Da Da Da-Da, Da Da Da-Da Pa-pa’s World (sung to Elmo’s theme)

Hope said something interesting a couple of weeks ago. “You can have your man cave back.” I was evicted from my he-bunker due to the children’s need for a playroom and Hope’s need to remove their clutter, remember? I’m happy to report both parties are finding this arrangement to their liking. “Yes, if you go further into the basement,” she continued. “We can set you back up to the way it was.” I’m presuming by “we” she means the children and her? I’m glad my being further out of sight is so top-of-mind.

Let me explain something to you. Deeper into our basement…crossing the threshold separating the new playroom and what lies beyond is what the impenetrable jungles of the Congo must have been like at the time of early white exploration. In short, from man cave to bloody kerplunking.

Despite my griping, I’ll take it. I’ll barge my way past the Christmas crapola, the assortment of furniture that will become archeologically significant thousands of years from now, and take over the same way a burrowing animal would. It won’t be pretty. Though it will be mine. And, seeing as I’ve already started telling my son about various ghosts living in the dark nether regions of our basement, he seems to be spending less time in his play area than before. I guess, I’ll have the old place all to myself?

But enough of this, the point of this posting is Hope’s new job and the fallout.

She left for San Francisco to meet her new workmates during the heaviest floods in state history. A Biblical downpour, lasting almost three days that equaled the length of her impending West Coast stay. This was the week leading up to Easter. I had the distinct feeling that my time with my children was to be the equivalent of the religious festival we visited in Guatemala a couple of years ago: Semana Santa (Holy Week), meaning I would serve penance, be crucified and rise again just as Hope got home.

We’re not a religious lot. Of the four of us, I would say that Samson is probably the most in touch with his spiritual side. Both children go to a daycare center where religion is part of the curriculum. Did we have any idea of this at the time? I can’t remember. Is it bad that parents send their children to be religiously inculcated just because they get a discount for sending both to the same place? Hey, it’s not like we’re sending them to a Jihadist madrasah. A little apostolic scripture never hurt anyone. And to be sure, Samson has come home with many a story that neither Hope nor I have any idea about. Anyone know the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego? He is becoming well versed in the ways of JC, that one. And his summoning of His name at the tiniest incident—like who will make the dill seed I planted grow—is directly attributed to his child-minding surroundings. In the car, the other day, he put one arm over the other and said, “What’s this?” I guessed Ninja Star. “No. A cross,” he said. “It’s what Jesus was put on.” Hey, what can I say it’s a life-style choice? But as with any true believer, their fervency requires tempering to keep it free from fanaticism. Last week, he had logged onto PBSkids.org for a little downtime. For some reason, the wireless connection kept dropping, so much so that from the young man’s mouth as he banged his fists came the confirmation of his faith, “JESUS CHRIST, why don’t you work!” Immediately, I gave a quick sermon on how referencing Jesus Christ has transcended faith into the common vernacular, which he’s forbidden to use in public under any circumstances. I also made a mental note to get a permit for my slovenly mouth and the wayward language spewing from it.

The first two days of my being Papa-Mama went without a hitch. Wednesday and Thursday morning, I got up an hour early to fix the kids their lunch boxes and figure out what to defrost for dinner. Hope is much more regimented in the mornings about this sort of thing. Bing, bang, boom. Done. Me? I wander through the cupboards in some strung out afterglow. Hmm, shall I cook lentils? A carbonara would be nice, but we don’t have cream…oh, that’s okay I’ll use milk. Wait a minute, I’ll quickly knock up a Spanish omelet...just peel some potatoes and boil them at SIX IN THE MORNING???!!!! Needless to say, the kids were late for school. Returning home from having dropped them off, I’d clean up the breakfast bomb crater and sit down to do some work. Ah, work. How to settle into concentrating on what pays me a wage having just survived the three-hour tornado is a feat many do, but few appreciate?

