I wonder where I can get a little consumer confidence? Any ideas? It’s harder to find, these days, since it’s on the same level as my subterranean den. I’d buy some, if there were any to be had, but, alas no dice. Seriously, most people aren’t putting their hands in their pockets for anything but the basics, because consumer confidence has gone the way of James Bond’s martini; its been shaken not stirred. Antithetical, don’t you think…this condition, to what this country was founded on? And what foundations are those, you ask? Liberty? Freedom? The pursuit of humane healthcare? No. Handing your money over as soon as you’ve made it, of course: reflex consumption.
Personally, I’d like to help…patriotically participate in this income for crap exchange thing. To my reckoning it isn’t that I don’t have any money, which I don’t. It has to do with the fact I have even less consumer confidence. And it is easy to see how this has come about. On the one hand; wages have been cut, benefits now resemble detriments, 401Ks have an employer $0 match, bonuses minused and the freaking Thanksgiving turkey fund cooked. No wonder nobody’s forking over the mullah. And on the other hand, thanks to our socially minded corporations, consumers are fleeing for the sanity of asceticism. To compare spending to swimming from one side to the other of a shark-infested pool is no stretch. Take banks and their best practice of bilking customers of their money. See Bank of America’s “Keep The Change” program. If you don’t keep a minimum of $300 dollars in the account, they take $5 per month as an inconvenience for your inability to find the money to reach their specified amount. Forget, that in 2010 you are even saving; you’re just not saving the way B of A wants you to. Then there’s Toyota and their accelerators with minds of their own. Oversight? Or the Japanese version of “Let them eat cake?” What about tainted infant formula, BPAs in most everything, Vioxx, or Madoff’s little gaff?
No, consumer confidence. In fact, the term, due to our predicament, should reflect the sign of our times. “Con Con” is adequate and suitably downsized.
In case you didn’t know, because I didn’t, consumer confidence is an index, a statistical barometer, which financial or economic performance is measured. Yeah. And I don’t have any, so I don’t perform. It’s gotten so bad that my con con is the equivalent of buyer’s remorse. I bought my wife flowers the other day. The florist made me feel as though I were buying a Porsche, she was so happy to have an average Joe handing over cash. Did she think it was a sign of better days…an economic upturn? No. It was an agonized purchase that left me scrambling to fill the $25 hole I’d created in my straightjacketed budget.
The American economy is geared towards spending. Captains of industry have legitimate concerns that Americans might now mow their own lawns, wash their own cars, iron their own shirts and put what little dough they have in coffee cans. And, really can you blame us? So on that sunny day, when we feel good about ourselves and we reach into our pockets and pull out a freshly dispensed twenty-dollar bill for a little well-earned extravagance, the feeling that what we’re holding has already diminished by the conniving banks and that the goods we’re about to buy may be harmful to us sends in the clouds. And like Punxsutawney Phil holding up a confused groundhog, the shadow cast by the twenty quickly fades away and spring for our con con follows suit.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Nostradamus Served Cold
Welcome back. I’m ensconced, here, in the cave, though, for how much longer I can’t say. My wife is turning my lair into our children’s rumpus room. Stubbornly and with a modicum of passive aggressiveness, I shall continue to write until evicted by the press of oil-based Chinese-made toys, that my children adore and persistently chew.
But enough about me and my spatially challenged home. When it comes to understanding America’s place in its history, academics and media pundits can postulate on our 2.0 era, but can’t define its unraveling in “real time.” They can grope and jabber and appear learned in the face of abject redundancy, but who wants to read about today, yesterday? Television, especially its call-to-buy commercials, brings We The People into HD clarity with all the juicy parts normally saved for confession. The television commercial is enlightenment, a high-jinx brand peep show with a happy ending guaranteed. These 30-second slots are our cultural sextants, the maps by which we navigate our civilization and damn, don’t they just tickle our glib zeitgeist.
With this in mind, the question that emerges is where are we on our evolutionary odyssey? What’s the frequency, Kenneth? And does anyone care? According to Bud Lite, not only does America not give a hoot, by its calculations we’re two years from the end of days. True indeed, Nostradamus has penetrated beer psychology. And you know what? According to the boys at Bud, America is okay with that.
