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Heaven's Mall |
America is a dark
half continent of grotesque notions made manifest, such as Scientology, the GOP
and the MacDonald�s �Big Bowl� meal. Americans seem to possess psychic flypaper
that attracts strange unsavory notions. Worse yet, we act upon them.
One notion we got
into our heads right after World War II was that each generation must live better than the previous one.
Not such a bad idea at the time, considering the number of folks in the
previous generation who grew up during the Depression and knew what it was like
to scratch with the chickens to survive. Consequently, the post-war generation
was more than satisfied with a 900-square foot home, a refrigerator, a
television, a car and presentable clothing -- any of which beat the hell out of
drafty outhouses and scarlet fever. Throw in the GI bill entitlement for vets
and you�re looking at a pretty nice package for the post-war generation who
brought us the baby boom and the two-ton, 17-foot 1954 Ford Customline 8 sedan.
Further excess was inescapable. As Cotton Mather might well have said, had he
the benefit of blasting down America�s new interstates with a Chesterfield
dangling from his lips and a cold Pabst in his pale Protestant claw, �BRING IT
ON!�
And so here we are
60 years after the Big War with an expanded American sense of middle class
entitlement. Ramcharged by extreme American capitalism and abetted by the
carnie barkers of Madison Avenue, everyone in the middle class now feels
entitled to the full-blown suburban lifestyle, every last digitized, low-fat,
high-density, energy-sucking bit of it. It all starts with a college degree.
Then in return for knocking down those hard earned Cs in university business or
technical schools, the children and grandchildren of people who thought a big
closet was one so deep you could reach your entire arm into it (�That sucker must be two feet deep Helen! Now
THAT�S storage!�) feel entitled to 3,000-4,000 square-foot houses. And
forget the lone old family wagon. The suburban middle class expects a car for
every family member, not to mention an investment portfolio, several household
cell phones, multiple television screens, (36
percent of buyers under age 35 rated having a �home theater� as important or
very important in their lives, according to National Association of Home
Builders), multiple baths, central air conditioning, DVD players,
washer-dryer combinations, laptops, iPods, answering machines, MP3 players,
patio furniture, outdoor gas barbecues, digital cameras,
car audio, security and navigational systems, microwave ovens, camcorders,
HDTV receivers, satellite systems, VCRs, Xbox controllers, water purifiers,
coffee/espresso maker combos, closet organizers, software, mountain bikes,
camping and hiking equipment, software . . .
Phew! I can
remember a time when my wife and I felt upscale because we bought a Sunbeam
blender -- one of those solid chrome plated babies with the heavy glass
34-ounce jar. Hoooweee! Invite the
neighbors. Banana smoothies for everybody! At any rate, Americans now have
entire rooms specialized by appliance such as entertainment systems, home
computers, and exercise equipment . . . It was not inevitable that we would
arrive at such a point. It took a helluva lot of public greed and capitalist
sucker-bait to make us the very spoiled and dangerous porcine folk we have
become, people whose lives under the Empire constitute the most extreme
material luxury and wealth the world has ever known, and the most oppressive
and nihilistic one from a global standpoint.
Still, it�s not
easy being an upscale suburban white middle-class American. There is a certain
amount of guilt involved. (Cut to 40million black Americans laughing
hysterically.) Waking up to suburban life�s true global cost is like finding
out that you have a hundred slaves in some unseen place on the other side of
the world making your clothing, working in your mines and harvesting your
Gevalia coffee. It�s more than a conundrum. It�s a moral confrontation with
real justice and values.
