Showing posts with label consumerism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consumerism. Show all posts
As is quickly becoming an annual tradition, media outlets are reporting widespread violence and general chaos in retail outlets across the nation as Americans pack into stores early in the morning in an effort to capitalize on the so-called “Black Friday” sales that begin the holiday shopping season. In Los Angeles, a woman injured twenty people when she used pepper spray in an effort to deter other shoppers and “gain preferred access to a variety of locations in the store,” in what police referred to as an act of “competitive shopping.”
Meanwhile, shootings were reported in Northern California, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Iowa; brawls broke out in New York, Arizona, and Ohio among others; a young girl was trampled in Michigan; and chaotic, frenzied scenes were widespread across the nation. How did it get to this point? How did the day after Thanksgiving morph into the unhinged quasi-holiday known as “Black Friday”?
Despite the valiant efforts of multiple generations of historians, most Americans still speciously assume Thanksgiving to be a largely unbroken American tradition that spans four centuries from the Pilgrim’s bountiful feast with the Wampanoag Indians to our contemporary football-infused turkey holocaust. To be sure, days of thanksgiving were observed frequently in many American colonies and during the early republic, but they were less bountiful celebrations of abundance than they were ascetic days of fasting and prayer. Most of the “traditional” Thanksgiving we celebrate today, from the food to its mythical origin story, was in fact the creation of mid-nineteenth-century moral reformer Sarah Josepha Hale. Within her widely read magazine Godey’s Lady Book, Hale promoted the potential holiday as a means through which the nation could gather, celebrate, and model loving ties and moral life for the nation. After decades of unsuccessful lobbying, and with the help of Abraham Lincoln, Hale succeeded in creating a national holiday as a mechanism to help reunite the nation after the tumult of the Civil War. The idea spread quickly and by the beginning of the twentieth century, Thanksgiving was widely celebrated throughout the North (Southerners initially distrusted it as a “Yankee holiday”), second only to Christmas.
Thanksgiving developed during a period in which, as historian Leigh Eric Schmidt has shown, most American holidays became thoroughly consumer-oriented, which was particularly true of Christmas. To a certain extent, of course, this applied to Thanksgiving, not only in its focus on certain foods, but also in its strong tie to American football. Indeed, already by 1893, one columnist could grump that “Thanksgiving Day is no longer a solemn festival to God for mercies given… It is a holiday granted by the State and Nation to see a game of football.” Yet, suggests Matthew Dennis, Thanksgiving was simultaneously (though however imperfectly) an expression of Americans’ growing ambivalence or even “aversion to commercialization and capitalist excess,” particularly in its de-emphasis on gift-giving and the simple preindustrial vision of America it celebrates. As a result, even in the nineteenth-century, it was considered in poor taste for retailers to begin the holiday shopping season until after Thanksgiving. In 1924, Macy’s created its annual Thanksgiving Day Parade to mark the transition into the Christmas shopping season. So the day after Thanksgiving has served as the transition into the Christmas shopping season for nearly as long as there have been Thanksgivings.
In fact, by 1939, this tradition had become so firmly entrenched that it precipitated one of the great and largely-forgotten political scandals of the twentieth-century: Franksgiving. Locked in the midst of the Great Depression, and with Thanksgiving falling on November 30th and therefore allowing a particularly short holiday season, Roosevelt acted on the advice of national retailers and—in an effort to boost the national economy—moved Thanksgiving ahead to provide an extra week of shopping days. The decision was widely panned, with over sixty percent of Americans disapproving (in large part because it screwed up football games scheduled for Thanksgiving). An Indiana shopkeeper protested with a sign in his window reading, “Do your shopping now. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas,” while the Oklahoma attorney general wrote:
April June and November
All the rest have thirty-one.
Until we hear from Washington”
The unpopular decision resulted in a joint Congressional resolution designating the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving, which Roosevelt signed into law in 1941.
If the day after Thanksgiving has marked the rather abrupt transition into the Christmas shopping season, and been one of the busiest retail days of the year, since the nineteenth-century, it only became associated with the name “Black Friday” during the 1960s, when Philadelphia police officers and bus drivers used it to refer to the traffic jams and crowded sidewalks resulting when mobs of shoppers descended into downtown stores. The term spread slowly across the United States until it began capturing some national exposure and a double-meaning, reflected in a 1982 ABC News World News Tonight Broadcast: “Some merchants label the day after Thanksgiving ‘Black Friday,’ because business today can mean the difference between red ink and black on the ledgers.”
