ginny t. 9/5: confessions of a material girl

Fall is fast approaching, and that means I've got to get ready. It means that I’ve got to go to White Barn Candle (not to be confused with Yankee Candle Co., which is where I get my “Jack Frost” candles at Christmastime) and stock-up on Macintosh Apple and Carmel scented candles. It means that I’ll be trolling the isles at Target (and Pier 1 and Crate & Barrel) looking for a big leafy orange and gold wreath to bedeck my front door. It means that I might just break down and get those Halloween themed placemats for my dining room table that I saw at Home Goods (but then, I’d have to get the Thanksgiving ones, and then the Christmas ones, too...it’s a slippery slope, I tell you!) Two hundred years ago, many Americans spent the autumn months preparing for a long winter by canning foods, smoking meats and shoring up the insulation on their homes. In 2006, we accessorize. Do I need my house to smell like a candy apple and look like a Martha Stewart bomb went off? No, not really. But will I go out and buy that stuff anyway? You bet. Why? Because I am a consumer. That’s what I do; that’s what we all do.

Our entire society is organized around what Jameson calls a “frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods.” Look around, and you’ll see that our world is full of stuff. I live in Longwood and within a 10 mile radius from my house, there are at least two malls, countless shopping plazas, grocery stores, and “Super-centers,” all conveniently located for my shopping pleasure. I can’t deny that I am an active participant in our ravenous consumer culture; hell, planned obsolescence pays my bills! As a technician at Hummer of Orlando, my husband’s paycheck thrives on people obsessed with the “new and improved." He sees people every day spending thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of dollars on accessories to bling out their $50,000+ Hummers.

While I participate, and even prosper, in this consumer culture, I can’t silence the little voice of panic in my head. If our economy is based on a cycle of production and consumption, what’s going to happen if we ever lose the ability to produce? When we run out of natural resources (and we will) to produce goods, when we have more people on the planet than stuff to consume, then what? Some people think Jameson is a doom-and-gloom pessimist who just sees the seedy underbelly of Western culture. I say he’s an intuitive man anticipating the horrifying consequences of consumerism run rampant. It seems like our current trajectory has us headed straight for some kind of cultural, economic and environmental collapse. But what can be done about it? How do you survive in Western culture without being part of the consumption machine? Rejecting consumer culture to live off the land and use only what you need to survive has a nice Thoreuian appeal to it, but it’s pretty impractical for most people--unless you want to be marginalized and ostracized from society as you forage for food in dumpsters to take back to your little house made out of refrigerator boxes and plastic bags.

There has to be some kind of solution; a balance struck between rampant consumerism and Unibomber-like isolation. I think in order to effect change, we need to do what the environmentalists have been saying for years: “think globally, act locally.” Multinational corporations and the nations that benefit from them will not be at the forefront of this movement. It is up to us, the people, the cogs in the consumer machine, to take the first steps. So, for my first contribution, I will go to Barnes & Nobel tonight and I will sit with my coffee and the new edition of Vanity Fair (hello, Suri Cruise!) but I will not buy the magazine! Ha! Score: 1 for ginny t., 0 for consumer culture.