Give Me Shopping or Give Me Death!

April 22, 2009

By Lee Eisenberg

Peggy Noonan thinks we have entered a new era of austerity and “authenticity chic.” Lee Eisenberg says she’s not giving enough credit to the indomitable American consumer.

Last week, apparently bereft of an Isaiah Berlin parable to inform her weekly noodling in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan deferred to a muse considerably less august. She ruminated over a story that had a few days earlier appeared in USA Today about a Michigan family who’d chosen to give up their increasingly hard-to-afford creature comforts (credit cards, satellite TV, etc.) and seek refuge from the economic storm. These “21st-century homesteaders,” without so much as Dancing With the Stars to divert them, now raise chickens and pigs, harvest vegetables from their own garden, and keep a woodstove burning to fight off the financial and cultural deep-freeze. In Noonan’s view, the Wojtowicz family is indicative of the current and likely future fate of what was—only yesterday!—the land of plenty. “There will be fewer facelifts and browlifts,” Noonan wrote of this new authenticity chic, “less Botox, less dyed hair among both men and women. [People] will look more like people used to look, before perfection came in.”