I dream, in my anarchist fantasies, of a day when firebombing a Wal-Mart will not be considered a crime but an act of humanity, one small step in ridding the world of that institution that embodies much of what is wrong with America today: corporations treating their employees like garbage, citizens in the thrall of mindless consumerism (like Robert Duvall and his fellow organic robots in THX-1138, purchasing crap just to throw it away, cuz it keeps the economy running), and the death of individualism not just in people but in the places where we live. Historic downtowns and town squares are decimated, and every place looks like every place else, an endless merry-go-round of the same big-box stores and fast-food joints. People say they shop at Wal-Mart because it’s cheap, but they have to shop where stuff is cheap because Wal-Mart killed off all the good jobs and replaced them with poorly paying ones. (Check out Wal-Mart Watch for some good scares.)
If we’re heading for a major crisis anyway, could we maybe take the opportunity to sweep this blight from the cultural landscape? You know, just as a bonus?
I nominate Mark Morford as the general in charge of eradicating Wal-Mart. Mark’s twice weekly column Notes & Errata is, he explains, "not suitable for children or the clergy or ardent and undying fans of Meg Ryan movies." And in today’s installment, "One Happy Big-Box Wasteland," he rants beautifully against the plaguelike proliferation of big-box America:
Do you want to know what depresses the American spirit? Do you want to know why it feels like the center cannot hold and the tyranny of mediocrity has been loosed upon our world? Do you want to know what instills more thoughts of suicide and creates a desperate, low-level rage the source of which we cannot quite identify but which we know is right under our noses and which we now inhale Prozac and Xanax and Paxil by the truckload to attempt to mollify?
I have your answer. Here it is. Look. It is the appalling spread of big-box strip malls, tract homes like a cancer, metadevelopments paving over the American landscape, all creating a bizarre sense of copious loss, empty excess, heartless glut, forcing us to ask, once again, the Great All-American Question: How can we have so damned much but still feel like we have almost nothing at all?
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This is the new America. Our crazed sense of entitlement, our nearly rabid desire for easy access to mountains of bargain-basement junk has led to the upsurge of soulless big-box shops which has, in turn, led to a deadly sense of prefabricated, vacuous sameness wherever we go. And here's the kicker: We think it's good. We think it helps, brings jobs, tax money, affordable goods. We call it progress. We call it choice. It is the exact opposite.
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Sameness is in. Sameness is the new black. It is no different than preplanned Disney World vacations or organized religion or preplanned cruises or themed restaurants where all edges have been filed off and every experience has been predigested and sanitized for your protection because, God forbid, you have an authentic experience or nurture genuine individual perspective or dare to question the bland norm lest your poor addled soul shudder and recoil and the Powers That Be look at you as a serious threat.
I admit: I like Target, and I like Ikea. But as Mark points out, what choice do I have? What choice do any of us have?
Xers are supposed to be cynical, I know, but as Lily Tomlin has pointed out, no matter how cynical you are, you just can’t keep up these days. Might Xer cynicism finally reach a breaking point? Is it possible that a whole generation could get fed up with everything all at once?
I have a theory of history: It is the Fuck This Shit (FTS) Theory of History. Things chug along for a while, getting worse and worse, until finally someone says, "You know what? Fuck this shit. Let’s get outta here, man." It happened on the savannas of Africa a hundred thousand years ago, when some guy looked around and saw all the competition at the gazelle hunt, and his wife realized there were more women fighting over fewer and fewer berries, and together they admitted they secretly hated the all the sun, they said, Fuck this shit, let’s head north and find some snow. And they did. And the Puritans said Fuck this shit and headed to America. And Thomas Jefferson and his friends said Fuck this shit and sent a nasty letter to the bosses back in England. And the itchy adventurous types who’d come to the New World for excitement saw the old colonial cities getting too, you know, citified, and they said Fuck this shit and headed West. And some day in the not too distant future, a bunch of people are gonna look around and see the destruction of the environment and the impossibility of escaping the surveillance society and the wars over water and oil, and they’re gonna say Fuck this shit and head off to Mars.
But maybe, before that happens, enough people will finally say, Fuck this shit and start embracing local artisans and riding a bike instead of driving and eating slow food and shopping at farmers markets.
A geek can dream, can’t she?
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