Black Friday

It is black Friday, indeed, when early morning shoppers lined up at a Long Island Wal Mart smashed through the doors, knocked a worker down, and trampled him to death in their mad desire to accumulate more Chinese-made junk. While it is true that times are tough, people are out of work and have less money to spend, and Christmas is coming, I don’t think that is a sufficient explanation for this unseemly behavior. Although I could be wrong, I doubt very much that a similar episode would have occurred elsewhere in the supposedly “civilized” world. It is difficult for me to imagine the British, French, Germans, et al, including the Russians, Iranians, and whoever else you might think of, engaging in such a pitiful display of shopping madness (perhaps something like this could happen in cultures where the citizens are actually starving and competing for limited foodstuffs). I believe the values symbolized by this terrible happening are peculiarly American. That is, “shop ‘til you drop,” “he who has the most toys wins,” “everyone loves a bargain,” “I’ll get mine, you get yours,” and so on. I suspect that our American customs of “all you can eat…,” and hot dog or pie eating contests, are related in a kind of symphony of greed and the most crass materialism found anywhere on earth. Competition, too, is related to this kind of behavior. This might be best summed up in the “keeping up with the Jones’s” syndrome. Although we might pay lip service to it, sharing is not a dominant virtue here in the United States, as it is in many of the world’s cultures. In fact, if they witnessed our behavior on moments like “black Friday,” they would most likely consider us quite insane.

I suppose it is inevitable that we would have developed as we have, living in a capitalistic, materialistic, consumption-based culture with its underlying belief in American exceptionalism and endless resources? Why should we not consume far more than our share of the earth’s resources, we always have. We have never been shy about taking the resources of others, as somehow “our due.” The history of American exceptionalism is not a pretty one, and our current adventures around the world are hardly an improvement. Our profligate ways have now painfully caught up with us, as evidenced by our now virtual dependence on Wal Mart. Even people who would not have been caught dead there previously are now flocking there in droves (alas, I am one of them). When I enter a Wal Mart I feel I am entering a giant warehouse full of losers. The clerks are losers, working for small wages and few benefits, the shoppers are losers, looking for the cheapest bargains they can find. Our culture is a loser as it is inevitably being reduced to the lowest common denominators. Where do you find pride in worksmanship or salesmanship these days? Built-in obsolescence is the order of our day. When it breaks, throw it away, it costs more to fix it than it does to buy a new one. Our culture is shot through with shoddy products, the result of mass production, everything is geared to short-term profits, nothing is built to last. When something goes wrong you can scarcely find a human voice to help you.

Paradoxically, there are things better nowadays than they were before. Automobiles, for example. We used to have to crank them and change the tires endlessly. Weapons of all kinds are better. Major appliances are better. It is technology that improves while the quality of life deteriorates, or so it seems to me. Of course for younger people, who have never known anything different this seems to be the best of times. For me, like Dickens, it seems to be the best of times, the worst of times.

LKBIQ:
Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.
Max Frisch

TILT:
Sidney Joseph Perelman (S.J.Perelman), one of our finest humorists, died on October 17, 1979.