Issue of consuming importance that's all Greek to the outsider

IT WAS, I have to confess, with a degree of weariness that I struggled on Wednesday night on your behalf, gentle readers, to acquaint myself with the minutiae of the agenda of the Consumer Affairs Council. Worthy, I thought, but dull ... pace, Comrade Rabbitte.

Until, that is, the following gem dropped from The Irish Times's fax machine. Under Any Other Business the Greek Minister would like to make a statement on "culture and consumers" and the Greek Government provided a taster to ministerial colleagues of the minister's concerns. It is worth reproducing in full:

"The chronic socio economic problems of recent years, the individualism of developed societies, and the widening gulf between technocrats and the great mass of society are forcing us into a uniform way of life".

Cultural distress is clearly evident within the general social crisis as the citizen has been transformed into a passive spectator of the mass media devoid of cultural singularities and pursuits. Cultural creation has been prostituted into banal consumer products, in that cultural products are put together at the bidding of the market with the result that they contribute to the spread of featureless consumerism.

"We call upon the Commission to undertake an analysis of the problems stemming from the flood of comparable, mass produced products which have the citizen consumer as their end user.

"The aim should be to take the necessary steps to alert the consumer to ensure that cultural consumption products have high quality specifications, to inspire a new humanism and to generate a spiritual counterbalance which will contribute to a qualitative and cultural improvement in the lives of consumers."

Strong, heady stuff, says I. Cultural singularities, citizen consumers as end users, and a new humanism. But what does it mean?

"I think," a usually reliable source in the Irish representation to the EU said, "they are talking about Big Macs. I always feel cultural distress in McDonalds. Anyway, it's self explanatory. It's about the alienation of consumers ...

Do they want to ban Big Macs, I asked? The answers got even vaguer.

So I rang the Greek representation. Waiting on "hold" for their spokesman I got part of the answer. I do not lie the phone played Yankee Doodie Dandy. Clearly we are talking about cultural imperialism, the dross of mass produced American bubble gum culture driving out the expressions of national culture like bad money drives out good.

Something like that, I am told.

"We have," says I, fantasising about Michael D on speed, to the spokesman of the nation that brought us Plato and Aristotle, "a Minister who sometimes speaks a little like this. Do you, too?"

Certainly not. More likely a frustrated civil servant. Perhaps there are problems with the translation.

I read the statement to the man who my colleague from Independent House refers to as "Europe's leader of 350 million consumers", our own former consumer "supremo", Jim Murray of BEUC. Can I have a reaction?

"Yes. Quite," he says. But then the penny drops. Did I know that the Danish ombudsman has complained about Disney and Kellogg's abuse of the Internet to promote their products to children? The Greeks have an Internet problem, too, but this is almost certainly a reaction to the Commission's attempts to block what it regards as the protectionist Greek ban on TV advertising of children's toys, he says.

Of course, now he says it, it's perfectly obvious.

PS: It emerged at the meeting that the minister's preoccupation was his concern at the "demeaning" of the intrinsic worth of an original work of art when it is represented on the Internet.

The Consumer Affairs Commissioner, Ms Emma Bonino, said she understood his concern but did not know what to do about it.