Retail Therapy

I had intended to write something before Christmas, but it turns out that the nefarious powers at the USA Network have conspired to deny you your erratic dose of blog goodness by running several days of House marathons which, it turns out, totally precludes productivity of any kind for those of us not previously exposed to the show. It's a full body condition typified by lethargy, inactivity and compulsive behavior, especially in the form of non-helpful television watching. My wife is concerned.

As for Christmas, the wife and I have taken it upon ourselves to single-handedly (double-handedly? More accurate, yes, but less dire sounding) propping up the economy in the greater Western Inland Past The Mountains But Not Quite The Desert region of Southern California. The number of credit card readers that have not tasted the white-hot swipe of my Discover card is rapidly approaching zero.

It's not that we've intended to spoil our children, it's that we've decided this year to fully embrace the commercialization impulse that is destroying Christmas in order to save it. I know, it's Bushian logic, saving something by participating in its destruction, but it's the safety of nostalgia that allows me to indulge in that kind of think. It seems almost cute when it can't be used to blow things up anymore.

Deriding the commercialization of Christmas is one of the great cosmic cognitive dissonances of all time. I can't think of a single conversation I've ever had with a single person praising the cross-pollination of the season of giving with crass retail advertising the the pressure to buy buy buy. It's disgusting to each and every culturally Christian person I know and yet someone, somewhere is out there buying things, unknowingly keeping the wheel rolling, just like movie violence and reality TV. Everyone hates it--most are even threatened by it as a destructive force to our aesthetic sensibilities, if not our society as a whole--and yet someone is seeing all the Saw sequels.

This year, it seems, everyone has decided to make a stand and not spend money at Christmas time. It turns out that economic recession has made ideologues out of us all. We're taking a stand on principle, en masse to decommercialize Christmas by not spending as much of the money we don't have as we used to.

To which I say: communism! Which, if you think about it, is pretty close to real Christianity anyway. You know, sell all your things to minister to lepers, camels through eyes of needles before rich men get to heaven, etc. It's nice to see people taking these things to heart finally, but the result is that my Circuit City just went out of business.

Something has to be done for the sake of American consumer democracy. I'm doing eveyrthing I can. I buy things I specificially do not need. The only hard part is waiting to find them when they're not deeply discounted so I can have the most pro-USA impact I can possibly have.

If you're out there and you're hurting economically, I sympathize with you and your friend Jesus, but that doesn't mean you're not also the enemy. Get out there and shop. You may doubt its efficacy as a weapon, but remember, it's the one thing we did as a nation after 9/11 when the enemy was something as quaint and toothless and international terrorism, when our president asked us to. And we all saw how thoroughly that foe was vanquished.

Do your part. Uncle Sam wants you.