Thanksgiving is followed by Black Friday, the mother of all shopping sprees when people shop for Christmas presents to give to loved ones. America is going to hell in a shopping basket. I agree with professor Robert Reich, the former U.S. secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, who wrote: “Consumers and investors are doing increasingly well but job insecurity is on the rise, inequality is widening, communities are becoming less stable and climate change is worsening. None of this is sustainable over the long term, but no one has yet figured out a way to get capitalism back into balance. Blame global finance and worldwide corporations all you want. But save some of the blame for the insatiable consumers and investors inhabiting almost every one of us who are entirely complicit.”
So how do We the People survive these difficult and troubled times?
We’d better move on in the 21st century. What is life all about? Material or personal collections? What is more important? Family and friends or material possessions? Spending time changing a system we don’t like or spending it in changing rooms? The best collectible is a viable functional political system we leave our children to cherish and enjoy. One they won’t throw out or sell at a flea market.
America, unlike many countries, pins its hopes for a robust economic recovery on the willingness of millions of consumers to spend substantially more.
In his book Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves, Princeton professor Sheldon Garon, who is not an economist but rather a historian with a sociological bent, says our willingness to spend is driven most prominently by our reaction to major events in our collective memory, including wars and depressions, and that it also depends on national character, which differs across countries and through time. Spending, of course, is shaped by deliberate government policies. Notably, during wartime, governments all over the world often start huge public-information campaigns to promote savings.
The U.S., however, is an exception. More than any other country, Professor Garon argues, it elevates consumer spending to a virtue, in the process minimizing saving. There is even a suggestion that it is patriotic to spend, rather than to save. For example, in a speech two weeks after 9/11, President George W. Bush urged Americans not to be cowed. “Get down to Disney World in Florida,” he declared. “Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
Personal consumption expenditures increased sharply in October 2001, and the recession that had begun in March of that year came to an abrupt end by November.
Do collectables really make us happy? No, according to Richard A. Easterlin of the University of Southern California, who has studied the relationship between materialism and happiness. We don’t get happier as our wealth increases and our possessions grow. When our closets begin to bulge, we end up moving to a larger house. The more we have, the more we need, especially if someone we know already has it. Happiness, he concludes, is not like wisdom. We don’t accumulate it as we go along in life. In fact, our happiness is more or less a constant in our lives. What we start with as working adults is pretty much what we end up with at the finish line.
That is why one has to love the Rev. Billy Talen and his Church of Life After Shopping. He calls Mickey Mouse “the Antichrist” and denounces the evils of mindless consumerism. The New York-based pastor-performance artist’s shows are sold out as Americans come to share the good news – many Americans, whether by necessity or choice, are opting out of the vicious cycles of getting and spending and, he suggests, finding new values and meaning in their lives.
“There’s a quiet revolution happening everywhere, of people just rolling up their sleeves,” said Talen. Across the country, he says, people who’ve realized that corporations have failed them are “de-mediating their lives, they’re meeting their neighbors, they’re starting new businesses out of their garages and station wagons, farmers markets are booming.”
“Changealujah!” as the Rev. Billy puts it. Dressed in a white suit, clerical collar and a dyed pompadour that would’ve done Elvis proud, Talen lambasted the sins of sweatshop labor outside the Disney Store in Times Square, burst into Starbucks with a megaphone to denounce the “fake bohemia” and labor practices of the coffee giant, and performed an exorcism on Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. He has been arrested dozens of times.
The Rev. Billy leads his congregants through programs of blazing testimonials, uplifting gospel music and fervid rituals of throwing away credit cards and blurring the lines between theater, protest action and religious ceremony. Something all Americans should think about carefully before binge shopping next Black Friday.