Cheap But Plentiful
It probably sounds unpatriotic to criticize those who would spend. After all, in our capitalist society, where the military-petroleum complex manages to squander a third of our domestic product, consumerism is next to godliness, or something like that. And it doesn't matter what people buy, apparently, it's the quantity of their purchases that defines them as better 'Muricans. Buy trashy stuff, break it, throw it away, buy more.
And that's what they were doing from sea to shining sea on the day after Thanksgiving. It's a ritual now, and it seems a lotta folks are addicted to the program without any good reason. Despite the sagging economy and the threat of losing their jobs, the masses were still out there massing, though numbers and sales were down. Still, for all you silver-lining lookers, Turkey Day came early this year, so maybe everyone is just waiting to plunk down their hard-earned when they think the prices will be even lower; which surely they will.
At the local Kneemen-Marxist — they still haven't taken down the Wal-Mart sign — people started lining up for the opening many hours ahead of time, and it was a cold night. In fact, all 600 spaces in the parking lot were full an hour before the doors opened. It sounds awfully lemming-like, in a sniffing-rodent kinda way, and you'd have to think that if someone in charge were looking at some easy cuts in the population, little would be lost by sucking this crowd right into the mulcher. Oh sure, we'd lose a coupla good folks — baby in the bathwater and all that — but mostly it would thin out the herd in crypto-Darwinian fashion.
I think if people were truly patriotic, in the good sense, they'd be thinking and learning more and spending less money, thought, and effort on buying stuff. Truly, we define people in our society — garbageman, lawyer, casino chief — by how they make money, and we define ourselves by how we spend it. And just as the television ratings are measured so do we focus on the height of the pile rather than it's composition. The gabbling army of acquisition isn't about aesthetics, discernment, or even a whiff of taste.
There is an irony to the calls for patriotic purchasing. The folks with the least financial cushion are the most likely to heed it, right over the cliff. As much as some pundits would like to point to an up day on Wall Street as a reason to think we've turned the economic corner, the fact is that we haven't and we won't any time soon. Most of the Dow-joy is over companies slashing payrolls and closing plants. The newly-unemployed are having serious trouble finding jobs anywhere near where they were being paid, and ya gotta think that before the whole thing shakes out many of the positions that are restored are going to be exported to the lands of lower labor costs.
Does that seem like the good American thing to do? Not if you were on the assembly line, but if you are a business analyst whose fixed gaze is on the short-term bottom line, rah-rah. Maybe if we could export the workers as well as the work, but somehow I just don't see those Wal-Mart shoppers forming a line to board a slow freighter to Shanghai. Unless the tickets were ridiculously cheap.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
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