Mack
Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
The Mayan
Apocalypse is Coming – Shop Early
“There
are those like Norfolk who follow me because I wear the crown, and there are
those like Master Cromwell who follow me because they are jackals with sharp
teeth and I am their lion, and there is a mass that follows me because it
follows anything that moves – and there is you.”
- King Henry to Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons
Abraham
Lincoln’s pocket knife, now part of a collection in the Smithsonian, was in his
pocket when he was murdered, and reminds us of a time when no man was fully
dressed without his pocket knife.
And
how many times can one reasonably use “pocket” in once sentence?
No
one seems to know what brand President Lincoln’s knife was, but it looks much
like a Schrade. Just as this nation will
never be blessed with another President Lincoln, neither can one ever again buy
an American-made Schrade, since the company folded (no pun intended) years ago,
and Schrade is now Chinese.
We
can be reasonably sure that when President Lincoln bought his pocket knife he rode
his horse to a store for the express purpose of buying a pocket knife because
he needed a pocket knife. He was not
defined by the act of shopping.
President
Lincoln, upon proclaiming Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, did not then
camp out for a midnight opening, join in a gang fight, punch someone, discharge
a gun, run over folks with his horse, throw merchandise, or wear a “Black
Friday” tee shirt.
He
ought to have re-thought that hat, though.
A
recent news show featured a poor woman who didn’t know what to do with the four
television sets, among other merchandise, still in boxes on her floor. She bought the televisions because they were
on sale, and she is a shopper. She revealed
all this to the reporter with no sense of embarrassment or irony. She didn’t need the televisions and she
wasn’t buying them for gifts; she was buying them because buying things defines
her.
Americans
are often stereotyped as being obsessed with material things, but material
things in themselves are usually good. A
pocket knife, a television set, a new shirt, a music album, a fountain pen, a
coffee cup – these are all good and useful, not obsessions.
But
we may well call an obsession the repeated act of purchasing things one doesn’t
need or even want – the four televisions come to mind.
The
images of people camping, waiting, shoving, quarreling, and shopping on a
schedule dictated by popular culture reinforced by advertising suggest that the
possession of an object is not, well, the object; after all, one can buy a
pocket knife or a television almost any time.
The purpose seems to be the camping, waiting, shoving, quarreling, and
shopping in themselves; that is, one submerges himself in a cause and thus
finds an identity, not unlike someone wearing the colors and adornments of a
sports team. The team doesn’t know who
the individual fan is, and wouldn’t care if they did know, but that’s not the
point – the point is that the individual, alone and lonely in a mysterious
universe, finds comfort and identity within a crowd, and almost any crowd will
do.
The
desperate need for an identity is perhaps understandable up to a point, but to
connect one’s identity with something as transient as a group activity
scheduled by advertising is not. The
collectivist concept of Black Friday did not exist until several years ago;
Grey Thursday was invented this year.
For a popular culture living in an eternal Now, though, reality means
nothing; Grey Thursday exists, has always existed, and will always exist
because the stores have decreed it so.
Orwell’s terrifying socialist Oceania couldn’t have duped millions of
people as easily as modern advertising.
And
the people said “Woo! Woo!”
-30-
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