Pages 167 - 180 of Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World, or In Search of the Great Penguin give a fair nugget of what I have to say on American consumerism. Or at least one aspect of it.
I’m going to recycle a few of those pages here this week and put them under the tag “consumerism”. The subject is a complex one. It requires some build-up. So, for the next couple of days one may not see just what this all has to do with consumerism. But I’m winding up for the pitch.
* * * * * * * * *
The sterility of the modern grocery store, oriented to fostering must-eat-my-cake-now compulsion, sells fruit so far removed from the primal plough and alluvial scene as to forget nascence, forget death, forget all points in between in favor of the toy box. The Pieta smiles, embracing her stuffed animals.
“Want a Ding Dong?” Faith, biting in, waggled another cellophane wrapped treat in front of Chance.
“How can you eat all that crap? What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing wrong with me that isn’t wrong with millions of Americans who have eaten millions of these buggers. Complain to the company who makes them. Tell them you don’t want them corrupting your friend, Faith. Send them a photo while you’re at it. Sell no more Ding Dongs or Ho-Hos to the woman in this picture.”
“You know what’s in that crap?”
“No. But whatever it is it’s made them tons of money catering to people with tastes like mine. It’s all a matter of opinion. Now will you lay off and let me enjoy my food?”
There is always more than one path to take, which some take as a world of options, when instead it’s the problem of not being omniscient, and is a breeder of contention which is also called opinion. Mortality and an average life span of the middle 70s (42 if you are an Afghanistan male, 46 if you live in Mali, 82 if you’re a French female) means the opportunity to exercise relatively few choices. Omniscience means not having to make choices, which translates into also not having to formulate opinions. Which means if there is a god who can number the hairs on a sparrow…no, sorry, if there is a god who can number the feathers on a sparrow and knows when each one falls, though good with the fast wrap on data, he or she or it probably doesn’t distinguish much between the sparrow that just fell dead out of the tree at 421 Timberlake Lane in No Town, USA and the one that just slammed into the plate glass window of the Harms’ bedroom on Locust Court. He, she or it recognized two sparrows down which meant fodder for another science project. Break the sparrow down into basic elements via decay and grow something new.
Of course, the Big Calculator could very well also be concerned with quality and not just quantities, and bored with Faith and Chance might have skipped back a state today to ride instead with Eddie Means and Rachel Lawrence who were currently taking the scenic route into mountainous areas of Tennessee, where they would see television antennas in place of hopeful resurrection crosses occupying the center of one-quarter acre graveyards; Jump off Baptist Church; Jack loves Wanda scribed in black spray paint on cut-away rock along the side of the road; miniature Cowan, Tennessee where rested two mysterious gray Rolls Royces in a dirty unassuming yard outside a gray shack; Desiree Lounge: Boiling Fork Creek: feed stores: second hand shops; Top Hogs and Sows bought; farmers in coveralls; trucks; trailers; farm equipment; VFW; tobacco crop; Brewersville and children riding bikes; unincorporated McBurg; blue sky with salmon pink fringe of cloud above corn field; Lawrenceburg; Sugarfoot Records: Davy Crockett monument in the town square of Lawrenceburg; Davy Crockett souvenir shops; cows; fog over trees in the distance; after the rain the sun again silver-gold blazing the road’s edge; and the Natchez Trace grocery.
For Faith and Chance, that road not taken in Tennessee which Eddie Means and Rachel Lawrence did take, may as well have been as far distant from them now as Earth to its moon. As far away in time and space as Sputnik launched in 1957 which made two satellites in the sky that year, not one. The road was as far away from them as every silver roofed farmhouse they zipped past, every human who lived in those houses who they didn’t see as they weren’t out on the road with banners waving hello and goodbye to Faith and Chance, they were doing what they would normally or not normally be doing on this Wednesday, which was Faith’s No Wedding Day. The Personal Perspective Units that nature made for itself out of human beings, one supposes so it could examine itself from lots of different angles in a human frame of mind and experience that much more about itself (quixotic, considering that humans thought they knew a lot about nature but were relatively clueless, most of them, about its workings, except that everyone could see it birthed, it lived, it died), anyway, those Personal Perspective Units were all about as far distant from each other as the Milky Way from the edges of the Universe, which is to say they were distant as far as one to another being able to leap the barrier of each their own unique perspective-and-experience-interpreter that is known as the brain. Humans in many ways aren’t very efficient. Takes a lot of energy and focus just to brush one’s teeth. A being that has to learn the fundamentals of squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush, that has to keep an eagle’s eye on the water it’s pouring in a glass to make sure it doesn’t spill over the top, that has to shut off the conscious mind for eight hours (more or less) daily lest it go nuts and die, well, seems a far stretch for that being to glorify itself as being at the top of the food chain, doesn’t it, next under god et other omniscient alls in the universal scheme.
“Hey, I can see myself!” If that’s what makes a superior being, well, consider then that not a single Personal Perspective Unit could see their face or rear end without a mirror. The majority didn’t want to see their rear end if they did have a mirror. A good number at one point or another determined if they never saw their face again that was just fine with them. Though it must be differentiated between those who said, “Agh, no more mirrors,” unable to accept nature for what it was, and those who understood a mirror just got in the way of being able to see nature for what it really was.