Yet, despite the often frenzied atmosphere and outside a few cultish die-hards who camped outside stores in advance of mostly normal openings, Black Friday remained a largely normal shopping day into the mid-1990s. By 1995 and 1996, however, the term “Black Friday” appears to have become a massive marketing campaign itself, used extensively in national advertisements and covered with increasing vigor by the news media, thus precipitating the ongoing race to the bottom we see today. In an effort simply to draw consumers into stores, corporations began advertising lower and lower sale prices each year of limited-supply items in an effort to encourage more and more people to camp outside earlier and earlier, actively cultivating an atmosphere of sport and competition.
By 2005, this manufactured frenzy began turning particularly violent—beyond the already widespread pushing and shoving—as companies began opening their doors even earlier while offering even lower prices and more short-supplied items like Wal-Mart’s $300 computer. In 2006, widespread violence was reported as consumers waited for the PlayStation 3, of which there was a worldwide shortage. As the New York Times noted at the time, “Many merchants angered shoppers by trumpeting huge discounts—like $70 portable DVD players and $600 flat-screen televisions—only to announce they were sold out moments after they opened.”
Then, in 2007, Jdimytai Damour was killed in a stampede of 2,000 customers who managed to break down the doors of a New York Wal-Mart at 4:55 in the morning, trapping him in a vestibule where he died of asphyxiation. A temporary employee working at a company infamous for low wages and poor benefits, Damour spent the evening with his family before rushing off to guard a “blitz” line for a “door-busting” sale, only to be trampled by a frantic mob of consumers, many of whom reacted in anger when informed that the store would be closing and continued to shop. Although many Americans expressed horror and anger and Damour’s senseless death, it precipitated few cultural changes or even much sympathy for the underpaid workers forced to endure such madness.
This year, when many of the major American retailers opened at midnight, it drew significant pushback from their disempowered employees. Although one petition to stop the decision received 190,000 signatures, most Americans appeared to adopt a stance similar to the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s: be grateful you have a job—you’re free to quit if you don’t like it. To suggest that workers with little economic security, and who are faced with daunting unemployment rates, are “free” to quit is, of course, a bizarre and elaborate fiction. To suggest that corporations should have the right to make any unreasonable demand they please from workers living in a state of such unfreedom is a disturbing reminder of how far Americans have strayed from the principles of charity and compassion the season is alleged to represent. It is only very recently, then, that Black Friday has taken on its third meaning as the darkest day in the American calendar.
“If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding.”
Frankly, I think Scrooge was onto something—I say we start with that little wanker, Tiny Tim.
Mercifully, though somewhat surprisingly, this year has seen relatively little outrage (with the notable exception of Sen. Jon Kyl) over the alleged “War on Christmas,” a controversy so obviously contrived and stupid that it seems more like an ironic statement on the poverty of American political discourse than anything. That controversy has become such a predictable, borderline traditional, part of December in the United States that it's actually remarkable to think it really became a national political issue only five years ago when conservative commentator (and noted Max Headroom-impersonator) John Gibson published The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse than You Thought.
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The War on the Pompadour: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the World’s Greatest Haircut is Worse than You Thought by John Gibson
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Here is where I would normally explain Gibson's argument before pointing out its inaccuracies, inconsistencies, or fallacies, all the while making fun of him like a jerk. But I've never read The War on Christmas. And you know what? I'm never going to read The War on Christmas. Because, really, you already know what it says and I already know what it says, and what it says is stupid. So let's not bother and just move on.
What is particularly interesting and too often ignored in this moronic debate is that, if ever there was a “War on Christmas,” it was fought for ardently by the celebrated “forefathers” of the American nation itself, the Puritans, who prevented any private or public celebration of Christmas in New England well into the eighteenth-century. In short, the Puritans hated Christmas—hated, hated, hated it. For them, it was a Catholic celebration without Scriptural or historical merit (they believed Jesus to be an autumn birth) that had obviously co-opted a Roman pagan holiday. Cotton Mather derisively referred to it as a “wanton Bacchanalian feast” and Puritan authorities happily punished anyone found to be celebrating Christmas for “disturbing the peace.” Indeed, Governor William Bradford issued his first such punishment in 1620—just weeks after the first Thanksgiving.