Jefferson had the
same conflict about his slave ownership. He never came to grips with it
either. Old Tom never freed that piece of side action, Sally Hemmings. Nor
are we about to demand freedom for the sweatshop slaves who turn endangered
nyatoh rainforest trees into Sears �classic and timeless patio furniture.� Who
is gonna turn down an Everyday Martha Stewart Stockbridge 5-Piece Bistro set
for a hundred and fifty bucks? �Fuck the
eco-kooks, what they need is a good bath and a character-building hitch in the
Marines, preferably in Iraq.� Of course we never say such things. We never
even think them. We don�t think at all when the in-laws are coming in from the
West Coast and we need that patio set for entertaining. The renunciation of
earthly goods is no easy thing if your father-in-law fought his way across
Italy in the Big War, then came home to work 70 hours a week building up a
business so you could �have it better than we had it,� and is damned proud of
the way his kids and grandkids are flourishing in what he considers a consumer
paradise of goods and opportunities. What�s to renounce? �Life is good here in
Brambleton. �Hell, why don�t you kids get a Hummer? You have the children�s
safety to think of, you know.� �Yes dad,
we thought about a Hummer, but we�re holding off for GM�s new Huey commuter
model helicopter gunship.�
Is this heaven, Paw? No, it�s Brambleton
The above dialogue
may be a parody, but Brambleton is a real place. And today I am passing through
it under the slowly arching mid-morning sun, which seems to be the only moving
thing today in this northern Virginia development. There is not a human or even
a car in sight down the long wide streets, just a crystallized silence occasionally
nicked by the chirp of an unseen sparrow. My rusted out 18-year-old Toyota
truck moving slowly along the streets, with its oxidized paint and a dead air
conditioner sticking up from its bed gives all the more impression of some post
apocalyptic scene from a not-quite-nameable film.
A distinct eeriness
pervades the sculpted green landscape and its too-bluish precast artificial
stone retaining walls and artlessly placed trees, as though it were a movie set
about to be torn down any minute, an illusion created for the moment. And in a
way it is. Even something as timeless as a tree becomes a prop in places like
Brambleton; they will be landfill in a few years because several feet of top
and subsoil were scraped during site preparation. Ultimately, Trees won�t
survive in what�s left, no matter how much mulch, fertilizer and watering is
done. But they look okay now in a place where the average house is six years
old, in a planned community with no communal memory, no sense of time�s
trajectory in which one can sense a future or a common weal, except through
changes in real estate prices. CNN Money
has called this place, 29 miles west of Washington D.C., one of the best places
to live in America.
The cost of living
in Loudon County�s Ashburn, of which Brambleton is but one of 60 such
communities, is 76 percent above the
national average, with houses running between $600,000 and $1.2 million. Which
is why I commute to work in Loudoun County from Winchester, for a $40,000 a
year job so I can live in a town that is only 41 percent above the national
average, according Forbes (or 2
percent below average if you believe
the local Chamber of Commerce.) Still, Forbes
calls Winchester one of the �best places,� despite that the median household
income is only $34,335, and 13.2 percent of the population is below the poverty
line. Evidently, Forbes and CNN Money give a helluva lot of weight
to the Washington Redskins and the contemplative benefits of sitting in snarled
traffic twice a day.
They may be right
about the latter. Sitting in jammed traffic ignoring chest pains offers me time
to speculate on the lives in these 4,000- and even 15,000-square-foot houses
with four- and even six-car garages. For example, often as not, one entire side
of these houses are windowless or nearly so. What the hell do they do in those
windowless spaces? Entertain themselves, surely, but how? I imagine all sorts
of strange sexual devices at play, though I�m sure it comes down simply to
darkened rooms with entertainment centers and big plasma TV screens, the kind
that have built-in cooling systems of their own. What the hell kind of
television needs its own cooling system?
�Holy fuck, it�s a plasma meltdown! Heather! Call 911! Get the kids into the
shelter!
Or I speculate on
the sheer number of shopping centers in Ashburn alone -- Old Ashburn
Square, Cameron Chase Village Center, Ashburn Farm Village Center, Ashburn Farm
Town Center, Ashburn Village Center, Broadlands Center, Truro Parish,
Broadlands Village Center, Ashburn Town Square, Loudoun Valley, Old Town
Shopping Center, University Center . . . and more under construction. Ashburn
has only 50,000 people for god's sake. And Loudoun County has dozens of other
malls besides Ashburn�s.
It�s a shopper�s dream all right. There is a Buddhist principle to the effect that the dream also dreams
the dreamer. And that�s what happened with the American Dream, which is why we
are all sleepwalking through this escalating nightmare of meaninglessness,
unable to shake ourselves awake.
