https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w7FjW3QeiQ
“Only in America,” I’d mutter to myself. The greed, the sales-drunk shoppers camping out in parking lots and then pouring through the front doors of Walmart like some sort of flesh tsunami, all stampeding and thundering down the aisles ripping discounted toasters and Xboxes from one another as if on some demented, nightmare game show, seemed parodic, a bit of cinema constructed for a dystopian movie and not a regular, predictable part of American life. It was the sort of theatre that always made me feel morally superior, cozy and safe in the knowledge that I would never behave in such a desperate, quasi-apocalyptic manner.
Of course, all I was really doing was sneering at poor people. Feasting on a genre of poverty porn, I would pat myself on the back, fashioning some sort of moral virtue out of what was actually snobbery and a glaring lack of empathy.
These videos that are so roundly circulated and mocked, may depict the results of greed, but not as personified by the unmediated appetite of the mob on the floor. No, the greed is taking place off-camera, up in the offices and towers of Walmart (which as a corporation makes about 16 billion a year in profit and pays it’s typical full-time employee less than $25,000 a year). The scrabbling peasants rioting beneath, their behaviour is the product of exclusion, of living in an aggressively consumer culture where material ascension must never yield.
Lacking sufficient funds to live the mythic “American Dream,” people who are working really hard just to survive, must wake up each day feeling like they’re missing out. In a nation where it’s said that the average child can identify 1,000 corporate logos and people are constantly bombarded, concussed, really, with messages that the good life is a narrative expressed largely through class, what hope do we truly have of feeling satisfied with what we have? If we get more stuff, we’ll be better off, is the message, and if you’re poor you’re relegated to live in an acutely felt state of deprivation while an inaccessible and teasing world glitters all around.
It’s nothing to laugh at, and as a culture we’re finally starting to understand that.
1. ROCK THE VOTE!!
In an effort to help remind Torontonians that it’s their duty to vote in the upcoming city election on October 27th, CondomTO would put out a series of prophylactics featuring various City Councilors and Mayoral candidates. Personalities should include:
Rob Ford
David Soknacki
Doug Ford
Karen Stintz
Olivia Chow
Sarah Thomson
- TORONTO: PROUD OF OUR WILDLIFE!!
This series of condoms would feature some of the urban wildlife that makes Toronto such a distinctive blend between big-city cosmopolitanism and natural green space, also serving as a reminder that animals are our neighbours and partners in city living! Creatures that should be considered for inclusion:
Pigeon
Raccoon
Small dog (As so many Torontonians are apartment dwellers, the city has a preponderance of small dog breeds such as Dachshund, Pug, Yorkshire Terrier, etcetera)
Rat
Squirrel
Bed Bugs
- CELEBRATE JURASSIC PARK!!
In honour of the Toronto Raptors basketball team’s great run into the playoffs, CondomTO would feature some of the star personalities involved with the team! Suggestions include:
Amir Johnson
The Raptor (Mascot)
Jonas Valanciunas
Kyle Lowry
Drake (Ambassador of team)
Nav Bhatia (Superfan)
Cuba, I guess, was a bitter pill. Our frail efforts at visiting the “Real Cuba” as opposed to the “Tourist Cuba” only served to prove that we don’t like the real Cuba, and neither, of course, do most Cubans. We stayed in three different cities, two of which (Havana and Varaderos) are tourist centres, so the crippled, interior poverty of the country was absent from our experience but only hinted at as we took a cab from city to city, passing by thatched roof homes with working donkeys living on the front porch. Our time there was one guided by hustlers, zombies and dead-eyed bureaucrats. Of course they would hate us, seeing in us only a mythic, superhuman capacity– one that was randomly dealt– to change their circumstances without damaging our own in the least. There’s an obscenity to wanting to have a fine lobster dinner in such a context, a very obvious one, and that tension was everywhere, invisible yet humming. We were billboards from the west– white, covered in corporate logos and sufficiently arrogant as to not know a word of Spanish. You know, I wanted to feel some sense of gratitude for my “charity” but what I felt was resentment and entitlement, which is probably the way that it should be. But in each small moment when we encountered what we hoped was the milk of human kindness or just a native curiosity about another human, it quickly revealed itself to be a prosaic, economic transaction.
The world is unfair in many, many ways.