What is particularly interesting and too often ignored in this moronic debate is that, if ever there was a “War on Christmas,” it was fought for ardently by the celebrated “forefathers” of the American nation itself, the Puritans, who prevented any private or public celebration of Christmas in New England well into the eighteenth-century. In short, the Puritans hated Christmas—hated, hated, hated it. For them, it was a Catholic celebration without Scriptural or historical merit (they believed Jesus to be an autumn birth) that had obviously co-opted a Roman pagan holiday. Cotton Mather derisively referred to it as a “wanton Bacchanalian feast” and Puritan authorities happily punished anyone found to be celebrating Christmas for “disturbing the peace.” Indeed, Governor William Bradford issued his first such punishment in 1620—just weeks after the first Thanksgiving.
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| Screw thy pagan holiday. |
(Bill O'Reilly wants to remind you that these secular-progressive Puritans are trying to deny the religious legacy of this country).Other colonies were not as authoritarian as the Puritans, of course, and various other more liberal denominations held some sort of Christmas celebration in southern and mid-Atlantic colonies. But these were neither obligatory nor necessarily festive affairs. Thomas Jefferson rarely, if ever, even referenced Christmas while George Washington often spent the holiday shooting animals and/or locking his servants into oppressive indentures. And because Christmas celebrations were so strongly associated with the English and Germans, by the time of the American Revolution, the entire practice fell out of favor in the United States. Well into the 1800s, then, many Protestants rarely even took notice of Christmas.
In reality, our sentimentalized “Christmas” is less a traditionally sacred Christian holiday than it is an invention of nineteenth-century authors like Charles Dickens or Washington Irving who managed to blend disparate elements of German (the tree), Dutch (the cookie), British (the card), and American (predictably, the fat guy in a stupid outfit) culture together to create the illusion of a coherent “tradition.” This particular narrative of Christmas would become popularized particularly in the second-half of the century because it fit so neatly into dominant cultural trends of the Victorian era: a newfound recognition and celebration of the notion of “childhood” and an increasing emphasis on mass consumption. The merging of these two ideals could be no better embodied than in the figure of Santa Claus:
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| Santa was apparently more of a creepy opium-freak when Thomas Nast created him. |
As Protestants began increasingly to observe and celebrate the new holiday, some ministers began to actively promote gift-giving on Christmas (instead of the more traditional New Year's Day) in order to make the religious holiday more esteemed than its secular counterpart. But other religious leaders have continued, even into the present, to express ambivalence, if not outright hostility, toward a holiday that would be far more accurately described by Daniel Boorstin as "the national festival of consumption" than an actual religious observance. And, by and large, that is really what Christmas is: it is a seemingly unending period between Thanksgiving and New Year's in which Americans are turned into raving lunatics, foaming at the mouth while frantically seeking out cheap consumer goods in ostentatious worship of capitalism and Bing Crosby music:
We can mock these people all we want and, to an extent, rightly so. But it may be worth reflecting on our own complicity in perpetuating an atmosphere in which this behavior makes any sort of sense. Christmas, as it is generally practiced in postwar America, works to solidify our increasingly pathological obsession with filling some hollow void with "stuff." Regardless of the financial burden that may ensue, the measure of a parent becomes their ability to procure some stupid new fad in order to fulfill a desire that was largely imposed upon their children through effective advertising. And the myth of Santa helps neatly obfuscate the production of the goods we buy: have you ever stopped to think that “Santa's elves” are often actually just children working in slave labor conditions out of our sight?
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| Merry Christmas. |
Debbie Downer, maybe, but it might be something worth actually stopping to think about before we supposedly celebrate "Christian charity."
But let’s return momentarily to the “War on Christmas” for a moment. The phrase “Happy Holidays” is, most likely, just as old as the greeting “Merry Christmas,” and was certainly in widespread use by the 1950s—long before the age of multiculturalism, tolerance, and “political correctness.” Even still, as American society has diversified over the past sixty years, it has become increasingly difficult and problematic to assume a Christian audience. And other December celebrations (Hannukah and Kwanzaa) have gained increased recognition as holidays no more constructed, and no less American, than Christmas.
In short, “Happy Holidays” became both a phrase of inclusion and a method of marketing to a wider audience. It is most certainly not the denial of a “sacred” Christian holiday nor of some uniform American religious tradition. After all, the “War on Christmas” is much more of a longstanding American tradition than Christmas itself. If you want to say "Merry Christmas," go for it, but the persistent attempts to make it compulsory (or to criticize those who prefer something else) are not only ahistorical, they are part of a larger agenda to recreate an imagined version of an homogeneous “Christian America” that never really existed in the first place.