How much shopping, unnecessary and meaningless, is humanly possible
under the spell of The American Dream? Obviously a lot. Enough at least to make it �one of America�s top
national pastimes.� According to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
-- whores to the last man, I can tell you from my magazine work experience, but
nevertheless pretty straight in their broader national reports -- 66 percent of
Americans see mere browsing as an important leisure experience and 73 percent
prefer to shop at shopping centers to catalogues, TV or online. Roper
recommends that stores further reinforce shopping as a leisure activity as a
hedge against the current economic uncertainty. Americans continue to be
optimistic about their futures -- almost three-quarters (73 percent) expressed
general optimism about their personal futures -- but optimism about the economy
is down slightly (off five points since February). This is the time to build
and strengthen relationships and loyalty, just in case the economy does
continue to weaken.�
In other words,
three-quarters of Americans actually believe that if the economy goes to tits
up they won�t be affected. So marketers and retailers are advised to keep
luring them in and blowing smoke up their asses as long as the wind holds out.
Middle-class
consumers will bend over for the smoke job. Face it. There seems to be no
defense whatsoever from shopping when it comes to the suburban middle class,
except the direst sort of poverty and bankruptcy. Now I consider myself a
socialist who tries to avoid needless consumption. �Yea, sure, buddy. And Godzilla is a vegetarian.� But if you are
living in America, even the implied material modesty of socialism will not save
you from shopping. Even foreign-born citizens raised in nobler, more ascetic
creeds go down under American consumerism like wheat before the scythe. Ever
watch a naturalized Indian matron with that black dot on her forehead when a
blue light special kicks in at K-Mart? �Set
of three Country Floral Kitchen Towels, just $5.99!� I�m here to tell you,
dear hearts, Mama Abja�s sari bursts into a furious orange blur and you�d best
get out of her way.
Not that I am any
better than Mama Abja. When I pass a music store with guitars in the window, I
need at least a set of strings, despite that I have 10 new sets at home. A sale
on men-with-big-beer-gut trousers at the mall can also nail me. Like the folks
in Brambletom, I�m fucked, though on a smaller budget. This desire to buy
stuff, just about any kind of stuff, seems to be universal. Last spring I watched
a Mayan woman in full native costume at a Belizean flea market buy a used Bun
and Thigh Max, doubtlessly an American castoff. Whatever did she need that for? She packs those baskets around
on her head all day, chops wood or totes kerosene to cook every damned tortilla
her family eats, surely walks a few miles a day in the course of village work
life. And she needs a Thigh Max?� The detritus of American junk capitalism
seems to be coming down just about everywhere on the planet.
All of this has
reshaped America politically. For starters, these tribes of the consumer
savannah lands are never liberals, regardless of their claimed political
allegiances. Certainly not here alongside Washington, DC, at the heart of
power, influence, financial regulation, lawmaking and the defense contracting
business. They have benefited immensely from the �financializing� and
militarization of our economy. These are the winners of the national
�lifestyle� game, and they will vote for whoever looks most likely to keep raw materials
and goods flowing from the far-flung corners of the Empire, even if it must be
done at gunpoint (which is known as establishing democracy around the world).
They don�t need no steenking global sheriffs to preserve social justice or
anything else. They need a �strong leader� who will spread democracy and
protect the American Lifestyle. As George Bush has said repeatedly, �the
American lifestyle is not negotiable.� We might add that neither is global
warming. Having the highest per capita number of bathrooms on the planet will
not compensate for the Atlantic Ocean creeping into the hollers of Kentucky.
Just a hunch.
The politics of the comfort zone
Meanwhile, what we
have stretching from this computer screen all the way to Washington, D.C,. are
a couple million people, citizens, clustered like ticks on the spotless
suburban belly of an allegedly fat republic. Strangers in the lost cul de sac
squinting at one another briefly as they get into their cars. In the
super-burbs there are no places where residents encounter people unlike
themselves, or encounter people at all once the garage door has dropped shut.