Four o’clock. Time to get the kids. And here’s how it goes. Go to Samson’s class. Don’t forget to pick up his lunch box, stuffed bear and any religious drawings or Old Testament scripts that he has copied and put to memory, then onto Amelia’s room. Back up. Where’s Samson? Go back and get Samson. Now, onto Amelia’s room. Get Amelia who keeps running away. I grab her with one arm as I’m signing her out with the arm that’s holding her lunch bag, wet clothes and her pink bunny…the same arm already holding Samson’s sundry belongings. I blink goodbye to her caregivers, on account that my limbs are weighed down and Amelia’s jacket is in my mouth. And we’re off to the car. Samson runs away to chat with friends and Amelia is crying as she’s buckled into her car seat. I walk back to the daycare center picking up what I dropped on the way to the car. I corral Samson and we’re heading home.

During the festival of Semana Santa enormous floats with the images of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus of Nazareth are carried on the shoulders of some 50 devotees or curcuruchas through the streets of La Antigua. Carrying 7000 pounds for a couple of blocks (only to be relieved by more curcuruchas) is a symbol of penance…atonement for one’s sins or wrongdoings.

I’m not sure what it is I’ve done. I’m just trying to be a dad. My sights aren’t particularly high in this department, either. I’m not a model anything, but that doesn’t mean I should go an entire day with no time to take a whiz. Is this domestic penance that I’m enduring…a past wrongdoing for which I’m now not allowed to piss?

Dinnertime. As my mother-in-law puts it, “Arsenic hour.” On the Thursday, a good friend came in from Boston to spend the night…catch up and enjoy the art of reconnecting, as civilized people do. Not exactly. Not even close. Cahill, a gentleman for whom children represent other people’s problems was thrown into dealing with one child while I calmed, bathed and pumped the knock-out-bottle into the other. He hadn’t even sipped his first martini before Samson screamed, “Cahill! Let’s build a rocket!” An hour later. There it stood. His martini…as unwanted as a witch’s tit. It was 9pm and dinner hadn’t even started. In the end, with Samson up way past his bedtime, we got down to the manly sport of eating steak, drinking vodka and telling whoppers. Samson fell asleep on the sofa. And a while later so did the rest of us. The next morning, Cahill left. He’s no dummy. Then it was just the kids and I. By 3pm I was deciding whether it was bad parenting to want to feed them, bathe them and put them to bed. I decided it was: a majorly big sin for which I would carry 7000 pounds of guilt without the help of 49 other dudes.

Before I knew it, dinnertime had come round again. Quick, go, go, go. Chop, sauté and boil as the children played with the one object that hadn’t been upturned, rifled through or obliterated by cushions and blankets: our bowls of onions, garlic and potatoes. In seconds, the kitchen floor turned into a plain covered with onionskins and stray onions barreling all over the place. I’d had it. “E-nuff!” Yelling felt good. It took the pain away in my lower abdomen that pulsated from not going to the bathroom since this morning. “But papa,” came from number one son. “I’m not papa. I am Mister Pick-Up. Mister. Pick-Up. Because all I do is pick-up, pick-up, pick-up!!! Who am I?” “Mister Pick-Up,” replied Samson agog at the dissonance between what he thought his father should endure and his unreasonable protestations. They were two and I was one. If this were a war I’d have been out-numbered by an entire regiment.

With the children eating, I sneaked off to the bathroom. Being a parent is to do, and be thinking of doing, multiple actions in the course of performing one single action. You fix the sticky handle on the toilet cistern while you whiz, because who has the time to do both with any sense of pleasure? With both children fed and bathed. We settled down to read a few books. Both crawled into their favorite nooks, which my body provided and as I read Amelia cooed, “Papa” over and over again while stroking my hair. If we had just been through arsenic hour, here was the antidote. Even though their mother was 3,000 miles away, they were content. Happy with, what in their minds was a good day. And who was I to think differently? As they fell asleep I managed to put them both to bed. Pulling Samson’s sheet up over him and BearBear, I detected something in his face, where locks of still wet hair curled about his forehead, framing his happy disposition as a testament to a Good Friday, that had been pretty dam good.

Hope called, that evening, to say things were going well, but air-traffic was snarled and she would be delayed by an extra day. Oh well, my resurrection will just have to wait a day. Da da da-da, da da da-da Pa-pa’s world.

