The Parachute

Tami Oliphant is a Ph.D. candidate in Library and Information Studies at the University of Western Ontario.

This novella introduces a Machiavellian business consultant with the
ultimate marketing plan—consuming consumers—as he completes his
final consultation with the president and executives of a shoe
manufacturing company. He begins by outlining the current state of the
business world, focusing on the erosion of the middle class and its
buying power, and on the characteristics of today’s modern consumer.
The consultant’s diabolical plans reveal a society in which human
beings have been reduced to mere consumers.

The book takes its title from a parable. The consultant suggests that
today’s consumers are so present-oriented that they would rather
experience the fear and exhilaration of jumping out of a burning
airplane than notice, or do anything about, the burning plane they have
abandoned. The consultant divides the world into two types of people:
those who dream of living and those who live on dreams. The vast
majority, he suggests, fall into the latter category: fixated on the
present and on instant gratification, they are the parachute jumpers.

They are also the people who will buy disposable shoes, which is the
initial phase of the consultant’s plan—create disposable shoes for
disposable personalities. People will demand disposable shoes in order
to assert their self-identity through consumption. Consuming becomes
rebellion. The manufacturers will make the shoes hip and stylish,
selling the illusion of dreams and rebellion. Then they will move on to
disposable food stuffs, and finally to health care and education. The
need for government will be eroded and trumped by the services offered
by businesses.

Dumontais’s frightening vision is not as implausible as one would
initially believe. His well-written and fierce satire on our postmodern
age simply takes neo-liberalism to its logical conclusion. The Parachute
leaves no one unscathed.