Only that inside the fuck boxes and the roadside world seen during miserable
commutes to DC or The Beltway �where the money is.� For the most affluent here,
that commute will soon be made easier by the installation of �Lexus Lanes,� in
which the highest rollers can pay a toll and escape being in the same lane with
anonymous me and my rusted out truck with the dead window-style air conditioner
bouncing in the bed.
I say anonymous
because, generally speaking, there is no way I can meet them without
significant extra effort (which I suspect is how they prefer it.) Even if I go
to them, there are no civic or public spaces where we are likely to encounter one
another. Not even in passing on a sidewalk because there are no sidewalks out
there in the beautiful system. There is no actual town center to these places,
although most retain some vestige of the community they engulfed, a gas
station, a hardware store, and here in Virginia there is usually an old feed
store, a barn or two, refurbished as businesses, so they can display
�quaintness� to visitors. But moreover there are just the malls and schools
supported by money beyond the comprehension of core urban dwellers, schools
with a lacrosse club, rowing, tenth grade class trips to France and Italy . . .
These people do not
consider themselves rich, or their families particularly elite. Yet their kids,
after finishing expensive educations, will eventually take the reins of the
administrative class, university deans, government bureaucrats, financial
mangers, publishing and electronic media people, etc. Then they will continue
to put the schnickle to the other four-fifths of Americans, not to mention the
world, without flinching. And they will continue to consider themselves quite
ordinary Americans, and expect their children to do even better.
Though it is
nowhere near the middle demographically, this is the true middle-class in
America, the group that meets the criteria we are trained to associate with the
term �middle-class.� In truth they only represent about 10 percent of the
population. Maaaaybe 15 percent. The dangerous 15 percent in my opinion. Not
that they ever ask me. Or you dear, reader. The typical progressive person
reading this is, most likely to be, let us say, a schoolteacher or a computer
programmer, someone of similar stripe. The planetary and societal criminality
of the three-quarter million dollar fuck-box crowd are not your fault. Or mine.
Not entirely
anyway. But if we were talking about American consumerism and its global
criminality, then you and I get to hold at least one end of the turd. Right
now, I am sitting at the keyboard clad in only in my underwear and a $60 Eddie
Bauer fishing vest doubtlessly made with sweatshop labor, while my usually
shaggy dog, Bingo, sports his $50 summer haircut as he pants patiently
alongside me in a 2,600-square-foot house, occupied by only two people. And
here I am talking to you about consumption while the cost of Bingo�s haircut
alone would buy one family a month�s groceries on half of the planet. I never
said I was a good example of what I blather about (or a pretty sight while
writing.) The best defense I can muster is that if you live inside the Empire
there is no escaping the Empire�s rules of pay to play.
Early next year,
spirits willing, I will be able to extract myself from the Empire -- or the
worst of it anyway -- without losing a wife and a family in the process. But
for now, it�s me and Bingo sitting here doing the best we can until then. Time
is required for love and marriage to triumph over consumer capitalism, so
deeply has it penetrated all our lives so deeply, both here on my ancient
street in Winchester and out there in the super-suburbs. Things must be worked
out ever so carefully to escape the system�s exquisite blackmail of its own
people.
