TGIF getting green

Law enforcement officers across the United States dread this Friday like the outbreak of some form of black plague. At least, traffic is a mess. A whole country goes into a frenzied ritual of spending paroxysm programmed by more than six decades of marketing genius that prey on native urges and human yearnings, and the facility of financial credit to afford them.

The spending ritual is part of the business cycle. The period from Thanksgiving to mid-January is about five weeks of marketing consumer goods in the western Yuletide and New Year’s season. The Christian liturgical calendar has the advent to the epiphany of the Christ-child (this is an all-powerful symbolic period to those who grew up in the canopy of its imperial image power)—from the Bethlehem babe to the three kings in the manger, ingrained in many time designs.

After WWII, returning casualties from military theatres showed a high percentage of mental health cases. Psychoanalysis had then ascended the U.S. healing profession to correctional institutions as they transformed punitive procedures to rehabilitative practices. The national Mental Health Act of ‘46 gave credence to the new pubic relations’ discipline practiced on Wall Street. A decade earlier, after the U.S. Depression hit impoverished bottom, Edward Bernays, nephew of prominent Sigmund Freud and cousin to devoted Anna, took psychological insights and applied it to the marketing methodologies.

Freud is a secular apostle of the Augustinian notion (my monkish opinion) that human genesis is on the negative side of the social equation. Augustine proposed original sin to explain his youthful behavior and adult guilt, used the Torah’s story of creation as authoritative justification, and decreed every human’s “fall from grace.” Following Europe’s optimistic period of enlightenment and the age of reason, Sigmund and daughter Anna suggested that underneath human consciousness lurks a sea of primitive chaos influencing behavior and making us all subject to animal savagery and violence.

Sigmund traced anti-Jewish Nazi Germany to primal nature; he also caught daughter Anna masturbating, and following European manners of the court that disdained sexual urges as contrary to the conduct of moral persons and upright citizens (though regally practiced under covers), he concluded that early childhood experiences and suppressed memories of them can explain deviant behavior. The regions of the subconscious and unconscious lend itself to manipulation so that it can result into desired programmed behavior. Similarly, education came along to promote the cult of self-preservation and self-esteem.

The age of consumerism is defined by widespread manipulation of primitive urges, an appeal to satisfaction, status, significance, and shame. Just say, “tak, tak, tak” in the Philippines, and one hears “Ajinomoto,” the food additive that made MSG a common fare in Pinoy cuisine. Nike shoes (think sports figures) and Polo (Ralph Lauren and Milan’s glitterati) shirts prey on our sense of social status. Apple’s “we will bring the library to every home” appealed to my sense of significance, patronizing its digital world products. Shame and sex, of course, remain the fertile field of exploitation, and one only stare at all the blown-out images in Galleria to track which of our salivating nature the ad folks are after! Newstands cover girlie and macho magazines that end up under many pillows.

China’s rapid economic rise is from cheaply produced consumer goods. Its export markets (North America and EU) are in recession with their financial systems weighted down by phantom wealth, delusionary assurances, and illusory assets; China’s manufacturing has started contracting as its savings-prone domestic market is not about to create a robust consuming horde overnight.

Sadly, China is rapidly getting highly commercialized with a widening consumer base, but Black Friday is a decade down the line. Aping Western models of consummate consumption, however, Chinese financial institutions extend easy credit to spur buying of products it over-produces for export, and heretofore, illicitly marketed in domestic stalls.

America will survive another decade of Black Fridays for as long as it drums the message of fear to its population and insecurity from terror among its allies, foists its currency as medium of exchange in global trade, spreads the culture of consumption worldwide, and flexes its imperial military muscles. Meanwhile, those duped by continuing Park Avenue marketing will line up for the latest sale of products of rapid obsolescence.

We see sunrise in the rubble of collapse. TGIF. There are green Fridays sprouting around the world. A network of glocalis is finding connectivity in new forms of social networking. As crude and unruly the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movements are, they foreshadow increasing eye balling communions of small groups forming around common interest, as in a green earth. That image of the earthrise overarches many visions and echoes along the tremors of mission lines. A vision of hope and a mission of profound transformation are occurring in the midst of frenzied gloom and despair.

But some will keep to their Black Friday. I am keeping mine green!