Holiday
Season Hypocrisy
By
Stephen Lendman
20 December,
2007
Countercurrents.org
Christmas
is observed December 25 by Christians and others celebrating the spirit
of the season while for those of the Eastern Orthodox faith the holiday
falls on January 7. It's to honor the birth of Jesus Christ even though
it's widely acknowledged not to be his birthday. Along with its religious
significance, the season is also for other celebratory events like winter
festivals, parties, family get-togethers and Kwanzaa from December 26
- January 1 for Africans Americans to reconnect to their cultural and
historical heritage. Jews as well celebrate the season with the Hanukkah
Festival of Lights. It's to commemorate their struggle for survival,
but for Jewish children it's their Christmas with gifts from parents
like their Christian friends get.
Christmas
is also the time when the national obsession to shop and consume reaches
its zenith. It traditionally begins the day after Thanksgiving, runs
through Christmas eve, and after the holiday continues into January
with plenty of extra buying power from holiday gift cards, year-end
bonuses and other resources gotten or borrowed. It's for everything
people never knew they wanted until creative advertising wizardry made
their lives incomplete without them.
Perhaps this
single dominant trait characterizes American culture more than any other.
It's a variant of the kind of consumerism economist/sociologist Thorstein
Veblen called "conspicuous" in his 1899 book "The Theory
of the Leisure Class." F. Scott Fitzgerald explained that "the
very rich....are different from you and me." Veblen wrote about
their spending habits and coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption."
Today, it's called "keeping up with the Joneses" or consumerism,
and it's practiced by status-seeking people obsessed with personal gratification.
But not just by the rich. Most people, except the poor, do it and to
excess.
The term
"consumption" originated hundreds of years ago. Then, it referred
to infectious tuberculosis or TB. But its original meaning is relevant
in today's acquisitive society where consuming for essentials is worlds
apart from gluttonous consumerism. This variant refers to overindulgent
shopping and spending for things people buy irrespective of need but
not without consequences for themselves and society.
Untreated
TB, or consumption, consumes its victims in a slow, painful death. Consumerism
mimics it with it's similarly harmful fallout: ecological destruction;
unhealthy and unsafe consumer products; corporate empowerment; profits
pursued over people; militarism and foreign wars; health, education
and other essential needs neglected; and democratic decay in a corporatist
state disdaining the public interest.
People take
pride saying "when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping"
- but not without consequences. The personal fallout is over-indebtedness
millions can't handle in the wake of unexpected medical emergencies
or loss of employment. The toll: since the early 1980s one in seven
families forced into bankruptcy, over 2 million in 2005 alone (30% above
2004), and millions more ahead from unchecked borrow and binge-spending
made worse by the subprime crisis.
Overindulgent
spending is what clinicians call an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
At its worst, it's pathologically characterized by obsessive, repetitive
thoughts that need compulsive tasks and rituals to relieve. For addicted
consumers, it's an obsession to shop and spend and a compulsion to buy
and accumulate. In excess, it's clinically pathological and destructive
when it causes bankruptcy.
In America
and the West, tens of millions of otherwise normal people shop excessively
for what they never knew they wanted until Madison Avenue mind manipulators
convinced them. Economist Paul Baran described the process as making
us "want what we don't need (all unessential consumer goods and
services) and not....what we do (good health care, education, clean
air and water, safe food, and good government providing essential services)."
Future insolvency
is risked, but few consider the possibility until it's too late. It's
worst at Christmas when it becomes a pathological orgy of frenzied spending
dismissively called getting into the holiday spirit. Maybe for merchants,
but not when bills come due with growing millions unable to pay them
or needing more debt to delay for later what they can't handle now.
Institutionalized
consumerism also plays into social control. It's empowered when people
are focused on bread and circus distractions that include the sights
and sounds of the season. Media theorist Neil Postman once called Americans
the most over-entertained and under-informed people in the world and
wrote about it in books like "Amusing Ourselves to Death."
Attracted to self-gratification and its reinforcing images, they're
diverted from what matters most - challenging wars of aggression, loss
of civil liberties and human rights, violations of law, gutted social
services, environmental harm, and policies benefitting the privileged
at the expense of beneficial social change.
Consumerism
also lets corporate power prosper and grow. It feeds unfettered capitalism
and out-of-control greed. It helps direct our tax dollars to a militarized
state instead of going for essential social needs. It diverts the national
wealth to an imperial juggernaut that consumers finance through overindulgence.
The more we shop, the stronger it gets and is better able to exploit
new markets, resources and cheap labor at the expense of the more expensive
kind at home whose future consumption is endangered by today's self-gratifying
excesses.
Adam Smith
was capitalism's ideological godfather who was also concerned about
concentrated wealth and wrote about it in "The Wealth of Nations."
He explained an "invisible hand" of unseen forces worked best
in a free market with many small businesses competing locally against
each other. He contrasted them with concentrated mercantilism and wrote
about the "merchants and manufacturers" who used their power
to wreak "dreadful misfortunes" and grave injustices on the
vast majority of people using the British East India Company as a case
study example.
Today's monopoly
capitalism would have been unimaginable in his day, but he'd recognize
it. He wrote that throughout history we find the wreckage of the "vile
maxim of the masters of mankind....All for ourselves and nothing for
other people....unless government takes pains to prevent" this
outcome. No invisible hand works in manipulated markets where governments
sanction Smith's "vile maxim," and the greater good is nowhere
in sight. Under neoliberal rules, capital wins, people lose, and consumerism
makes things worse. It's most extreme at Christmas when shopping trumps
the holiday's meaning and seasonal sights and sounds drown out everything
else.
The toll
is tragic. Whatever Christmas was, it no longer is, and our behavior
corrupts it and the spirit of the man it honors. He spread it in deeds
and teachings from his Sermon on the Mount and message to "turn
the other cheek," love thy neighbor, not kill, and do unto others
as you'd want them doing to you. The consumerist ethic glorifies receiving,
not giving; condoning predatory capitalism and ignoring its harm; neglecting
the greater good; sanctifying overindulgence while forgetting those
most in need throughout the year. In the spirit of the season, thoughts
should be on helping others and giving thanks. In an unfettered marketplace,
it's impossible.
It's a sad
testimony to a society obsessed with greed and gratification at the
expense of beneficial social change. At Christmas, it defiles the holiday
spirit and forgets the needy. For them, Christmas is "Bah Humbug,"
and Santa Scrooge - all take and no give.
New
Year's Day
New Year's
day is one week after Christmas and concludes the long holiday season.
It starts after Thanksgiving, reaches a climax around Christmas, ebbs
for a day and builds again for a final celebratory new year's welcome
with more overindulgent eating, drinking, partying, and binge-shopping
for nonessentials.
The new year
is also a traditional time for resolutions that include some with merit
like losing weight, quitting smoking and getting fit. Most are forgotten,
and those most important never made: working for peace, good will toward
others, loving they neighbor, respecting everyone, and treating people
as we want to be treated in a society of caring and sharing with equity
and justice for all. Wouldn't that be a wonderful resolution for the
new year. Long ago in simpler times before the old world became America,
it was that way. It can be again, but wishing won't make it so.
Stephen
Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].
Also visit
his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen
to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com
Mondays at noon US Central time.
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