Heather Mallick has worked as a reporter, copy editor and book review editor at various Toronto newspapers and most recently wrote a column called As If for the Globe and Mail. She has won National Newspaper Awards for both Critical Writing and Feature Writing. Heather writes a political column for the New York Times Syndication Service that runs internationally. Her first book, Pearls in Vinegar, based on an ancient Japanese form of diary, was published by Penguin in 2004. She is currently writing a collection of essays for Knopf Canada, tentatively titled "Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life".

I'm seeing red. Sorry, make that (Product) Red®.

If we had to pick the most shameful moment since George W. Bush came to power, admit it, we'd be up all night. But a good candidate would be mayor Rudy Giuliani's cry to New Yorkers after the Twin Towers attack to go out and shop.

It wasn't just the crassness of recommending retail therapy in an attack so successful that actual medical therapy wasn't much needed for those crushed and burned to death.

It was that Americans were indeed going to shop shop shop, but with money they didn't have. The binge was all going to go on credit cards most Americans had no ability to pay off in their lifetimes.

Perhaps some citizens decided to cut back on shopping, even on those quite attractive goods made in China at slave-labour wages and sold at vastly multiplied prices that still seem astonishingly cheap to Americans. So retailers came up with a new come-on: charitable shopping. Buy (Product) Red®.

I opened a recent New Yorker, a men's magazine whose front section is annoyingly insular and almost hick and whose back half has some good reporting. Staring at me was Steven Spielberg, a 59-year-old man in a baseball cap, who makes movies for the child in every adult. He was shilling for the Gap. "Gap is collaborating with (Product) Red® and the world's most iconic brands to help eliminate AIDS in Africa."

Readers were told that if they bought a "Gap (Product) Red® item, half the profits will go directly" to the AIDS fight. Then came 28 Gap ads in a 97-page magazine with slogans including "Can a T-shirt top change the world?"

First, since you ask, no, it can't. You might have a shot at changing the world if you stayed away from the Gap and sent the cash for your 100th T-shirt to AIDS clinics.

Two, tell us how much of a profit Gap earns from each sold garment in the first place. Enough, clearly, that even half of it still makes a nice deal for Gap.

Three, how is AIDS being fought? Research? Payments to Big Pharma to lower the cost of medication for Africans? Providing condoms? There is no reference to condoms on the web page that outlines (Product) Red® anti-AIDS tactics.

Four, icons are religious images. By "iconic brands" you mean "famous brands." Have the grace to say so. Quit turning shopping into the pursuit of the Holy Grail.

Five, take the huge GAP logo off the red T-shirts you're selling supposedly to help dying destitute black people who, I notice, rarely sew your products. Your factories are rare in Africa, plentiful in Asia. Stop using black models and semi-celebrities to sell products to guilty liberals because black entertainers are desperate for exposure.

Six, appreciate the irony of the non-Gap ad in the same magazine that says "When all the bodies have been buried in Darfur, how will history judge us?" It quotes Bush on calling for a UN peacekeeping force. The U.S. still owes $1.25 billion US to the UN and could rescue Darfur with a fraction of the money spent on Iraq, but Bush won't do it because he doesn't care and readers know that.

Seven, everyone in this (Product) Red® mess gets screwed except for corporations that raise their profile and get charity tax breaks. The consumer goes into deeper debt and has an even bigger false sense of worth; the climate suffers from the cost of making and transporting more throwaway goods; people with AIDS get the dregs of the cash, and publications, Spielberg and any number of black performers lower themselves.

It gets worse. The Toronto Star's Jennifer Wells has reported that only $10 US of the $199US cost of a (Product) Red® Apple iPod will go to buying AIDS drugs. I say spray-paint your current iPod and try the other mechanism recommended by Canada's magnificent Stephen Lewis: Donate one day's pay, net or gross, to AIDS charities. Or donate a whack of cash to the federal political party you believe gives an actual damn about black people dying hideous deaths in nations most of us can't find on a map.

Please understand that I did not write the above in a state of moral dudgeon. I wrote it in a mental soup of shame.

For years, I wrote a shopping column for a newspaper. I loved acquiring goods ⁸ they give me a tactile pleasure that I did not fully understand until the elegant Canadian/American writer Adam Gopnik explained it. Writers spend all their time with thoughts and words, which are mere air. They never get to touch stuff, the way people with sensible jobs do.

My whole life, since my frozen Scottish childhood, has been spent enjoying stuff, perfumes, fabrics, textures and artful bias cuts on swirling jersey dresses. Of all the pleasures of life, only reading, sex and certain grades of shopping have never let me down.

I am shallow.

If this revolting (Product) Red® scheme disgusts someone like me whose affections are easily sold, then it must really be beyond the pale, both morally and logically.

This Week

Best start your reading of Orhan Pamuk, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, with his memoir Istanbul. It gives you a basis for understanding the complexity of Turkey: its great history and decline from grace; how it feels humiliated by its current poverty; and its high-temperature hostility between modernity and religious fundamentalism. These are all reasons to welcome Turkey into the EU. Then turn to his novel Snow, followed by My Name is Red. Pamuk is like Dostoyevsky. His desperate characters, shuffling about the streets, send you into a trance.

On TV, Rick Mercer is back on track. When he and Bob Rae went skinny-dipping last week, I covered my eyes. Oh, CBC, punish me with Mercer's hind end, but let me not endure the sight of Rae's. I liked the CBC drama Intelligence, but I'm biased. Actor Ian Tracey, like Nicholas Campbell of DaVinci's Inquest, can do no wrong.