Mile after mile of mall after mall. Many, many malls. Major malls and mini malls. They put the mini malls in between the major malls, and in between the mini malls they put the mini marts. And in between the mini marts, you’ve got the car lots, gas stations, muffler shops, Laundromats, cheap hotels, fast food joints, strip clubs, and dirty bookstores. America the beautiful. One big transcontinental commercial cesspool. And how do the people feel about all this? How do the people feel about living in a coast-to-coast shopping mall?... They think it is as cool as can be, because Americans love the mall. That’s where they get to satisfy their two most prominent addictions at the same time: shopping and eating. Millions of semi-conscious Americans day after day shuffling through the malls, shopping and eating, especially eating.
-George Carlin
Let me offer the same caveat upfront that I’ve offered before on the topic of materialism, which I’ve gained an appreciation for having lived in various Third World countries impoverished to varying degrees: I understand well the draw of material sustenance and even abundance, as it’s a necessity for human flourishing.
Without material sustenance, ideas don’t matter much. Philosophizing takes a back seat to eating food.
(Incidentally, this is the reason that, historically, communist revolutions have been devised, ironically, by the children of the bourgeois; the peasants they claim to be acting on behalf of are too busy trying to feed their kids to toy with lofty notions of utopia.)
The story of human history, for the vast majority of people who have walked the earth, is one of deprivation and destitution — the major exception being the United States, which birthed the world’s first robust middle class in the aftermath of the Second World War, the envy of the world.
(The current ruling elite, of course, hate the American middle class because people with resources and extra time and a sense of self-ownership are difficult to fully control, a subject perhaps for another time.)
Related: Pence Denounces 'Populism' in Speech, Claims It's Incompatible With 'Conservatism'
By way of further caveat before I get to the point, of all the economic systems devised and instituted so far — and this isn’t to say that a superior alternative isn’t possible, only that one hasn’t materialized yet — free market capitalism offers the most benefit to the most people.
Along with capitalism, for better or worse, perhaps inevitably, comes consumerism — the acquisition of material goods for the sake of acquiring material goods, a finding of purpose in collecting knick-knacks to replace God.
God, after all, Nietzsche proclaimed, died in the West two hundred years ago, by which he meant a belief in anything transcendent beyond the material and the sense of awe that accompanies a belief in the divine as well as the meaning and comfort sourced from it.
So now this is what we get: ritualized fist-fights, and sometimes worse violence, in shopping malls from coast to coast each year over non-essential resources like gigantic flat-screen TVs and Cabbage Patch dolls and designer lingerie.
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Via ABC News (emphasis added):
If it seems like the Black Friday riots are a new phenomenon — as in, in the past decade or so — that’s probably just because of the advent of social media and pocket-sized phones that double as cameras.Shots rang out at the Park Plaza Mall in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Black Friday, leaving two people injured, police said in an update Friday evening…
Two people were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, including one with gunshot wounds, police said….
Police said the incident appears to have stemmed from a "disturbance" between two individuals, which escalated into gunfire.
Cabbage Patch dolls, once much coveted for some reason I’ll never understand, instigated a riot at a Pennsylvania mall 41 years ago that made the Titanic evacuation look orderly.
Cabbage Patch Dolls Black Friday Riots 1983 pic.twitter.com/rOv0AxW0Vk
— Roland Deschain (@icantwant2) November 29, 2024
At the risk of preaching, is this the best we can do, America?
This looks to me a lot like end-stage empire stuff.