In this vein, Christopher Hitchens has famously, and I think convincingly, argued that Christmas turns the country into a quasi-totalitarian state:
"As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring."
I don’t want entirely to be a Grinch here (only mostly). Christmas can also be a good time of family, of celebration, of charity, and so on. But what does it say about modern society that we need to set out a particular time of the year (besieged with compulsory conspicuous consumption) in order to do all those things?
Linus can go to hell--Charlie Brown got it right, man:
There was a clip from the Daily Show in early July that I remember finding to be a particularly depressing testament to our current political climate. It ended with Diane Sawyer asking the audience whether Muslims should “be allowed to build their mosques in the neighborhoods of their choosing.” I remember asking how that could even be a question. The issue seemed to fade for a moment and then, suddenly, Obama has the temerity to defend Muslims by referencing (of all things!) the Bill of Rights and now it’s all the mass media can talk about (by the way a chunk of Pakistan the size of Italy is currently under water. Anyone? Bono? No?).
So why is this controversial at all? It’s worth noting, as Michael Calderone does, that the very phrase “Ground Zero Mosque” is a complete misnomer, and that its continued use by the mass media is a coup for the ideologues that turned a non-issue into a fabricated controversy. First, it is an Islamic community center that will house a mosque among many other services and functions. Second, it is two blocks away from Ground Zero, located on a neighborhood that already has mosques. So while the phrase “Ground Zero Mosque” evokes for some, I assume, a shrine to Osama bin Laden on the very ashes of the World Trade Center, reality hews closer to building a Muslim 92nd St Y in an old Burlington Coat Factory.
Still, arguments from prominent conservative politicians are as irate as they are completely non-sensical. Rudy Giuliani argued that “nobody would allow something like that at Pearl Harbor. Let’s have some respect for who died here and why they died here. Let’s not put this off on some kind of politically correct theory.” Now, one can only assume that the “politically correct theory” he is referencing here is liberalism, the proto-Marxist doctrine of bleeding-heart sissies like Jefferson, Madison, and Locke. But maybe he has a point: even though Pearl Harbor is conspicuously close to a sushi restaurant, a Buddhist temple, and a Toyota dealership, it’s not as though Americans could ever be so insensitive, right?
Newt Gingrich, that paragon of rational political discourse, argued against the Islamic center on Fox News by suggesting that “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.” There are obvious problems with this statement, and it is particularly horrifying for a former Speaker of the House to, in all seriousness, compare the world’s second largest religion to nazism. But even if both statements are completely absurd on their face, they both get at what appears to be the central idea in the controversy.
The most common argument appears to be that the Islamic Center is somehow “insensitive” to the families of the victims. But why would building a Muslim community center near Ground Zero be insensitive? No one ever seems to elaborate on this, and the claim doesn’t really make much sense unless you believe that Islam, writ large, caused 9/11 and that Muslims, by extension, are responsible and have no business congregating near Ground Zero. And that is precisely why the debate is at once so bizarre and so frightening--because it seems so rooted in this longstanding Western idea of an Islamic Manchurian Candidate wherein contact with a Qur'an will turn you into a mindless Islam-o-bot, roving the countryside lopping off the heads of the "infidels."
But I think the controversy has even larger implications on how Americans have begun to re-imagine their nation. Back during the heady days of the Cold War, Americans liked to advertise themselves to the rest of the world as a nation of good-natured, tolerant people with an aw-shucks, can-do attitude who extended freedom and liberty to everyone. Numerous people, of course, pointed out some small inconsistencies with this rhetoric. But, as recent historians have shown, this Cold War ideology helped force white Americans to confront their more overt legalized forms of racism; exchange them for a subtler more nuanced mélange of suppressed bigotry; and largely pretend that none of it had ever happened in the first place. Ever since, including even the Reagan years, that has been the image of America that we have conveyed both to ourselves and abroad: a place of liberty, diversity, and (begrudging) tolerance. It is an appealing image, even if the reality is often more complex and troubled. So this controversy is indicative, I think, of much larger changes occurring in the way America is currently imagined by a large segment of the population.
Even if they were literally building a mosque on Ground Zero, what could possibly be a better symbol of what America is supposed to represent—what we have been arguing for sixty years? Wouldn't that be a beautiful testament to what is good about liberal democracy? So perhaps the complete unpopularity of that vision suggests that this old vision of what America means is rapidly fading in favor of another, less pleasant, one.
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