DownerMan Revival
Happy Overconsumptive December!
Boy do I hate the holidays.
Every December I marvel in the fact that, in the past ten years, I have
managed to somehow end up in Japan for business during the holiday season
six different years. Japan is not a nation with a Kris Kringle fable, nor
is it terribly Christian. But they do the Christmas season all right, red
and green decorations on plastic trees and candy cane wrapping paper, and
they make no bones about it: It's unvarnished commerce. Their ancestors
may have celebrated the coming new year with offerings at the shrine,
visits
to family, and the ritual climb of Mount Fuji, but it's today's global
merchants who have turned the end of December into the gift-giving
free-for-all
that Japan celebrates with glassy-eyed glee.
This year I'm not going to Japan. I'm staying at home in Northern
California, and gritting my teeth against the impending assault of treacly
sentiment scarcely concealing a terrible detour that our culture has
taken. The irritants are everywhere, in the mundane and trivial details
that make a reindeer-sweatshirt-wearing soccer mom moist with appreciation
that she's a citizen of the country which has a special place in God's
heart, the US of A.
This year, there's a new kind of Christmas light - short strands
hanging off a main trunk line, giving off ten times as much light as last
neighborhood. Great. In some power plant there's a slave driver cracking
his whip over the sooty elves, and exhorting in a Scottish brogue -
"Another shovelful of coal, ye wee freaks; fat Americans need to outshine
one
another with holiday cheer!" The people across the street from me have an
arrangement that I've not seen before, steady red lights in combination
with white lights that wax and wane on a dimmer. Rather than looking
festive, the place looks like a cheap brothel in the Fourth circle of
Hell. On my route home, right down the street from my brother (fittingly
enough, in the back yard of a house we call The Mausoleum) is a
forty-foot-high telephone pole complete with Maypolesque lights, a big-ass
star, and a Happy Holidays neon sign. You know how the power company
keeps tabs on electricity usage and informs The Law that a big spike
(signifying a pot-growing operation) has occurred? The cops have been out
to the Mausoleum three times since Thanksgiving, sniffing around and
finding nothing except a crime of fashion. My little
house will remain unfettered by lights; the environment can do without my
contribution to Christmas-light-induced global warming.
Being single and an outspoken critic of these infernal days, I can
afford to make the statement: I am not buying anyone any presents, and
I am asking everyone I know to not buy me anything. Some friends
think this is a good idea; those with children, however, sound wistful and
say, "I wish I could do that." Their tone of defeat and resignation
saddens and
angers me, especially when we consider that the recipients' lives will
largely go unimproved by Christmas morning loot. Reminds me of the story
of the three-year-old whose parents spent an absurd amount on some
extravagant toy, and the kid spent the next week playing in the box the
toy came in. Just to aggravate myself further, I plan to drive around
town the first garbage day after the 25th, to see the mounds of extra
garbage - mostly wrapping paper, itself printed with toxic inks and
contaminated with unrecyclable glitter and plastic ribbons, and
packaging materials for overly packaged, inferior quality Crap that is
given in a vain attempt to buy favor with one's loved ones. Each
upstanding houseful of citizens will have their own temporary, but
uniquely beautiful and socially meaningful, curbside shrine to
overconsumption.
This being the holiday season, I would be remiss if I did not bring up
that favorite topic of Santa's workshop, toys. Yessiree, toys are the
raison d'etre of little boys and girls - Pokemon, Beanie Babies,
Baby Furby. Dang, I wish I was a kid again! Then I'd be able to once
again whip myself into a frenzy over Cabbage Patch Kids. Or maybe Pogs.
Or Tamagotchi cyberpets (barf). Or
maybe - aw hell, whatever the annual fad is, that marketing confection
which leads the weak-willed to bargain-basement assault and battery, and
to eBay auctions where two bucks worth of carpet remnants and cheap
Chinese transistors command thousands of dollars under the guise of Tickle
Me Elmo. Maybe it's boomer nostalgia to think that toys really
were cooler in the past; in any event they were certainly more
durable than the slave-labor-assembled plastic Crap which fill the shelves
of mega-box retailers. Today's toys rarely outlast a kid's attention
span, which is saying pitifully little in this spastic Ritalin-popping
culture. Toys which are part of a marketing campaign, tied to some movie
or video or pop culture event - well, they just plain suck. The cool toys
I had as
a kid didn't need cross-marketing tie-ins: Lego, Meccano, Stratego, the
game of
Life (whose little white kid pins forever altered my view of family
life; if I want more than six kids, do I need to buy a second car?) - all
endlessly entertaining because they had no fixed outcome, no 39th level to
reach
and conquer and discard.
And don't even get me started on the whole tree issue. On average,
trees consume more carbon dioxide and give off more oxygen when they're
wee saplings, so why would you cut down a perfectly good living organism,
drag it indoors, and decorate it with ugly lights (the good ones are
outside, impressing the neighbors) and kitschy knick-knacks? If people
really want to be traditional, they ought to affix candles to the tree,
like they did in the Good Ole Days. When the house burns down, you get to
buy a new house - and fill it with more Crap! And what could be more
American than that?
In all seriousness, the holiday season irritates me so because the
message
of the season is lost amidst the commercial blah-blah-blah that attempts
to drown us daily. But there are people who refuse to accept global
capitalism; some of them were in Seattle last month, and others stayed
home, spreading the word via the Web. Like the stickers used to
say: We Are Everywhere! Get out there and make yourself heard.
And if you still have to give gifts, give something that's more you
than
merchandise: your time and good will.
DM