But you promised us blackmail too
American extreme
capitalism�s blackmail is based upon basic human need -- especially health
care. For example, my wife is on my employer�s insurance. She works for a local
public library which grants insurance, even crappy insurance, only to a select
few because the library never knows when its funds may be cut now that the need
for depleted uranium artillery shells has superceded the need for children�s
books in the national scheme of things. So its board, in all its wisdom, keeps
costs so close to the bone the marrow shows. That means employees with no
benefits or insurance. Thus, I must keep my job creating military magazines --
the pervasive symmetry of a military-industrial consumer-based economy never
ceases to amaze me -- so we can both have insurance, even though I could give a
damn about insurance for myself, despite my lousy health. The day-to-day consequences
of cooperating with the beautiful system�s insurance-as-blackmail racket are
staggering, and most surprisingly, lead to increasingly poorer health. It�s
quite literally killing me so I can have the insurance that is supposed to keep
me healthy. Smothering me to death, actually. It�s like this:
It is a Tuesday in
July and I am driving to work, down, down past the sprawling geometry of the DC
exurbs. At 7:30 AM the thermometer has already hit 80 degrees on a code orange
air alert day -- meaning the polluted air is especially dangerous to those with
breathing disorders. I gasp for breath most of the hour-long commute because I
have COPD, cardio obstructive pulmonary disease. I drift off the road onto the
gravel or into the next lane at 60-70 miles per hour at least twice a week. A word to the wise: If you ever see a 1988
red Toyota truck coming your way on VA route 7 some morning, PULL OVER INTO THE
DITCH! Jump the median strip if you have to, because whatever you do will be
safer than being within a hundred yards of that truck and me. Nevertheless
I have always managed to arrive at work in one piece to drag myself out of the
truck, then try to hit the office with a fake spring in my step and a smile
that says: �Godammit y'all! I am deliriously happy to be here!� And I am. Hell
I survived another commute didn�t I? And so the old guy blanks at his workstation,
sucks on his rescue inhaler, and pushes through another day in the system.
At home he wheezes
and bitches and the family shows sympathy for the struggle, but are terrified
of the possibility of the old guy abandoning the struggle. Better to die early
with insurance than die happy and probably healthier without it. Family and
even good friends are so conditioned they will literally watch you die piecemeal
before their eyes, feel for your misery, confident that the beautiful system
will provide whatever is needed when you fall off the crapper some morning with
congestive heart failure. �Be glad you have insurance. COPD is expensive.� And
every morning you get up alive is another morning to reassure themselves, �See,
the old guy is still here. It can�t be that bad, can it?� I have come to
realize they are as helpless as me to change the system. What else could they
say? And so life goes on. And the carpets need shampooing and the house
painters are coming tomorrow and the McCabes want to have drinks after work on
Friday. The same obliviousness and denial maintaining Brambleton�s equilibrium
operates here too, maintaining the consumer state�s productive momentum.
With a couple
drinks in me, I often talk about how the Empire�s beautiful system is not only
killing me, but a skillion others across the globe we don�t even see. And I
talk about simply leaving, going someplace to write and rot. Just leave like so
many others have done of late. And they look around and see that there are
millions of Americans still here, people just like themselves, and the think to
themselves, �Things can�t be as bad as Joe makes them out to be.� What they
don�t see is the couple million Americans who had sense enough to flee the
system as its shadow grew increasingly ominous, not to mention unworkably
expensive. My best friend Ken in France says, �Joe, your photographs look so
unhealthy. You are killing yourself for a house payment.� And he�s right. But
what does a man do? Just run off? Leave the wife holding the bag for the bills
and the dogs hopelessly waiting to jump on the bed with me when I get home from
work?
Ah yes, home from
work. At last. Again. Can�t catch even half a breath. No air anywhere,
especially in an old non-central air-conditioned house. As always, the mail is
piled on the kitchen table, and in it is a letter from the Democratic Party
announcing that they are putting the heat on the administration. I stumble upstairs
and turn on the bedroom window-unit air-conditioner, suddenly struck by the
thought that even in Brambleton there must be similarly blackmailed
husbands/fathers coming home in the same sad shape, equally aware of the global
injustice involved in their lifestyle, yet equally cowed by the brutal
consequences of deviating from the system�s prescribed order. And I fall upon
the bed to watch an old CSI . . . to
watch Catherine Willows step within the yellow crime scene tape marking the
sacred spot from which the ritual of our collective revenge for some
make-believe injustice will proceed . . . And the cool air blows across the
bed, and Bingo is licking my fingers and for a few moments at least, I am
suffered up unto the sheer anesthetic bliss of the beauty of our system.
Copyright 2006 Joe Bageant
Joe Bageant is the
author of a forthcoming book from Random House Crown about working class
America, scheduled for Spring 2007 release. A complete archive of his online
work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class
may be found at www.joebageant.com. Feel
free to contact him at: joebageant@joebageant.com.