I’m referring to Bud Lite's Super Bowl Commercial, since Bud has another ad of similarly apocalyptic woe featuring a meteor winging earthward, begins with a forlorn group of airline passengers stranded on an island, the wreckage of what carried them smoldering in the background. Not too fantastic. In fact, this also is a prescient emblem of what’s to come. Anyhow, one passenger arrives from the wreckage carrying a black case, announcing, “Everyone, listen up! I’ve found the plane’s radio equipment. I think we can get off this island.” But wait, not so fast. By the water’s edge another passenger relays a different message, one of more infinite hope than the first, “Everyone, listen up, I’ve found the plane’s beverage cart,” he says breathlessly. “And it’s full of Bud Lite!” Let me ask you, as an American living in 2010, which would you choose? For the passengers it’s simple: Budweiser’s version of Miller Time.
Cruel delight aside. The message is one of renewed nihilism that goes beyond the denial of personal credit card debt being just numbers, raison d’etre being confused with WTF and retirement in the US of A being a pine box. Hell, have a beer and use what time is left to party on. Better to “bottoms up,” than to remove our collective bottom from the existential sling that has us comfortably couched? Better to mitigate the life and death circumstances with a cold one and hope tomorrow never comes. And better to go to hell refreshed and a little tipsy, than continue the manic dance of life. It is said, that along with predicting the end of days, that Nostradamus also foresaw 9/11, but that’s not the point; the point is beer and what you’ll be doing with it come the end. When it comes to luxury and downtime, advertising has successfully tapped into our Paleomammalian brains and figured out that culture isn’t about substance it’s about rapid-fire spanking new that distracts ourselves from ourselves and elevates the pleasure principle beyond existence itself. Bud-Lite has made a pact with THE END and Nostradamus is behind the bar twisting off caps and serving it cold.
But enough about me and my spatially challenged home. When it comes to understanding America’s place in its history, academics and media pundits can postulate on our 2.0 era, but can’t define its unraveling in “real time.” They can grope and jabber and appear learned in the face of abject redundancy, but who wants to read about today, yesterday? Television, especially its call-to-buy commercials, brings We The People into HD clarity with all the juicy parts normally saved for confession. The television commercial is enlightenment, a high-jinx brand peep show with a happy ending guaranteed. These 30-second slots are our cultural sextants, the maps by which we navigate our civilization and damn, don’t they just tickle our glib zeitgeist.
With this in mind, the question that emerges is where are we on our evolutionary odyssey? What’s the frequency, Kenneth? And does anyone care? According to Bud Lite, not only does America not give a hoot, by its calculations we’re two years from the end of days. True indeed, Nostradamus has penetrated beer psychology. And you know what? According to the boys at Bud, America is okay with that.
I’m referring to Bud Lite's Super Bowl Commercial, since Bud has another ad of similarly apocalyptic woe featuring a meteor winging earthward, begins with a forlorn group of airline passengers stranded on an island, the wreckage of what carried them smoldering in the background. Not too fantastic. In fact, this also is a prescient emblem of what’s to come. Anyhow, one passenger arrives from the wreckage carrying a black case, announcing, “Everyone, listen up! I’ve found the plane’s radio equipment. I think we can get off this island.” But wait, not so fast. By the water’s edge another passenger relays a different message, one of more infinite hope than the first, “Everyone, listen up, I’ve found the plane’s beverage cart,” he says breathlessly. “And it’s full of Bud Lite!” Let me ask you, as an American living in 2010, which would you choose? For the passengers it’s simple: Budweiser’s version of Miller Time.
Cruel delight aside. The message is one of renewed nihilism that goes beyond the denial of personal credit card debt being just numbers, raison d’etre being confused with WTF and retirement in the US of A being a pine box. Hell, have a beer and use what time is left to party on. Better to “bottoms up,” than to remove our collective bottom from the existential sling that has us comfortably couched? Better to mitigate the life and death circumstances with a cold one and hope tomorrow never comes. And better to go to hell refreshed and a little tipsy, than continue the manic dance of life. It is said, that along with predicting the end of days, that Nostradamus also foresaw 9/11, but that’s not the point; the point is beer and what you’ll be doing with it come the end. When it comes to luxury and downtime, advertising has successfully tapped into our Paleomammalian brains and figured out that culture isn’t about substance it’s about rapid-fire spanking new that distracts ourselves from ourselves and elevates the pleasure principle beyond existence itself. Bud-Lite has made a pact with THE END and Nostradamus is behind the bar twisting off caps and serving it cold.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The United States of Target
For those who haven’t visited, and I’m talking about 2 percent of the country, who are either on a space mission, doing “time,” or are banned from malls by their psychologist, Target, the mega store with everything, is the Ellis Island of our era.
