Because You Never Asked

 

(9/08)

     One of the most faithful barometers of who and what we are can be seen in the 24-7-365 repetitiveness of commercial propaganda so incessantly hammered into our consciousness on TV, radio, billboards, newspapers, magazines, taxis, buses, outfield walls, soccer jerseys, the Internet, and just about any artifact known to humanity that can transmit a message. I still have morbid visions of the boxer I saw on TV with a commercial message tattooed on his muscular brown back.

     In a culture where buying, selling and possession have become the almost singular measure of emotional well being, this makes mathematical sense. These persistent commercial messages --- even more so than the political propaganda so allied to the way of life being marketed with these commercials --- are the “message“, a message we eventually accept as “Gospel”, a message we will even fight and die for (at least those mercenaries either desperate or unlucky enough to take on such work for the rest of us, who are patriotic enough to sit home and “support” their deaths).

     This essay’s conception occurred in some nebulous realm of the past I cannot identify any longer, though it couldn’t have been too long ago (how’s that for nebulous?), maybe about a year --- or something like that. The content of the memory is also shrouded in pea soup obscurity, but I remember enough to know it had to do with some form of commercial message. There is no longer any image or recollection of what was being sold, but what stuck with me is this:

     The customer, when informed that opting for the product being hawked could save such and such amount of money, replied, “wow, that’s a new pair of shoes”.

     Unlike conception, which is always buried in secrecy and ambiguity, the birth of something is a flamboyant event with well delineated contours. This essay’s birth had such a well defined catalyst.

     The 2 weeks sandwiched around Labor Day are always special for the American tennis fan, for it means two weeks of wall to wall television coverage of the US Open. Tennis players are usually starving for televised tennis, and most of us become regular consumers of the product for this period. This means commercials; repetitive commercials; more commercials; the same commercials, day after day, over and over --- until you begin to puke them up.

     Hey, what can I say? --- we love tennis.

     One such wretched production gave birth to this essay.

     (Cue the Rod Serling, Twilight Zone voice): “Picture, if you will, an antiseptic white room, a white-bright of polar intensity dominating a scene where two young women, pale women, Geisha girl pale, 2 pallid forms on an Arctic landscape, are talking about car insurance. Contrasting dramatically with this cue ball brightness is the shrill blob of crimson plastered across the mouth of the saleslady, an island of deep color in an icy dead world, a bulls-eye of color that becomes the target of our attention as the Geisha face sells her snake oil. Unfortunately, we are not about to enter the Twilight Zone. Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, this is hard core reality”. (Cue the spooky da da da da--da da da da music. Cut).

     The saleslady described by Rod Serling is the star of the show and her mega-zeal in trying to sell car insurance is almost a “prima facia” case of the obnoxious, not because of her saleslady eagerness, but because, in reality, she is not trying to sell anything. She is an actress (and a good one). She couldn’t care less about the quality of the product she is feigning to sell. If the producer told her to extol the virtues of a sulphuric acid hand lotion, she’d do it with the same intensity, for the pay check and to get her face on TV. Sad to say, for the most part, we are used to this. But on occasion, a performance of this nature is so exaggerated that at least one person in the world is offended. Anyone else?

     Probably not.

     In its most skeletal form, the commercial goes like this: Geisha-face is pushing car insurance to attractive young woman. She explains how she can save her money, at which point an apparatus similar to those used in airports to post departures, begins flipping over names and numbers, eventually settling into a list of companies and prices. Voila! How’d you guess? The company being pushed by Geisha-face is more than $200 cheaper than the others. The face of young lady-customer lights up with glee. She says, “that’s a new pair of shoes”.

     So now the reader sees how that mysterious spark of conception so long ago, finally reached the light.

     Just what kind of human being reacts to the world around them as this young lady-customer has? In a way, her response is like a word association test. “Extra money” --- “New shoes”, or new dress, or car, or --- whatever. Certain neurological connections have been concocted with regard to money and why we want it. A complex motivational apparatus has been mounted here, culminating in behavioral patterns that are not the result of physiological needs. The young lady blissfully thinking of a new pair of shoes has been induced into this behavior.

     Judging from the commercial, the young lady-customer is representative of that vast herd of millions of middle class consumer wildebeests hunted so carnivorously by the neo-liberal economic scheme dominating the world. Regardless of her economic solvency --- which is constantly being pressured by the temptations of her credit card --- she has a good job, makes good money, and chases the spoils of the consumer society like a greyhound behind a mechanical rabbit. She is willing to spend over $200 on a pair of shoes, as if this is exactly what $200 was invented for.

     From a practical standpoint, we should all be reminding ourselves that this young lady does not need a new pair of shoes. It’s not like her old pair of shoes are worn out, or has a flapping sole, or cracked leather, or moisture is getting in, like so many millions in the world might need shoes. Right now, as we speak, she probably has 15 pairs of perfectly functioning shoes sitting in her closet under a dense forest of hanging clothes. But from an emotional sense, she does seem to “need” these shoes. Where did she get these emotions? Was she born with them? Is there a specific part of the brain pertaining to “shoe desire”?

     One must remember this young lady-customer, like the exuberant, Geisha-face saleslady, is not really buying car insurance. She is an actress too. She is being paid to represent a role millions of us adhere to in real life. Her job is to portray the sociological center for car insurance customers. This is a target group that comes close to representing all of us, much more so than people targeted for tofu consumption (are they targeted too?). In trying to analyze her behavior, we come close to analyzing the behavior of our culture in general.

     Being that Post Consumer Man is not one of the millions of wildebeests making up the consumer herd and, even though he has strayed from the herd and lives isolated in cultural quarantine, at times, he too is “targeted” by the insatiable appetite of the global economy, whose no-stone-left-unturned attitude is both impressive and horrifying. But his epiphany happened way too long ago and the roots of his “post consumerism” are now too deeply anchored to be dislodged. This means his concept of who and what our young lady-customer-wildebeest is could be different from yours. But the idea of these essays is to throw these thoughts out there, like a free market of ideas, to be marketed and sold to whoever might be listening. It’s a hard sell --- he knows.

     When the line “that’s a new pair of shoes” triggered this essay and I began to grope for ways to describe the woman who said it, such words as

     “frivolous”, “shallow”, “spoiled”, “adolescent”, “superficial”, “brainwashed”, “bored”, “unconscious” --- and then it hit me!

     Destructive.

     This woman and the vast herd she represents are very destructive people. Their extremely exaggerated material needs; their concept for their emotional well being, their happiness, their fulfillment, is destroying nature itself. The industrial slime needed to produce it all; the energy needed to fuel it; the transport needed to distribute it, along with the massive amounts of resources necessary to market these products and maintain the physical plant of the business infrastructure (not one single, solitary thing was ever produced at the Twin Towers or all the rest of the skyscrapers seen punctuating the horizon of any city) are destroying animal habitat and bio-diversity, are destroying the health of our oceans and the purity of the air, are warming the climate and,

     it should never be forgotten,

are creating geo-political situations leading to the death and destruction of warfare.

     The young woman-customer-wildebeest is a destructive person. Are you?