Coastal
Post Online
December,
2003
Shopping for Democracy?
By Frank Scott
Commissars of capital
hope that the annual celebration of consumption will soon reach its peak. Our
economy is supposedly rebounding, though the
jobs creation rate of the last quarter
would have to be maintained for
at least five years to simply get
back the more than two million
jobs our economy has lost. But
ministers of the mall preach that the holy shopping spree is needed to make
everyone prosperous again.
This
festival of frenzied buying is somehow related to popular legends about our
divine ancestry. Some of those fables inspire us to become loving members of a
single human race, however mysterious our origins may seem. But more
often, biblical mythology acts as
rationale for the most despicable behaviors human beings can indulge in, and
offers a godly acceptance of the mass murder we call war.
The dominant patriarchal legends that
reduce the awesome mystery of the universe to an invisible entity with a penis,
can inspire good as well as evil. Unfortunately, those who interpret biblical
testaments about darker experience to
bring out the brighter side of humanity are reduced to being spiritual immaterialists, by those whose
interpretations are far more materially murderous.
Whether Jesus was a prince of peace
teaching about love, or the world's first self-hating Jew, or the Jew most hated by other Jews, or the inspiration
for generations of Christian murderers, or never existed at all, is of less
importance than the major holiday need:
millions of Christians, Jews, agnostics, atheists and others must trek
to the mall and shop, until they drop.
Capital's market needs consumers,
and whether they participate in this annual feast with innocent joy or
greedy avarice makes little difference. Shop with love, with fear, with spirit
or with cynicism, but shop. This is the
ritual of the season, however
much attention may be devoted to various prayers and rites practiced during the
festival of spending.
Sadly,
many who indulge these holidays by opening their hearts to an immaterial spirit
of peace will in reality simply be emptying their wallets for a material god of
war.
The middle east is where
civilization is said to have begun, and it is the geographic center of biblical
belief. But more important is its central role
in an economic religion's warping of humanity into acceptance of racism and murder as somehow godly
practices. It is where much of the world's oil is found, and that oil is what
powers the civilization that has created better lives for millions, and abject
misery for millions more. This contradiction
makes the economics, like the religion , difficult to fathom, and easy to bury in simplistic axioms that make
"buy cheap, sell dear" sound more godly than "love they
neighbor as thyself."
The
religious belief in peace and justice, honored in words, is servant to the economic pursuit of profit, honored in deeds. Doctrines of
racial supremacy, and the organized chaos of the market under corporate control
are more important than prayers. Capital rules, and religion serves economic god by making the morally
material seem insignificant compared to
the spiritually immaterial .
So we shop for loved ones, and for many we
don't love, just to honor the season , keep our jobs, maintain social
appearances, and for other reasons that make it seem sensible to buy at holiday time, as though there were no
tomorrow. For many, there will be no
tomorrow, especially in the "holy" land. The Judeo-Christians of capital, who dominate not in number of believers but in number of weapons , presently focus their attention on
that area, which looms large in both
religious and economic mythology.
There is profit in
making weapons that cause bloodshed, and there is profit in making Band-Aids to
stop the bleeding. The manufacturers, salesclerks and transporters of weapons
and Band-Aids earn paychecks and create profit, without any thought on their part of
loss, good or evil. But the moral madness, the colossal contradiction of capital
is that profit pursuit means that both
war and peace can ring up sales, so what difference does it make whether we
love one another, or hate one another? Six of one, half a dozen of the other, a dollar is a dollar, yay god.
Iraq can have its government and
infrastructure destroyed by the
corporate Likudniks of USrael, and then rebuilt, at a profit, by the same
corporate Likudniks of USrael. A nation can be established to provide a
homeland for a tortured people, and become a racist colonial power, creating
another tortured people. And religious
believers, inspired by biblical testaments old and new, can fill the air with
song, joy and tales of human wisdom, just as they fill that same air with
bombs, bullets and acts of inhuman terror.
We can try to shop with love in our hearts, but as long as our
governing policies are driven by racial supremacy and disrespect for most of
humanity, we'll never spend enough to blot out reality, even for just a
single holiday. A religious theory of
love and peace that is actualized into a political practice of hate and
war is a contradiction as large as the economic foundation on which it rests.
Resolving that contradiction would be a much greater good than emptying the
malls of product.
As we shop-if
we haven't maxed out our plastic-let's remember that millions of our own
people are unemployed, unhoused and
unhappy at this supposedly joyous time. And as many of us bewail-and many
profit from the bewailing-the fanatics who preside over our system of godly
serial killing, remember that we live in a democracy. It is ultimately our responsibility that these dreadful
dimwits are in power. The best gift we can give ourselves is to replace the US government with a real democracy. That can't be
accomplished by passive consumers or parishioners, but only by active
citizens. Happy holiday.