Rick Raw: Black Friday Craziness–American Commercialism Run Amok

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

The Friday after Thanksgiving is now known as Black Friday, conjured up by savvy cultural programmers, a.k.a. social trend setters known as advertisers. These market mavens brainwash Americans to spend like there’s no tomorrow to save the Gross National Product. The media hype switches on the subliminal program among mostly female platinum card carriers, insinuating that if they don’t max out their plastic, the country will fall into a terrible recession. A voice inside their heads says," It’s your patriotic duty to buy, buy, buy, or the filthy rich Walton family (Wal-Mart owners) will take out a hit on you.

The crazed spendaholics lineup at 5:00 am in the morning to fight their way into department stores to get their puny bargains in an orgy of reckless spending. This over-hyped holiday madness underscores how American masses have degenerated into glassy-eyed consummer-Moonies, worshiping the idol deity of commercialism during this dark season of bad craziness.
After the dust cleared, the retailers and mall operators racked in an estimated $20 billion in the 24 hours of Black Friday’s spend-a-thon. Clearly, the lure of the shopping mall has a very strong appeal, despite the rise in on-line shopping. Most Americans will spend an average of $1,000 dollars or more on Christmas, running up credit card debt to unprecedented levels.

Well, why not, the National Debt Clock is clicking away at over $9 trillion dollars and rising at the rate of $1.4 billion dollars a day. We are the largest debtor nation in the world, and after Black Friday, we claim the prize for amassing the highest personal debt in the world. Let the good times roll, and never mind the spending hangover the day after Christmas.

The holiday season has become a benchmark for economists, retailers, and market forecasters to gauge our country’s economic health. Christmas spending accounts for a large percentage of retailers’ yearly profit. Over the years, the significance of Christimas as a bacchanal of out-of-control credit-card charging has obscured any religious or family oriented meaning. This has not happened by accident. Years ago, the market gurus devised a sinister plan for turning the holiday season into a green light for the masses to lose all reason and logic when planning their assault on the bargain isles. The light flashes green, as in "spend," and all hell breaks loose.

This raises deeply psychological motivations for our spendthrift culture. Why are we so materialistic? Why must we have so much stuff? Why indeed! Yes, I’m guilty as charged. I shun the Black Friday madness like the plague. However, over the years, I’ve accumulated a pile of gadgets, computer systems, cell phones, and other technological toys. Ah, the good old days when my radio was my electronic contact to the outside world.

But that was before the runaway train that is technological progress ran over us all, and we must have the latest widget or bad things will happen. Steve Jobs will appear in our dreams, implanting his devious program that forces us to buy his iPhone or God will put us on heaven’s no-pass list. I wake up and see that cool touch screen and I must have it, damnit, or my heart will explode.

We wretched tech-heads need to take a nature hike with no modern technology like that guy in Man Vs Wild. My getaway would be Spartan–dropped off in the Outback of Australia with a canteen of water, a Bowie knife, and accompanied by MVW’s Bear Grylls to teach me how to survive in the wild, live off the land, and commune with nature. Frankly, I’m such a technocrat, I don’t think I would last too long into this serious deprivation and having to eat bugs-- kill, skin, and devour small creatures. But, it would be a revelation to try and a great object lesson in humility–a cold turkey trip without my electronic connections with other people.

If all the technology that we depend on was suddenly taken away, we would be naked before a cruel world. It would give us a new perspective on how little we need to survive--never mind communicate with the world through the Internet. If we get hit by a catastrophic event like a large asteroid strike or a gamma ray burst (GRB) from a super nova in our galaxy, wiping out all electronic devices, if we lived, we would have to survive like Bear Grylls or our forefathers. Well, it could happen. And yes, I’m not ready for it, nor will I ever will be.