Seven Oaks Magazine.

The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism – a small chapbook compendium of statistics and short essays put together by Vancouver musician and artist David Lester, and recently released in its second, revised edition – could just as easily have been called Some Gruesome Facts of Capitalism. Taken as a whole (admittedly a small, 112-page whole), Lester’s book is both symptomatic of the pathological way in which we exchange knowledge today, as well as being a tiny corrective. Whatever it’s shortcomings, its heart is in the right place, and with royalties going to the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, there are certainly worse ways to spend 11 bucks. But there’s still the matter of presenting de-contextualized facts as discourse in and of itself, as Gruesome Acts does. And that’s no small thing.

Over a period of years and years, my uncle was occasionally wont to tease his youngest sister, my dear aunt, for a blustery sentence that she once decried in the midst of a fit of panic and confusion: “Don’t confuse me with the facts!” A while later, he quietly recanted, explaining that he’d come around to sharing her suspicion – people can find facts to prove anything. And that’s a fact – witness a little-known debacle called the War in Iraq to see what charming “facts” people can come up with, fill vials with, and wave in front of the United Nations. In the era of mass communication, we’ve been flooded with things that we half-know, a phenomenon captured perfectly and jarringly in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. The onset of Google, Wikipedia, blogs, ‘Fact of the Day’ features on the TV listings channel and the like have the same effect on knowledge as the massive, uncontrolled printing of monies: the value of the currency drops, and the detection of counterfeit bills becomes harder. So people, like Stephen Colbert’s obscurant Report persona, turn to their “guts.” Paradoxically, the tumor that is Truthiness is built with the cancer cells of devalued fact.

It’s a state of affairs captured hilariously on NBC’s The Office, when office manager Michael Scott (played by Steve Carrell, like Colbert a Daily Show veteran) tries to drive the fear of drugs into his employees:

Gruesome Acts showcases many stats and figures that might be new to many people – “Globally the number 1 occupation for disabled people is begging” (page 33), or “Elizabeth Paige Laurie, an heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune, was under investigation at the University of Southern California over claims that she paid a fellow student $20,000 to complete her coursework” (page 23) – as well as confirming ones that we feel we already knew, intuitively, or that we’re pretty sure we’ve heard before, someplace: “In the U.S. in 1998, almost 70% of wealth was in the hands of 10% of the population” (page 19), or “A child dies of starvation every 7 seconds according to the World Food Programme” (page 41), a fact curiously then attributed not the World Food Programme but to the Guardian Weekly (in fact, the Guardian Weekly shows up as a source like peanuts in a can of mixed nuts – way, way more frequently than anything else that might be sprinkled throughout).

It’s in the attribution, which tends towards being fairly transparent and helpful, that Gruesome Acts offers it’s corrective: these are no longer just free-floating facts and figures out of the ether anymore, they’re from somebody or someplace verifiable, and therefore all the more real. In addition, Lester provides short essays about activists and artists, as well as lists of organizations, which situate the orphan facts within an ethics and morality, which serves to bind the myriad evidences he’s offering in the case against capitalism.

So while it might have fallen in to the trap of adding to the DeLilloan white noise – and it does come close – Lester’s The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism stays away from the more egregious extremes of the philosophy that Homer Simpson explained to a news anchor during a televised debate: “Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Fourteen percent of all people know that.”