The Cursive Son

Our son, Samson, has informed his mother that he won’t be living with us for much longer, on account of the fact he wants to be a famous magazine writer. According to our future National Magazine Awards winner, famous magazine writers don’t live with their mamas and papas and so we should prepare ourselves for his inevitable departure. Not bad from a four-and-a-half year-old.

Even in my darkest fears of how environments can shape a child’s pliable character, (hence my demands for raising Samson for the first two years of his life in a Skinner Box. See picture. Happy little dude ain’t he?), did I think that my eldest would want to follow in his father’s footsteps. I mean, I’ve had my share of acclaim, but famous? “We don’t set out to be famous,” I told him. “Look at your father. I’ve remained true to the integrity of my trade; I’m a nobody.” Why had fame taken root in his little unspoiled mind?

Seriously, though, before he leaves I need a word with him. It’s not his exodus that concerns me. At four-and-a-half he can work a computer, use the TV remote like Liberace, make himself food and use the John, so that’s not the issue. The issue is his choice of profession. Publishing? Why not boxing? Publishing! How about a job with Blackwater, or whatever it’s now called…something useful? Stop runaway Toyotas? But publishing!?

No doubt you’ve guessed from my last posting what I think about my industry. Bitterness, you might think? Ego dyspepsia? Slit my throat on my editor’s desk to have her not strike the meaning from my 600-word piece on window boxes? And yet, my dismay comes from a deeply vested connection to the wonders of bringing people entertaining reading material. I’ve been in this game since the mid-1980s and let me tell you, back then, journalism and life were joined at the hip. You were knee-deep in what you reported on. The office was just a place where you’d collect messages. Your desk and chair: placeholders for when you became too old for three-hour lunches and a belly full of hearsay. These days you’re expected to write from your desk, interview people via telephone, read a person’s or company’s web-site and press releases, and then for the atmosphere cobble together something plausible, because atmosphere can’t be fact-checked. Like the correspondents covering the Iraq War, we’re embedded…contained by our L-shaped desks and task chairs: publishing’s version of the couch potato.

As evidence of this shifting mindset, back in the early ‘90s, as chief photographer in Eastern Europe for Agence France Presse, I was away from my desk for more than a month. Returning to the cupboard-sized office I rented in Prague, I found my desk was completely obscured by a mountain of faxes sent by head office in Frankfurt wondering where the hell I'd gotten to. The pile was huge. A proverbial avalanche of queries. I put my arm in as deeply as I could and pulled out one coiled and yellowing message that read, “You’re Fired!” Luckily, a three-hour lunch and a belly full of hearsay at the local beer keller took the sting out from that one. My nose for a good story had me tagged as a loose canon, a roving renegade. Let’s hope the famous magazine writer in-waiting uses his nose more judiciously than his father?

As any parent would be, when their offspring has made such an inchoate proclamation, I’m curious to know what a famous magazine writer will pen in the future? By my calculations it will be around 2030, when he places his fingers on the keyboard in earnest. What will the briefs of those commissions be? Based on the way it’s going, I can guess; business to business marketorials on maximizing the click rates of your eNewsletter, 10 ways to make eye-contact with the boss, lists and countdowns on everything from vacation destinations to the top one hundred doctors specializing in treating ED in the Greater Boston area. Publishing, if it isn’t already, will be pure PR, delivering information with a view to reader consumerism. So, maybe Samson’s choice of being a famous magazine writer might instead, morph into becoming a famous copywriter?

If what he’s done to date is any measure of his writerly prowess, then he is well on his way. He has already authored his first book. It’s an untitled work and incorporates drawings, mixed media—by way of wildlife stickers that click when they’re depressed. I ghost wrote a couple of pages, but for the most part Samson’s diary is an original work that touches on his existential wanderings through Christmas, Moray eels and Robinson Crusoe. He’s not quite writing cursively and it appears at times he’s not even writing English, but he’s filling pages, which in today’s literary world can earn you a pretty penny.

