I was driving home tonight, kind of zoning out, when I drove past the pale blue bunker that is the local tittie bar and noticed their sign out front; it said, “Watch the game with us.” Now I was left wondering, what kind of guy goes to a tittie bar to plop down $6.50 for a beer to watch a baseball game on a big old flat screen instead of going in to see…well, titties? It had to be that the owners are getting desperate to attract customers and thought that baseball would draw guys in to drink over priced beer when bare breasts would not. This is puzzling to me and I take it to be a metaphor for the sorry state of the economy in general.
In order for our economy to thrive, we all have to spend money – buy stuff. If the owners of a tittie bar have to resort to offering big screen broadcasts of Giants games, it seems a clear indication to me that our ability – or willingness – to spend money and buy stuff has hit a serious snag. Which calls into question the whole damn idea of a consumer based economy in the first place. When you stop and think about it, is it realistic that we all are just going to go on buying stuff endlessly? Won’t we all end up with a house full of extra stuff? How many flat screens can you really support with quality viewing? Is having one in each bathroom what’s required to pull us out of the slump?
Personally I’m not a shopper – I am more of a buyer. If I need something I’ll go get it. I’m not interested in driving around “shopping” for the best price – I am far more interested in actually acquiring whatever it is I need and taking it home and using it. And while I’m at it, I’ll try to buy a pretty good one so it will last a long time and I won’t need to buy another one. But now I realize this goes against everything that this great country stands for. If I get, say, a new couch, I can’t see going and getting another one - unless of course I get another house. But if 2/3 of the economy depends on us constantly buying stuff, there has to be more and more stuff to buy - it is almost my duty to go and buy another couch. This explains a couple of mysteries of modern America.
The first one is the size of the average American house. Depending on who you ask, the average American house is somewhere around 2,500 square feet, almost double the average size in 1970. And given the number of those 1970 houses still around, that means that when these guys build a new house these days, it is giant sized. Seriously; unless you’re going to have an upstairs and downstairs maid, what on earth do you want with a house that big? At the same time as mini-mansions became all the rage, the average American household has shrunk in size to a robust total of 2.7 people per house. What does this mean? It means you have to have a lot of stuff that you probably don’t really need to fill the damned things up. And with the average working American’s wage being basically flat for the better part of 20 years, it also means that this stuff is cheaper and mostly sold at Wal-Mart. And made in China…
This phenomenon also helps explain the mind numbing variety of crap that’s available to buy and nowhere more extravagantly and enthusiastically glorified than on late night TV, and especially on cable. There are more hucksters on late night cable TV than at every carnival midway that’s ever existed anywhere. My personal favorite is The Knife Show, where these two goofball guys sell 20, 30, even 50 knives at a time. I’m not talking about silverware – these are everything from little folding knives to Bowie knives that Sarah Pain might use to skin griz up on the tundra. It goes without saying that people buy them, probably to put in one of those big-ass new houses they bought. They better damn well not leave that one kid home alone by himself – they’ll probably find him playing mumbly-peg on their Brazilian rosewood floor.
It isn’t enough to have some cookware to make dinner; you need dedicated special pans to facilitate making meat loaf. We have stores specializing in freaking candles. Stores are overflowing with cheap clothes, sheets and towels, toys, electronic gadgets that all the nerdy analysts say make us more productive but at what? Updating your Facebook page? Is it really a boon to modern life to be able to tell your TV what channel you want to watch? Do I need a granite countertop that’s $100 a square foot? A six slice toaster that also make julienne fries? A food processor and a blender and a juicer and a Mix Master and a double oven? How many turkeys are you going to cook at Thanksgiving? What the hell are we really thankful for? A clap-on bedside lamp? Forty pairs of underware? Designer cat food? Scented toilet paper in packages of 20? $8.00 lattes?
I fear that we’ve come to the intractable edge of an economic cliff, where we need to continue to spend money that we don’t have for stuff we don’t need – or even want, in some cases - or we're all going down. The credit cards are all maxed out, our jobs suck, we’re all surrounded by idiots and we have an enormous house we don’t need and can’t pay for to boot. Christ…I’m going to the tittie bar to watch the game…
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