As far as anyone concerned knew on Monday, plans for weddings more often than not following through (a wedding being the kind of ball that once speeding down the lane confuses commitment with the done deed) come Wednesday night Faith and Marshall would be frolicking in a hotel, Faith dressed up in veil, white Victoria’s Secret corset, lacy panties, garters, thigh high stockings and three inch platform shoes. But a lot can happen in three days. A plague can awake after sleeping for several hundred years, a mutant mammal be born with an opposable thumb, Caesar be murdered, Shakespeare determine that “To be or not to be, that is the question”, sixty-thousand die in an earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, the first publication of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary appear on the stands.
“Next time you see a good prospect for a convenience store, pull over,” so said Faith to Chance, some thirty-five miles into Arkansas, desiring a bottled chocolate soda, starting to feel spaced and numbed out from too much sugar and carbohydrate and reasoning she required another shot. She was still in that zone of life where you don’t have to worry too much about the immediate impact of not flossing regularly or eating time bombs passing themselves off as food. The saying “This too shall pass” covered a lot more ground for her now than it would later. The effects of abusing the body consistently wouldn’t begin to evidence themselves as real “Uh ohs” for five, ten, fifteen maybe twenty years, more or less, and maybe not much at all if one’s DNA didn’t come loaded with quirks passed along from generations of progenitors, sins of Faith’s fathers and mothers passed along to the seventh generation which meant she would pay for something she had nothing to do with other than being a distant relation.
Life is like that. The luck of the draw. There are people who play dodgy and artfully irresponsible with billions of other’s banking monies and investments and never pay for it; who could, can and do skate through minor indiscretions such as making fortunes off mirage companies that wipe out the life savings of scores; then there are those nit-picky recalcitrant types who get jail time for sitting down on a corner with a sign that says, “You’re not doing this to me any more, thief.”
Yes, the luck of the draw. Play now, pay later? Maybe. Maybe not.
And think of all the things that could happen to take a person out in the meanwhile.
“You not in love anymore?” Chance asked the predominately silent Faith.
Flicked off the tip of her tongue, Faith replied, “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Maybe not. But one wonders why you’re so quiet, Faith.
“You mad at me? Is it the Ding Dongs? Are you that fond of Ding Dongs, you’re offended by my trashing them? Or addicted to them?”
“What’s your problem? I’m not mad at you.”
“Wow, look at that vulture.”
“So, what the fuck was wrong with that last convenience store you zipped on by?” Faith seethed. “Didn’t meet your approval? Maybe you’re waiting for one to hop in the middle of the road? Am I doing to have to wait for Utah for my chocolate soda?”
A lot can happen in three days; a lot can happen in an instant. If Faith and Chance had somehow happened to be on some very wrong day driving the Ferrari thorough Hiroshima or Pearl Harbor, Baghdad, Dresden, New York, or a small Afghan village, in the space of a split second their whole outlook on the world could have changed, blasted clean off the map. And they’re not even military being paid to kill and be killed–they’d be nothing but Collateral Damage. Oh, and an example to the rest of us.
In order to disappear from view, Faith and Chance need not be navigating a Wellsian time-traveling machine to Fat Boy’s Ground Zero, or jockeying a light beam of Einsteinian relativity back to the Big Bang which would annihilate even as it brings them potentially into existence. They are not riding upon or under the fleeting shadow of beaucoups dollars worth of Missile A on a rendezvous with its Missile B factory line brother, creating a double your fun mega-watt flood lamp junk-baby (go Boom, and that’s what I call a real light show, yeah). They are a tiny spider on a web of roads, a spider that becomes a speck, a micro-micro-microparticle, the further out one goes, the wider the scope, so that the Ferrari and Faith and Chance have disappeared (no need of a bomb) even before we have reached a height grand enough to scope the imaginary boundaries of Arkansas, much less America, nationalism, patriotic fervor, the world, this solar system, the galaxy at large. Not to say that small is insignificant. Millions of dollars cross counters in the effort to rid shoulders of a flake of dandruff, or the cause of a fleck of roach shit. Invisible bacteria and germs terrorize the world (they kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life, with every atrocity they hope that larger life forms grow fearful, retreating from the world, forsaking friends and even purportedly USDA inspected meat; they stand against us, because we stand in their way; we must starve them, pit them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no rest). Small stuff can be big. But Faith, Chance and the Ferrari are not in that league of small stuff. They are so insignificant that no one cares to find and convert them to Christianity for sake of their souls or kill them should they not submit; no one cares to find and make of them soldiers of neocolonialist Global Corporate Economics or kill them if they protest acculturalization (for one thing, Faith need not be converted and Chance, if ever noticed, amounts to a minimal amount of solanin potato green which is quickly excreted from the body and not harmful); they are so insignificant that no one has as yet bothered to caress them into being with dragnets; they are so insignificant that Faith’s cell phone hasn’t bothered to ring once, ever, since Monday (oh, yeah, she cut it off). Which leads one to wonder if there is hope for them as god-remembered metaphoric hairs on the head or barnyard swallows. And what can be said but there’s always hope of making an object worth discovering, creating a need for that project, projecting a consumer. As in, if trace elements of water in the cold reaches of space elicit scientific excitement with the prospect of life, imagine the furor if Faith and Chance were spotted tooling around Arcturus.
In the New Physics (confounding to the layman as New Math once was to the parents of mid-twentieth century schoolchildren) an object can be invariably found if one has the will to discover it. Yes, absolutely, which is how matter aids and abets the battle of the scientists in confirming conflicting research, manifesting great confusion. Oh, joy! Will wonders never cease?!
But no one was looking for Faith and Chance.
Site Search Tags: consumerism