If I had my druthers, would I prefer him to be a novelist rather than a scribe for hire in the always-fresh-never-staid world of editorial? You betcha. Would I wish him to have creative control and take it as far as his muses will allow? What father wouldn’t? Perhaps he senses this and wants to make me proud. It could answer this whole famous notion he has in his head? I should be careful. The whole parents’ and their unfulfilled dreams can impact their children to terrible effect. Take Michael Jackson: the epitome of tears before bedtime

In toying with the mark my son will leave on Western civilization, the idea of him writing the next Ulysses is sexy, though misguided. I love the way people say, “If Ulysses were written today, it would never get published.” True that. Though, not because the likes of Joyce aren’t around, they are. The Joyces of a hundred years on are less concerned with a parallel story of the most famous mythological journey of all time and a man’s wanderings through the streets of Dublin. Their schtick is more about posing fiction as fact...true stories of escaping Nazis and being raised by wolves in the Ukraine Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, or raised by gangbangers in South Los Angeles, when you're really a Valley girl Love and Consequences. The need to be famous can make your nose grow just like that. I know shouldn’t be bogging you down with this. Had Samson been raised in a Skinnerian box, tended to his earliest formations with rubber gloves bolted to the structure of his 24-month home, he’d be less susceptible to my influences and less of a slave to his innate desire to emulate them. Equally, Samson could have chosen a more benign trait of mine to follow, like taking enormously embarrassing mouthfuls of food, for instance. But publishing!? I know keeping children in a box seems a little off, but most parents are hip to the idea, no? What do think a crib is?

After his commanding declaration, I’ve been trying to get to grips with what both children will become. Standing by our kitchen island, recently, I looked over to the children’s dining table where my daughter, Amelia, valiantly drank juice from the air hole of her sippy cup while the contents streamed from the mouth piece onto the carpet, and then noticed the leaves at the bottom of my tea cup (That's a big fat James Frey whopper. I use tea bags). I wondered what they might tell regarding the fate of my two babes? Perhaps embracing Samson’s decision is what’s best? At the same time, I should prepare him for all that he is about to endure and enjoy. James Wright, the Pulitzer-prize winning poet, gave his son the sort of treatment that can only fortify a child’s quest for their dreams. Having read his son’s first poem, Wright said in an encouraging tone, “You’re a poet! Welcome to hell.” Notwithstanding, there is Samson's mother. I’m not sure if he’s considered Hope's wishes when it comes to his sallying off to some Paris commune of his own making. I get why this has to happen: the whole creative process and self-discovery thing, but mothers are mothers, especially one who already lives with a writer. She would no more want her son to leave home than to become a writer. And leaving home to become a writer, well, perhaps Wright’s commendation would work just as well in this instance: Samson, “Welcome to hell.” You've just broken your mother's heart. Given this, I wonder whether now is a good time to revisit the Skinner box idea with Hope? What better place from which to write from home?

Sometimes A Great Notion--The Mangina Monologues

Recently, my better half has become much more than that. She’s become the wealthier half: the whole loaf of our bread-winning duo. Big job. Bigger pay. If this were a race, between her profession (online marketing) and mine (magazine editing), the photo-finish would show hers crossing the line and that’s all it would show. Publishing has been ravaged, and I’m not talking bristle burn and nail marks.

Her new status will do many things for our family, put our son, Samson, in summer camp, increase our savings for the children’s education and let us pay for the services of more baby sitters to release us from the toy-corralling, poop-wiping, and high-safety surveillance drones that we’ve become. Increased wealth will afford us drinks away from the calamity of child-induced mayhem. We will drink to the children, not because of them.

But it is in our relationship where the real change will occur…I fear. With Hope heading to San Francisco every month as well as to all the nationwide summits her company will host, daddy, here, will become more…how to put it…daddy-mommy. Don’t get me wrong, feeding, washing, playing with my two young-uns are already part of my parental repertoire. What I fear is that the daddy-mommy moniker has the potential to shift in attitude how one half of the relationship, namely Hope, will see the other—me.

Already the head of household and its outright owner (Being fearful of what might happen should I meet with a terrible accident and not be able to pay the medical costs, seeing as I don’t have health insurance, we signed over my half of the house to Hope. Another perk of her new job, I’ll be back on her insurance.), Hope will be evermore that traditional and exclusive role once held by the man of the house. Forced role-reversal is what it is. And let me tell you, in my world it very much is. The Center for Gender in Organizations at Boston College surveyed 400 women on this particular matter. Eighty-six percent reported providing more than half of their household incomes, and with over a third totally responsible for paying the bills. Phew, I’m not alone.

