Black (Friday) Sheep
‘Twas the day after T-day, and all through the land,
The people were shopping for every known brand.
Commercials that blared all week long on TV
And ads in the papers enticed them to see
Those deep-deep discounts and bargains they’d get
When the stores opened – while the dew was still wet,
At seven – no six! – no five! ‘neath parking lot lights.
You’d best get there early or camp overnight.
So, stuffed with turkey, potatoes and pies,
They hit Circuit City for great midnight buys.
By three in the morning, they must leave that store
To line up at Target or K-Mart by four.
Those discounters open at six o’clock sharp,
And only the early-birds get the big carts.
Employee shills (“We’re off work today.”)
Stand first in line, and have much to say:
“Only one set of the three sets of doors
Will be opened at six, so if you want to score
That TV or toaster or child’s rocking horse,
Get in line, keep your place, ‘cause the guards will enforce
The order in which all the shoppers arrive.”
Late-comers who “bump” just may not survive.
Weary waiters will turn upon late-sleeping fools
And call on the guards to enforce all the rules.
But if you’re compliant and stay in the line,
That pre-dawn bargain will make you feel fine.
Never mind that it costs the exact same at noon,
Or even next week. For you know that quite soon
The marketing masters, obeyed, let you sleep
’Til they herd you again like dumb, docile sheep.
I confess. I attempted shopping on Black Friday. I hadn’t shopped on the Friday after Thanksgiving for more than a decade. Completing all my holiday shopping before I eat the turkey is one of the things I’m always thankful for. I am oblivious to the onslaught of marketing that accosts us in every medium. Okay, not oblivious. I hate it. Actively. I cannot imagine many people succumbing to its blatant chicanery. I believed that the annual news coverage of dazed but earnest shoppers huddling in the cold at bizarre hours awaiting a store opening was vastly exaggerated by the media cynically serving the interests of its advertisers. Apparently my imagination was misinformed.
In the wee hours of this Black Friday, I did not set out to shop. I set out for a 7:00 AM cup of coffee with a nearby girlfriend at the local Panera. I knew there would be a Target on the way, and that it would have on sale a pragmatic little item I’d been meaning to get for myself – a small George Foreman grill. So I planned a little stop along the way to Panera. I arrived at 5:40, figuring I’d pop into Target at 6:00 when the store opened, after the (imagined) smallish clusters of very-early risers waiting at the three sets of doors made their well-deserved and too-long-awaited entrance. I would grab my little grill, and probably have to wait in a longish line to check out, and still be at Panera by 7:00.
Couldn’t do it. It wasn’t the long checkout line. I never got that far. I never got into the store. The problem – visceral terror at being in a herd of sheep as mindless as the people I found lined up outside.
Snapshot: One long line, a queue of some 200 people (when I arrived, but it grew as I watched) all leading to one single set of doors. This was dehumanizing crowd-control reminiscent of Disney theme parks without the roped-off switch-back model, which would at least have allowed people to huddle for warmth. In light of last year’s stories of violence against line-jumpers, though, maybe it was simply prudent management.
I never meant to stand in line. I brought a banana and a bottle of water, which I planned to enjoy while sitting in my car until the long-waiting crowd entered. But the vision of the extreme conga line made me curious. The weather was not too cold, so I strolled the line with my banana and my bottle, chatting with folks. Big mistake.
First, I tossed my banana peel in the nearest trash can, which happened to be by the only set of doors from which the line of shoppers snaked out into the wilds of the parking lot. There, as I was strolling away (away from the trash can and away from the sacred door to the temple of Mammon), I was verbally accosted by the (“off-duty”) employees who had been in line since 4:00 AM to nail their bargains. They directed me pointedly to the end of the line. “Yeh, yeh, thanks, I get it. What’d you want me to do? Toss the peel on the ground here where y’all would slip on it?”
On my meander along the line, I noticed the happily chatting groups of people who’d been waiting who-knew-how-long, and whose feet must be hurting. I thought, gee, this is so sweet – people getting along, talking with strangers sharing an experience, with a common goal. There’s something innocently intimate about queueing up with strangers in the dark of very early morning.