These days my wife goes alone. She prefers it that way. I prefer it too, since that one and only time around Christmas, two years ago. It’s not that I’m a xenophobe, or acrophobe, it’s just that I was overwhelmed by America’s great Kasbah and the people moving down the aisles speaking a multitude of unknown languages. Ever heard Uzbek? Go to Target. Amharic? What’s that? You don’t know? Go to Target.
Of course I’m guessing, here. It may just be what with all the goods, the funneled music and the smell of over-cooked dogs from Café Target that I wasn’t in the most cosmopolitan of moods. But as a landing point for America’s new immigrant, Target has that big behemoth Wal-Mart beat. It’s where the new America shops. It’s lifestyle, not general store. It’s Kashi cereals, not BB gun pellets. It’s design done cheerfully, not utilitarian meatloaf. And best of all is its logo: red and aggressively seductive. I mean who wouldn’t set their sights on that mark, having just arrived from Belarus or Yemen; like a bull drawn to a matador’s cape, it would be un-American not to charge toward the Mosssimo collection of women’s apparel and spend?
The apocryphal quality to this massive chain and their capitalist mantra is that it is socialistic. It is socio-corporate solidarity—for profit. Growing up in Sweden in the late ‘60s, shopping was the same experience: decent quality goods, affordable prices and best of all, although I can’t describe why, the feeling of complete social equanimity. The doctor, the lawyer, the cab driver, the cleaning lady and carpenter would appear the same because they shopped the same. Now, I’m not saying Target is the equivalent of a Eugene Debs utopia, here, in the USA. I’m saying that in our present economic meltdown, Target has saved many a breakfast table from appearing famished, many a mom from having her children look like Oakies and many a Christmas from the Cratchit’s threadbare observance. I know that many red-blooded Americans already feel that our President is the love-child of LBJ and Marvin Gaye and his radical ideology nurtured in Saigon, but the fact is that The United States of Target receives the tired and the weary, the befuddled masses yearning for twenty percent off retail price on a daily basis with a no-questions-asked return policy. Under the superstore’s colossal roofs, humanity’s disparate ingredients spend and blend in the great melting pot. Want to see America? Go to Target: it’s naturalization for less.
These days my wife goes alone. She prefers it that way. I prefer it too, since that one and only time around Christmas, two years ago. It’s not that I’m a xenophobe, or acrophobe, it’s just that I was overwhelmed by America’s great Kasbah and the people moving down the aisles speaking a multitude of unknown languages. Ever heard Uzbek? Go to Target. Amharic? What’s that? You don’t know? Go to Target.
Of course I’m guessing, here. It may just be what with all the goods, the funneled music and the smell of over-cooked dogs from Café Target that I wasn’t in the most cosmopolitan of moods. But as a landing point for America’s new immigrant, Target has that big behemoth Wal-Mart beat. It’s where the new America shops. It’s lifestyle, not general store. It’s Kashi cereals, not BB gun pellets. It’s design done cheerfully, not utilitarian meatloaf. And best of all is its logo: red and aggressively seductive. I mean who wouldn’t set their sights on that mark, having just arrived from Belarus or Yemen; like a bull drawn to a matador’s cape, it would be un-American not to charge toward the Mosssimo collection of women’s apparel and spend?
The apocryphal quality to this massive chain and their capitalist mantra is that it is socialistic. It is socio-corporate solidarity—for profit. Growing up in Sweden in the late ‘60s, shopping was the same experience: decent quality goods, affordable prices and best of all, although I can’t describe why, the feeling of complete social equanimity. The doctor, the lawyer, the cab driver, the cleaning lady and carpenter would appear the same because they shopped the same. Now, I’m not saying Target is the equivalent of a Eugene Debs utopia, here, in the USA. I’m saying that in our present economic meltdown, Target has saved many a breakfast table from appearing famished, many a mom from having her children look like Oakies and many a Christmas from the Cratchit’s threadbare observance. I know that many red-blooded Americans already feel that our President is the love-child of LBJ and Marvin Gaye and his radical ideology nurtured in Saigon, but the fact is that The United States of Target receives the tired and the weary, the befuddled masses yearning for twenty percent off retail price on a daily basis with a no-questions-asked return policy. Under the superstore’s colossal roofs, humanity’s disparate ingredients spend and blend in the great melting pot. Want to see America? Go to Target: it’s naturalization for less.
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