This brings me to a question I posed to the senior executive of our relationship about what to call this blog. She was stumped. Until, that is, she was on the phone with her stepmother, who’ll remain nameless. “Suzie (Hopkins) said, ‘Why don’t you call it the Mangina Monologues?’” The slice that cut so deeply wasn’t my own realization of my place in our relationship, but everyone else’s. Mangina Monologues…really, huh? I felt my appendage retract at its very utterance. Will Hope start holding the door for me? Push my chair in as I sit down in a restaurant? Make the first move?

Essentially, this is anthropological. It’s adaptation. In last month’s Marie Claire magazine an article on the best countries for women to live in The World's Best Country for Women gave Sweden the collective thumbs up. And what makes it such a “Femirvana?” The social interchangeability of the sexes. “As one Swedish website puts it,’” says the article. “In our country, women drive the buses and men push the baby buggies.” I think it shows a social maturity that is in step with the reality of our times—which is my way of standing tall in the fact that the ladies at my children’s daycare offer up their intimate memories of child birth experiences as though I too had a cesarean scar. Is my part of the sisterhood that solidified?

And yet, is the state of sexual parity feminism’s great achievement or Governments’ devious plan for a larger tax base? Sitting in a burger joint in Cambridge, Mass, with an old friend of mine, he asked our young waitress, whether she thought living in a society where her job was to have children, raise them, make a home in return for a life where the certainty that her partner would earn sufficiently to provide the financial security for themselves and their children would be something she’d prefer to having her make her own way? Would she lay down the political notion of sexual equality for a future such as this? She walked away. I don’t blame her. What kind of bloody question to have two lunchtime punters ask? She returned and agreed. Yes, she would. The commander and big cheese of our home, concurs. As much as she relishes the workplace challenge, the feeling that she’s lost out on not being able to focus on our children is very real. To ease the pain, I reminded her that her new compensation package contains guaranteed bonuses as well as performance-based bonuses. And let’s not forget the stock options. Of course, I’m stroking her financial ego, assuaging some of guilt she must feel at getting a bigger job against the demands that will take her further from her home and family. If the stats are true, her earnings for such sacrifice are well below the male equivalent. Equality or economy?

The word package may well hold the clue to this whole feminine advancement thingy. It may have little to do with the social and cultural dynamic than it has evolution. Could we be moving towards sexual flip-flopping, or horror of horrors, asexual reproduction? Come to think of it, the phrase “go fuck yourself” might finally be elevated into the Darwinian mantra of the future? The Cleaner Wrasse is a fish that is emblematic of the Swedish social attitude perfectly—a Swedish fish of sorts. Groups of this fish consist of an adult male and a harem of females. If the male dies, the largest female changes sex and takes over the male role becoming fully functional within a few days. THEY DON’T GET ANOTHER MALE TO DRIVE THE BUS PEOPLE! SISTERS ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES!

At home, I’ve been a little irritable and overly sensitive at what I’ve considered my emasculation by my wife’s bigger professional advancement. I had a dream she found some else and I wouldn’t speak to her the next morning. I mean in our society aren’t status and money the equivalent of length and girth? I figure I’ll know when our role reversal is complete. The day she gets home from a business trip to enjoy a meal I’ve prepared, drink the wine I’ve poured and check on the children who I’ve bathed and put to sleep. And when we sit down on the sofa and all the talking has stopped and we hug and kiss and I feel her hand on the back of my head pushing me towards the place where the Cleaner Wrasse females have mastered the switcheroo, the social gravitas of my new capacity will make me part my lips and the mangina monologues will be born.