I asked one lone, petite woman near the front of the line how long she’d been there. Oh, only about 20 minutes, she said. She had asked the employees at the very front what the deal was with the line going to only one door when there were three – two at opposite ends of the front of the building, and one at the side by the garden department. She wasn’t exactly in the line, more of an out-lier like me, but she wasn’t walking away from the line, either. I asked her what she was going to do. “I’ll wait ‘til they’re all in before I go in. I only want a couple of things I can carry in my arms. Don’t need a cart.” I wished her “happy shopping” and wandered on along the line, eavesdropping on conversations.
Most people were telling each other what they were hoping to buy. No surprises – toys for kids, clothes, home appliances. Nobody else mentioned my small grill. That gave me confidence. Who gives a two-burger grill for Christmas?
Then I started asking people how early they’d arrived – 4:30 AM, to be about 50 people back in the line – and why they did that. I mean, Black Friday is infamous for being frustrating to shop in, dangerous to drive in, and not particularly bargain-rich compared to prices that would be offered during the weeks before Christmas.
One well-dressed, merry-faced woman’s response typified the mentality: “Oh, just for the excitement.” Okey-dokey, then. I just could not bring myself to ask her how excited she felt after standing in the cold and dark for an hour and a half. It’s one thing to be all Snidely Whiplash when I write about these sheeple, but I simply could be the Grinch who stole her Christmas right in her face. So I wished her a happy holiday as I noted the slightly unfocused eyes that looked back into mine. Not glazed, exactly, but definitely not focused on present reality. She must have been listening to some very exciting voices in her head where the exciting images were cavorting, in a state of shopping frenzy and glee.
An altered state. That’s what I observed in the rest of the folks I chatted with, once I knew what I was looking at. Oh, they weren’t all in the same state, but they weren’t in the here and now, being who they usually are. No. I wouldn’t call it a state of excitement, but it was some state of fantasy.
There was a recently retired man in a windbreaker and shorts and tennis shoes, directing the latest-arriving stragglers to the (ever farther) end of the line. “End of the line’s over there,” he shouted, flinging his arm in the right direction, “You have to go to the end.” I asked him if he was an employee with an official role this morning. No, “I just like doing it.” Maybe he’d been a policeman, and enjoyed directing traffic when the stop-lights were out. With these folks, the lights were definitely out.
As I passed him, the petite woman who had been hanging out not-quite-in-line near the door caught up with me. “The employees called the security guard on me,” she reported. “They pointed me out. The guard towered up over me and told me to go to the end of the line. I wasn’t going to go in until everybody in line had gone in, I just didn’t want to walk all the way out there just to walk all the way back to the door.” And, shaking her head, off she went to the very end of the line.
As I worked my way farther and farther into the more recent arrivals, people who had been standing an hour or less, I found less conversation and more glazed eyes. They were definitely “in line” physically, but their brains stared out of their eyes into the middle distance – maybe seeking the brightness of the parking lot lights to keep themselves awake. I’ll never know. Their auto-pilot demeanor forbade interruption; one does not want to startle the living dead.
Among the very latest arrivals, there was some spark of active cognition. These folks seemed less amused to be stuck far back in a single line, but figured they were there, might as well stay and get what they came for. They were resigned to the situation, but at least they could verbalize what it was.
Then I looked from the end all the way along the line to the front. I remembered that I’d just driven by a pasture where the cattle were stirring, about to start their grassy breakfast, seeking exactly what they needed precisely when they needed it. No ads could persuade them to do otherwise. These cattle wouldn’t be herded until the slaughter, but they would have no previous experience of that hazard to advise them of the danger – no freezing throngs immortalized on film during last season’s final march to the killing ground. The herd I was looking at in the Target parking lot had no such excuse.
Not that retail marketing would kill them, except, from what I’d observed, spiritually. Just shear them seasonally. Desensitize and deaden them bit by bit. So my herd wasn’t cattle, but sheep – marginally aware, but not really thinking beasts. Not oblivious to the ploys convincing them of this “excitement,” but acquiescing to it. Who knew what this herd might do if prodded just so – unthinking, innocent, but stampeding with sharp hooves all the same.
