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Thursday, April 24, 2003
posted by gbarto at 3:04 AM:
When is a boycott worth the trouble?Below, I write about the Dixie Chicks controversy and the fan boycott. I thought it would be worthwhile to offer some more general observations.
A good boycott requires three elements:
1. An overlap between users of a product and people unhappy with the makers of that product
2. A willingness on the part of the users to forego use of the product to express their displeasure with the company
3. A plausible remedy the company can make
Without the first two, you can't effect a boycott. Without the third, it won't accomplish anything. All three of these must obtain. Take the Nike mess from a few years ago. American consumers of Nike products were upset by the use of child labor in sweatshops to make their shoes - condition 1. They threatened to buy shoes from more child-friendly corporations instead - condition 2. Nike won back their trust by setting higher standards for their plants and allowing third-party monitoring of their compliance with consumer wishes. I don't recall if we actually got to the out and out boycott stage, but the point is that with these three conditions seemingly met, Nike was backed into changing its corporate behavior.
Without the three pillars, though, boycotts don't work. Seniors Against Pornography can boycott the local strip joint all they want, but number one doesn't obtain, so the boycott goes nowhere. AIDS patients may hate big pharma, but they'll die without their drugs. Condition two doesn't obtain, so no boycott.
The Dixie Chicks and French wine actions are useless boycotts because they can't meet the third test. French vintners are not the French government. They can't change France's policies significantly. Raising hell with a French business does not threaten the French government; it just usurps its normal territory. Maybe there is the possibility, longer term, of breaking the French elite by breaking the masses and showing that it can't take care of them. We'll leave this boycott as a feel-good effort that - if stuck to - may have long term results.
The Dixie Chicks, however, have no remedy to offer. If the thoughts of Natalie Maines offend you, you can stop buying her stuff and thus limit the material comfort in which she thinks them, but that's it. What do you want? A changed mind? There are only three outcomes: 1) she sells out, meaning that what she says doesn't matter. 2) she genuinely changes her mind, meaning that her convictions are so muddled that what she says doesn't matter. 3) she takes the artist's pose and proclaims she won't change her mind, meaning what the public says doesn't matter. None of the three is remotely satisfactory to anybody whose thoughts surpass unreflective jingoism. There is no plausible remedy. The only thing that could really improve the situation is if she said nothing whatsoever, letting those moments on a stage in Europe disappear into irrelevancy. Which is not going to happen if we keep selling stories about what this country singer thinks.
So let us explore the one and only successful boycott outcome for Dixie Chick activism: drawing a line between the country music and the activism and refusing to buy the second. The remedy there would be for the Dixie Chicks to get back to singing and decide to get out of the commentary business. This is accomplished by not buying the product, perhaps, but only if so doing will change the tune, so to speak. As we know, with the arts community this never works. What does work is stony silence. Polite but muffled applause and looks of confusion - hey, Wilbur, I thought you said they were gonna sing - are what's required to burst this bubble, not the elevation of the political thought of Natalie Maines into a cultural crisis.
Before undertaking a boycott, the three pillars I've listed must always be tested to see if they'll bear the weight of the boycott. Unless they will, your boycott won't effect change. It will just make you a fool.
Case in point: the Dixie Chicks still have the number one country album in America today. And the headline on Fox is that they're firing back at their critics (see below). So much for the boycott.
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