Tag: consumption

Competitive Consumption as America’s Pastime

The Real American Way

BILL ASTORE

SEP 24, 2025

Competition can be a good thing. Think of sports, for example. Would victory have any meaning without competition? If we just randomly selected a winner each year of the Super Bowl or the World Series, who would care?

Competing is completing—a way to motivate oneself, to better oneself. That said, “victory” is more than just lifting a trophy in triumph. How you got there—how you treated your fellow competitors along the way—matters too. 

I remember a saying—If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it. Competing honorably, giving your very best, is really what it’s about, not just shiny medals and trophies. If your soul is empty, if your heart is cold, the glow from even the highest accolade will fade—and quickly.

Too often in our society, competition is embraced for the sake of dominance. For some, winning has no meaning unless others suffer by losing. A real winner, however, lifts up others even as she or he is competing to be the very best.

This is a lengthy prelude to an article I thought I would write about Americans competing for everything. Cooperation? Fuhgeddaboudit! Competition for everything, always, calls to mind a cutthroat world in which only the fittest—or the most ruthless, the nastiest—survive and thrive. 

Far too often, competition in America is further expressed through materialism, buying, and display. Competitive consumption, if you will. Over-the-top displays of dominance: having the biggest yacht, the loudest stereo system, the largest truck, the most expensive SUV, the most exotic pets, you name it.

America, let us say, is not a country known for its restraint. But as I thought about consumption as a national pastime, I recalled the great monologue on America by comedian George Carlin, who in less than eleven minutes dissected the American way with more power and wit than just about anyone else I’ve heard. His lessons were grim, but Carlin spoke from his heart and warned us we were losing our way in mindless consumption.

Every now and then, I rewatch the 11-minute clip below to give myself a cold slap of reality. Believe me, there’s a lot in his monologue to digest. And a lot of profanity as well—consider yourself warned.

On Black Friday, the Hologram Is Revealed

Today's Teresas are driven to ecstasy by commodities
Today’s Teresas are driven to ecstasy by commodities

W.J. Astore

It’s Black Friday: shop ’til you drop!  I watch my share of TV (mainly sports), and this week I’ve been subjected to a bumper crop of commercials showing me that my happiness–even my life–depends on buying more and more stuff.  People on these commercials experience paroxysms of pleasure when they save a few dollars on sweaters or shoes or electronic gizmos (probably all made in China).  Thank goodness I stopped watching morning “news” shows and other infotainment, which simply reinforce the drive to consume like gormless zombies.

Speaking of zombies, my favorite scene from the “Walking Dead” series came in Season 1 when our intrepid heroes are hiding in a department store among the racks of merchandise as hordes of zombies press against the doors, fighting desperately to gain access so they can consume some choice brains.  What a telling visual metaphor for brainless consumption!

As usual, Joe Bageant knew the score.  If you haven’t read his work, I strongly urge you to read “Deer Hunting with Jesus” or “Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball.”  From the latter:

In effect, the economic superstate generates a superhologram that offers only one channel–the shopping channel–and one sanctioned collective national experience in which every aspect is monetized and reduced to a consumer transaction.  The economy becomes our life, our religion, and we are transfigured in its observance.  In the absence of the sacred, buying becomes a spiritual act conducted by satellites in outer space via bank transfers.  All things are purchasable and, indeed, access to anything of value is through purchase–even mood and consciousness, through psychopharmacology, to suppress our anxiety or enhance sexual performance, or cyberspace linkups to porn, palaver, and purchasing opportunities.  But, most of all, the hologram generates and guides us.

Through advertising and marketing, the hologram combs the fields of instinct and human desire, arranging our wants and fears in the direction of commodities or institutions.  No longer are advertising and marketing merely propaganda, which is all but dead.  Digitally mediated brain experience now works far below the crude propaganda zone of influence, deep in the swamps of the limbic brain, reengineering and reshaping the realms of subjective human experience…

Now, as walking advertisements for Nike and the Gap or Jenny Craig, and living by the grace of our Visa cards, we have become the artificial collective product of our corporately “administrated” modern state economy.  Which makes us property of the government.

Bageant, from another essay: “The media have colonized our inner lives like a virus.  The virus is not going away. The commoditization of our human consciousness is probably the most astounding, most chilling, accomplishment of American culture.”

Amen, Joe.  One thing that strikes me from the commercials I’ve seen: the depictions of people as they purchase that commodity they hold so dearly.  Their expressions are akin to religious or sexual ecstasy.  The message is simple: Here is your god.  Here is your loved one.  Here is your life. This commodity–buy it–now.  Rapture!

And that’s the true blackness of Black Friday.