Expect a new crusade—for dollar and country—against a classroom video

Until Tuesday, “The Story of Stuff” was spreading like whooping cough through the world’s classrooms with relatively little opposition—it had been banned by only one school board so far. But Tuesday The New York Times featured the video on its front page. That brought it to the attention of The Heritage Foundation, which redubbed it “The Story of Lies” and published a review that begins like this:
The Story of Stuff highlights the very extreme left’s Greenpeace view of America. Essentially it tells the story of how America is not a nation to be proud of, and in fact, your child should be ashamed for living in it.
The comments following that post begin with sentences like these: “It had better not be in the school where my child goes,” and “It is inconceivable to see the amount of American traitors behind this, with this pathetic mind set.”
What is this traitorous, pathetic mindset? “The Story of Stuff” tells the story of American consumerism, how it started, how it works, how it impacts natural resources, and where it leads (to the landfill). Its creator and narrator, Annie Leonard, covers a semester’s economics in 20 minutes, from toxins to working conditions to foreign affairs, while explaining, clearly, the means of production that make the system go. She is frank in a manner we may have become unaccustomed to seeing in American classroom material. She accuses the system, bluntly, of trashing the planet. But not without evidence, such as the fact that 99 percent of the materials flow of production goes to waste within six months. One percent endures as a product or possession. Is honesty un-American or very American? Here is Ms. Leonard on brominated fire retardants:
We take our pillows, we douse them in a neurotoxin, we take them home and put our heads on them for eight hours a night. I don’t know but it seems like in a country with this much potential, we could think of a better way to keep our heads from catching on fire at night.
The video has been labeled anti-capitalist by the Heritage Foundation (and by the parent who complained to the Missoula, Montana schoolboard), but while it is clearly anti-consumerist, to call it anti-capitalist shows little faith in capitalism. It can be called anti-consumerist in its critique of an economic system that depends too much on people buying new stuff they don’t need and discarding stuff that’s still useful. But when Ms. Leonard makes her pitch for a better system, she doesn’t call for the nationalization of industry, nor for workers of the world to unite, she calls for the cycle of capitalism to go in a circle instead of a line—sustainability.
She also makes traitorous statements of this order: “I hold true to the vision and values that governments should be of the people, by the people, for the people.”