Twitchell’s initial point is indisputable: Americans love stuff. Although people are always saying that consumerism is bad, you can’t have consumerism without consumers, and people are paying — paying — for the privilege of accumulating all the goods they can stash away. In his introduction, Twitchell pulls a drive-by shooting on the voluntary simplicity movement, backhands the idea of recycling (“Trash is central to commercial culture. It is the remains of our incomplete love affair with stuff.”), and tosses a candy wrapper at the academic critic (“a cross between the village idiot and the schoolmarm”) who thinks he knows better than the consumer how society and commerce should behave. But as the first chapter rolls past and the arguments begin to pile up, Twitchell’s position becomes less cocky and starts folding in upon itself.

Everything that Americans do, feel or believe, Twitchell says, is now caught up in a seamless discourse of buying, selling and advertising. Consumerism, in short, is, and by the logic of the market (and according to the book’s premise), that must be a good thing. We’ve all voted on it with our dollars. But Twitchell can’t stop remarking that it’s a terrible thing. He notes that it’s drowned free speech in advertising chatter, wrecked the fine arts, surrendered community life first to the malls (Twitchell compares the modern shopping mall to a “small, thoroughly policed, fascist medieval city-state”) and finally to who-knows-what. It’s led to excess, and it’s led to numbness to the genuine pleasures that material objects can offer. Personally, Twitchell resists it. But there’s no solution for any of us because whether we like it or not, consumerism represents the final development of human civilization, and eventually the entire world will be ruled by consumerism, forever. Hello, there’s Fukuyama again. Twitchell, winding down, invokes “The End Of History,” calling its claims “demonstrably true,” and continuing, “For better or worse, American commercial culture is well on its way to becoming world culture. The Soviets have fallen. Only quixotic French intellectuals and anxious Islamic fundamentalists are trying to stand up to it.” He lights up the applause sign, dimly, with the final sentence: “While this is dreary and depressing to some, as it doubtless should be, it is liberating and democratic to many more.” But he doesn’t seem to be applauding.

The word for all of this is “rubbish.” Not the books, because in spite of everything they’re good and interesting reading — but the premise that the future is determined, and that society benefits whenever the invisible hand of the market comes around to administer a spanking. One corny slogan, totally in character with the sprinklings of ad-chatter in Twitchell’s book, would’ve made “Lead Us Into Temptation” about something, rather than about nothing in particular: Just Say No. To Francis Fukuyama, who writes that a resurgence of religion would help in overcoming the great disruption: Matthew 6:24 — “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”