Not a crowd I wanted to share a store with. This is Florida, after all – a state with its own category of weirdness on Fark.com, where the Florida category has more entries than the “dumbass” category. I didn’t want my friends and relatives seeing me among the terrified (or deceased) in the morning news coverage of a “45-calibre stand-off among over-excited shoppers at SuperTarget.” That’s not my idea of excitement.
I finished my water walking back to my car. It was 5:55. I arrived early at Panera, and had a cup of coffee before my friend arrived. I read the paper – mercifully uncluttered by the previous few days’ volume of ads. No need, today. The sheep were already in the shearing sheds. Baaa! Or, as Scrooge and I would say, “Bah!”
© Kate Diamond 2006
Girls’ Rules
The November 2006 election opened the door for a sea-change in United States history. It was more than a referendum on the war in Iraq. It was a referendum on all the wrongs the Iraq war stands for – from lies about weapons of mass destruction to a strategy of mass deception.
This election was a referendum on sloppy intelligence work, inter-agency turf wars, political over-reaching, lies to Congress and the people (lies nearing the magnitude of fraud, serving agendas conceived before any excuse for action toward them occurred), and unethical behavior ranging from the torture of prisoners to the exorbitant prices paid for Haliburton’s goods and services. Let’s not forget the egregiously exorbitant price paid in the lives and limbs of soldiers and innocent civilians in the name of security from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
The electorate taught our political parties—both of them—a lesson. That lesson is change and accountability for it. It’s a lesson of hope and of trust, but hope that must be fulfilled and trust that must be earned. One of the most important results of this election is the historic accession of a female representative to the post of Speaker of the House.
That’s how much we as a people see the need for change. We have played by boys’ rules long enough. Now the girls are not only at the table, we’re closer to the head of it. We shall raise the level of discourse. We shall reach achievable security and economic goals through effective strategies. And we shall burn no bras to do it.
That 1960’s bra burning myth was always just that, myth and metaphor: “Set ‘the girls’ free.” It’s been a long, complex climb, setting the girls free, and the climb’s not done yet. We have sheer north faces to scale and glacier fields to traverse before planting the Chickland flag on the peaks we will summit.
Then we’ll have to mark the trail clearly for others to follow and defend it against the kudzu-like encroachment of the persistent Oldboysland parties. But they have long had their own trails to the summit, and they can (and will) continue to use them. The only difference will be that the Chicklanders will not ever give up our paths to those same summits – and a few new peaks the Oldboyslanders never thought of. Not to worry, though; we’ll share the view.
Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker of the House. During their campaigns, Republicans held that possibility as an unimaginable horror which—along with the threat of a Democrat-led abandonment of the War on Terrorism—would dishonor Our Great Nation. Really? More than initiating an unjustified war did? More than torture of prisoners did? More than defrauding Congress and the electorate into sending our soldiers to die and spending our wealth for nothing good or necessary while enriching politically well-connected companies did? Being led again by the party that achieved our last balanced budget would be worse than that?
Most people aren’t that good at math and logic. The Republican marketing machine was counting on that and also on the fascist-conservative voting block’s deeply subconscious fear of powerful women. I mean, you suppress a group for your own advantage all your life, con them into believing that it’s for their own good, keep them in the dark about how you’re really running the world – and then when somebody turns the lights on, and they see how the world really can be for them, well, the payback should scare you.
I don’t know what’s so surprising about a woman being Speaker of the House. Every woman I know is the primary speaker of her house. Men always complain that we speak too much. Recent studies show that we use more words per day than men do. (Not counting, I’m sure, the many subtle meanings of the common male locutions “Humma-humma,” “Hoo-wah,” and “Oh, baby!”) So a woman becoming The Speaker makes sense in a biology-is-destiny kind of way.
I hope that the first woman Speaker will redeem us Baby Boomers from the embarrassments we have suffered because of the compulsions and excesses of the first two (male) Presidents of our generation. I hope she sets a precedent for the next (and probably last) President of our generation, if the next generation doesn’t pre-empt our last hurrah. Nancy Pelosi’s statements since the elections have established a strong foundation for those hopes – pragmatic, realistic, reasonable, open-minded. I’m pretty sure she can pronounce “nuclear” and construct a coherent sentence.
