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Put Adbusters Back on Shoppers’ Shelves!
Appalled that We’ve Been Cancelled?! Sign This Petition!!
Shoppers Drug Mart recently took the extraordinary step of “delisting”
Adbusters magazine, one of Canada’s most influential homegrown publications.
With over 1,300 stores, Shoppers is the country’s largest print-magazine retailer.
Adbusters, for its part, accepts no advertising or corporate sponsorships. It relies entirely on newsstand sales and subscriptions to stay afloat.
With access to the drug-store chain’s shelves revoked, the independent mag was dealt a heavy blow in a time, moreover, of economic beleaguerment and journalistic peril.
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Adbusters and the roots of the contemporary left
On November 15, 2011, just outside a boarded-up vacant lot in Lower Manhattan, several NYPD officers held down a protester and beat him with batons while a number of onlookers, including the actor Frances McDormand, chanted “Shame, shame, shame.” (It was the first time I’d seen such an assault; I was working for
Variety and on the lookout for quotable celebrities.) The protesters had gathered at the request of the Estonian-Canadian documentarian and activist Kalle Lasn, the charismatic founder and primary creative force behind the glossy magazine
Adbusters. They had set up tents in Zuccotti Park and declared themselves Occupy Wall Street. This was not quite the second month of the occupation; it had begun on September 17, Lasn’s mother’s birthday.
We’ve been here before.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, many of us relax. We spend time with family, sharing anecdotes of Christmases past with a smile, and quietly reflecting on what this time of year is meant for loving each other and remembering the joy of our Savior’s birth.
Well … maybe not.
When December rolls around, most of us find ourselves squeezed between our convictions about responsible stewardship and the cacophony of messages ever wooing us toward indulgent consumption.
Then, when the credit card bill arrives in January, we lament that as if against our will we’ve once again been dragged into the holiday marketing machine and spit out like packing peanuts. And we’re not even festive pagans.