Selling Off The Oaf

Once upon a time, when the Dow floated at an altitude of 11,000 daily traded shares and homes were ATMs with windows and gardens, men, as the advertising industry saw them, were the boobs of the boob tube. Portrayed in commercials as the foils to the era of movie-star aspirations for all and the “get mine” disclaimer for all disreputable behavior, the average Joe was the dinosaur in a clown suit, because “average” was ridiculous and ridiculous merited ridicule. And in this climate of self-obsession, advertising realized that schoolyard cruelty toward this unpopular group could get cheap chuckles and prompt people to shell out for beer, cars, phones and pizza. They couldn’t jab women. They couldn’t knock gays. And minorities were off limits. Their reasoning like their tag lines read: high-time for low-brow...kick 'em where they have none. And since society had already created the intellectual and political sport of male-bashing, especially white ones, all advertising needed to do was side with the times. Thirty-second misandry (misogyny’s lesser-known counterpart) hit full stride.

In these drubbings, the scenarios varied little. A bemused man married with kids or a single dimwit with friends identical to him were the tragic protagonists. Both owned the looks and physique of a bag of spanners stuck on a mound of pizza dough. The married guy had an attractive wife (only in advertising), who wouldn’t give him the time of day and two wealth-coddled children who confused “dad” with dud. The single guy, well, he was just too much of a loser for sex and so was the eating and drinking machine who lived in a déjà vu world of Abbott and Costello. The married guy would be ridiculed by his wife in front of his friends or hers, it didn’t matter, or admonished by his children for knowing less about life insurance than they did. And as for the single guy, he didn’t mind being the jackass for all seasons. Rob him blind, stick corn chips in his cornhole, punk him, it didn’t matter.

As someone who thinks about the world from his subterranean den, I can see how this social harrying precipitated the invention of the man cave: a place of solace where the sun doesn’t shine. Didn’t the phantom reside in the bowels of the opera? Dracula keep himself safe in his coffin until dark? The man cave offers sanctuary; that is until advertising realized it was another setting to poke more fun at their most valuable target.

What I don’t get is, why this neutering took place? Why had Mr. America’s America, turned on him? Vilified his simple humor, conservative ideas and unsophisticated tastes? Had the breadwinner become the intolerable drone that furnished consumerism by working 10 hours a day, chewing ulcer tablets in the privacy of his daily commute? Furthermore, why was he a party to his own public humiliation? Was it better to laugh than to cry? Don’t get mad get castrated? Martyn Straw, former chief strategy officer at BBDO Worldwide in New York, gave his industry’s take on their motives in a New York Times interview back in 2005. “In advertising and in general communications there is the notion that things that are ‘negative’ are always much funnier than ‘positive,’ which can get very schmaltzy.” He added. “In order to not cross over the line into denigration,” the situation portrayed in an ad needs to be truthful and funny, “it's not really bashing, it's just having a funny look at the way men work sometimes.” No one likes a chuckle more than a boob, right?

In 2010, truthful and funny no longer intersect. The reality for the boob in the tube is that he isn’t just the butt of everyone’s joke; he is also bearing the brunt of the recession. Male suicide has spiked. The infamous murder suicides of the past couple of years have had men not just take their own lives but the ones they love. Less sensationally, alcoholism and families breaking apart through the complex pressures prompted by economic strain are the scourge of these, here, times. The Financial Times reports that 80 percent of the 5.1 million jobs lost to this economic tsunami were male occupied. Back in 2009, I was awoken by shouts and screams, banging and 10 minutes later flashing blue lights. A man, living the next street over, was taken away by police for trashing his wife and their home. He’d been drinking…laid off from work and didn’t know what to do, or how to make his way. Is this the work of advertising? Directly? No. But attitudes aren’t formed overnight and doofuses aren't crowned with one beer commercial.

Our view of men has transitioned from Gary Cooper to the ass-crack with the man in the middle too uninteresting for consideration. And while the ass-crack has been a God-send for lazy agency creatives and companies such as Bud Light, Domino's, Hummer, T-Mobile and Verizon, men’s dignity has become the collateral damage in their sad craft and marketing stratergies. Does the value of a product have to be tied to humiliation? Why not have a commercial where there’s an average looking guy of average weight, dressed with a modicum of style using a product skillfully, intelligently or in some way that wasn’t slapstick? They exist. I’ve seen them. In Europe, that is.

Consuming Confidently?

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.

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.

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.