Thus, she may also be able to help structure a coherent approach to economic and military recovery. Although Pelosi represents that hotbed of liberalism, San Francisco, she will definitely lead no flag burnings nor bra burnings. We original uppity women of the 1960’s now need our bras too much to burn the damn things. But we don’t love them; they’re uncomfortable. Maybe, along with better oversight of big pharma and big insurance, we can pass some regulations about fit and comfort on the bra manufacturing industry. We might fund research into up-lifting technologies – something solar-powered, perhaps bio-engineered and anti-gravity.
It’s time to raise the, um, standards. Let’s hear it for the girls!
© Kate Diamond 2006
Slave to Technology
We’ve come a long way from our deliverance from the washtub and board, to the washing machine with it hand-crank wringer, to the automatic washer and dryer. Now, all we have to worry about is upgrading to the most water- and energy-efficient, front-loading … oh, and colorful and sleek and LCD-screened, and perched atop a handy storage drawer-ed … models. All three most familiar brands of which (Maytag, Kenmore, and Whirlpool) are all actually made by Whirlpool. Only LG is a separate company. But sure as Bank of America has bought MBNA, LG will be subsumed by its industry’s lava flow of acquisition. But what do we care, as long as our lives are made easier and we have more time for greater productivity and recreation of higher orders?
Technology has also delivered us from the horse and carriage to horsepower and highways. We have been freed from the manual shift to the automatic, from analog AM radio to digital AM/FM and satellite radio, with random-play multi-disc CD systems. We no longer have to worry about who might rustle our horses, and what might spook the horse into throwing us as we ride. Automotive security systems first tell passersby to step away from the car and then Lojack their whereabouts to the police after the Grand Theft Auto wiseguy outsmarts the alarm. In the “protect us from ourselves” department, our cars have gone from the annoying clang to the gentle tone to the dulcet voice warning us that a seatbelt is unfastened or a door ajar.
Now, Lexus can parallel park itself – a chore I was ready to be freed from, say, 40 years ago. Now that I've finally mastered that skill, what I need is for the car to unload the groceries from the trunk and shlep them to the kitchen. But I guess life-long suburbanites who have never parked anywhere but mall lots will need this service when they regentrify hip new urban environments (to walk to theaters, shopping and restaurants, as the ads bray) after their offspring leave the nest. I wonder what the gentle auto-voice will tell the driver when the car won’t fit into the chosen spot. For men: “Sorry, you’re just too big to fit. Let’s go find something that can take all of you.” For women: “Honey, you know you deserve more space than this puny little thing.” Now, there’s a technology that we could become slaves to. And you know the auto industry marketing gurus will give us whatever will appeal to our deepest psychological needs (or fantasies), the ones we don’t admit into our conscious awareness. The gentle voice will not say, "Dummy! Get a Prius or a MiniCooper for in-town. And save some resources by driving it everywhere else, too."
But we don’t mind. As long as our lives are easier and we feel better about ourselves, we don’t mind having fewer real choices. Choices take so much time, make us think so hard. So we pay a bit more because there’s less competition among manufacturers. Among banks. Hey, efficiencies of scale make things both better and cheaper for us, right? Everybody says so. Yeah, and more than 60% of Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was allied with Osama bin Laden around the time we invaded Iraq.
I’m not some Luddite who wants to reject technological conveniences. I just want to keep the context in mind. What do the providers of those conveniences know about us that lead them to offer particular subtleties instead of others? What needs (or fantasies) for prestige and self-esteem are they counting on – and addicting us to their brand of satisfaction thereof? And what more do they hope to profit from them?
It’s one thing to want more freedom from drudgery in order to apply our talents and intellect to higher order goals. But it’s a different, and a much worse, thing to let ourselves be turned into whatever consumer creatures the marketers work so hard to carve us into. We don’t know their full agendas, we can only be sure those agendas extend beyond the juicy tidbit on the hook dangling in front of us at the moment.
The only agendas, goals and missions we can know are our own. And we’d better be very clear about those. Can you visualize and verbalize yours, and the steps to achieve them, clearly enough to evaluate every tempting toy pushed at you with the question, “Does this serve my goals?” And then choose the ones that serve you more than you serve them.
© Kate Diamond 2006
