Getting and spending

On our way to a party over the weekend we drove through miles and miles of soul-crushing suburban sprawl.  Shopping malls, mini-malls, strip malls, big box stores, fast food “restaurants,” gas stations, ugly and random little arrangements of bricks that billed themselves as banks, paved over acre after paved over acre crowded with disposable buildings, none of them looking empty but none of them looking all that busy for a Saturday afternoon.  The parking lots weren’t filled but the road and access roads were jammed with people who had bought a new set of bath towels and were now driving three miles to buy a shower curtain after which they’d drive three more miles to buy a sandwich for lunch.

Made me irritable and I arrived at the party mad at our hostess for living in the middle of all this getting and spending and forcing me to be part of it.  I stuffed my mouth immediately full of crackers and cheese and found a lonely corner in the family room where I sat watching football until my mood improved.

What really bothered me about the “town” wasn’t its ugliness and inconvenience and maddening stop and go traffic.  It was the grasping, wrenching, grabbing greediness of it.  Every storefront, every neon sign, every banner shouting SALE, all seemed to be reaching out to me with giant cartoonish hands to claw at my pockets.  Widely grinning jack-o-lantern mouths roared “GIMMEE!” and “MINE!”

It was a nightmare world of building-shaped demons dementedly determined to empty my wallet while loading me down with piles and piles of useless gizmos, toys, cheap clothes, and debt that I would have to push around the parking lots for all eternity, constantly bumping into other “consumers” pushing their piles of useless crap, all of us pausing just long enough to shout at each other, “Why do you hoard?”  “Why do you squander?”

Hat tip, @DanteAlighieri.

Of course it’s not a nightmare.  It’s life.  It’s what you see when you look at any collection of human beings at work and play and putting together the supplies they need to do either.  The prettiest seaside village, the cheeriest, most bustling neighborhood in the handsomest cities are in fact exactly what that sprawling asphalt, cinderblock, and plate glass hell in the suburbs is, marketplaces.

This is our economy as geography, and economy is just a catch-all word for the ways people feed, clothe, shelter, and, if they have the time and the wherewithall leftover, comfort and amuse themselves.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our  powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Although it may seem to sensitive, poetical types like my old darling Wordsworth and me that people have made the mistake of living only to get and to spend, getting and spending is living or, at any rate, the way we have to live, as in keep body and soul together, since human beings gave up hunting and gathering.

Somebody always wants your money because somebody always needs it. 

We’ve made a bigger mess of it than is necessary.  We’ve accepted that the measure of middle-class prosperity is the by the accumulation of useless gizmos, toys, cheap clothes, and debt.  We’ve fixed it so that our getting and spending is dependent on cars and cheap oil without factoring into our calculations the cost of those cars with their insurance and maintenance and the paving and repairing of the roads they ride on.  We don’t notice the time all this convenience takes away from us.  We have yet to consider the atomization and alienation and sociopathy bred by the way we’ve separated all our getting and spending from the living it supports.

The ugliest feature of mallscapes like the one I drove through Saturday is their nakedness.  The reasons for the getting and spending aren’t there.  Nobody lives there.  There are no houses in sight where the new bath towels and shower curtain will add to the hominess and comfort of the families living there, where the food bought will grace the tables.  No clubs or nice restaurants where the clothes bought that day will be worn and shown off.  No offices where the paper products and computers will be put to work.  No tourists come to visit and gawk and take pictures.  No children play in the few unbuilt-on lots.  The life all this getting and spending supports goes on elsewhere.

I watched that football game on the hostess’s wide-screen hidef TV.  I am going to get me one of those, as soon as I have the money to spend.

Comments

[Rana]

*sigh* I hear you. Boy, do I hear you. Especially the shallowness of these places, which serve only the single purpose while hiding all of the other parts of life. It's gotten especially bad for me since, as a result of several years of moving, dealing with dead families' households, inadequate income, living in places where shopping online is a necessity, and increasingly picky tastes, I've broken much of my former buying habits.

I'm not saying this to sound virtuous, because wave a sale in front of me in the right e-store and I'm calculating if I can get a merino shirt if I forgo some other spending. The thing is, though, that stuff for stuff's sake, especially the poorly mass-produced stuff that's in most of those big-box stores, increasingly looks to me like more trouble than it's worth. I don't _want_ five cheap shirts I'll barely wear and have to find closet space for; I want one nice one I'll wear as often as it's clean.

But that's not how we're supposed to think. We're supposed to be good patriotic American consumers and spend spend spend! And then spend some more to store it, and on books on how to reduce clutter. It's a house of cards, isn't it?

[actor212]

The Paradox Of Our Age
We have bigger houses but smaller families;

more conveniences, but less time.

We have more degrees but less sense;

more knowledge but less judgment;

more experts, but more problems;

more medicines but less healthiness.

We’ve been all the way to the moon and back,

but have trouble in crossing the street to meet our new neighbour.

We built more computers to hold more copies than ever,

But have less real communication;

We have become long on quantity,

but short on quality.

These are times of fast foods but slow digestion;

Tall men but short characters;

Steep profits but shallow relationships.

It’s a time when there is much in the window

But nothing in the room. — the 14th Dalai Lama.

[Cathie from Canada]

They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum
And charged the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em
Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til its gone.
They paved paradise and put in a parking lot.

[mac macgillicuddy]

There's an episode from the long gone "Mad About You" sitcom series. Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt are getting ready to take what she says will be a quick trip to look at furniture, and he points out that "everything in life takes FOUR HOURS." You have to wait for the subway, then you have to get something to eat...

That was life in the city back when that show was on. In our little rural corner of the state, I still find that to be true, but for different reasons than Paul's.