Buy

Best Buy and Marshall's have series of commercials that rewrite old Christmas carols as sales pitches for televisions and touch-screen phones to passers-by. ABC cut scenes from A Charlie Brown Christmas and sped up the animation to fit more commercials into the time slot. Wal-Mart freely reinterpret Christmas as the sum of its material products, claiming, "Family moments cost less at Wal-Mart." Hallmark commercials play out similarly, except each with a big red delivery truck pulling up to the store with the word "MEANING" painted on its side. BMW tries to convince me with smarmy cynicism that it understands my repulsion, then suddenly abandons tone to cheerfully sell me a car with a special Christmas financing plan. Toys 'R' Us, Pillsbury, Target, etc. etc.

There is a growing idea in sociology (at least there was back when I kept up with it) that our culture has abandoned Christianity/Puritanism as its hegemonic value structure and is near the end of a process to replace it with consumerism as its central religion. For example, malls are "cathedrals of consumerism," to which Americans make pilgrimages (especially to the bigger malls - my mother, for one, just got back from her annual weekend trip to the Branson outlet stores) to find or create who they are to the world as unique, special individuals. Like churches, in many ways. These commercials seem to fit right into this idea, blatantly co-opting Christmas from Christianity and reforming it to fit a consumerist dogma.

There is also an idea (which scares me more than any of it) that many advertising campaigns since the early '90s have worked on the assumption that their ads will be consciously ignored. Often marketers expect that, while attempting to ignore them, a consumer won't pay enough attention to scrutinize the messages being transmitted. So they sneak in through the backdoor of our subconscious, passively absorbed so that they can plant little bits of trust via familiarity that yell out later at the recognition of a product. Those billboards along the freeway, for example, that are just huge prints of beer logos - sometimes with an exploding bottle, or a woman in a swimsuit, but mostly just a logo - don't have any remarkable scene or attempted message except, "You know me; don't forget that I'm always here."

It all makes me think I should know better than to watch TV. It became a habit when during most of the day I was too exhausted to focus my eyes. Now I've got no excuse for putting up with its arrogance. The bullshit I watch is always such a compromise, anyway: shows about cooking things quickly, shows about eating big meals, or old sitcoms are usually the best I can do for my tastes. Maybe all these presents will be enough to distract me away from it.