It used to be that when I watched one of those Black Friday videos I’d be overcome with feelings of contempt and disgust.
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.
Comments
4 responses to “Black Friday”
I was born into poverty and yet never wanted for food and shelter. I learned, early in life, that material possessions are fleeting things that can – in the short term – provide a bit of happiness but, in the end, are meaningless. I give as I can to those in need and give small gifts to those who mean much to me. I give love and receive so much in return that Christmas means little more than another chance to provide hugs, offer best wishes and hope and give to those with much less than I am so lucky as to possess.
I love you as family, J. Michael Murray and to you and those who love you as I do? Merry Christmas and an amazing New Year.
Thanks Jon, you are entirely excellent and kind and cool!
I reposted this to my tumblr with a link back here, hope you don’t mind, but you said this so well (as you often do).
Also, your texts to Rachelle and blogs from the evil Heidi make me laugh.
Chris:
Hey, thanks for the kind words!