Embrace it, you nihilist, sarcastic, sardonic, anti-sentimentalists. Erin Brockovich is a good movie.
I realize there’s virtually no excuse for writing about an ancient movie whose dubious cultural effects have undoubtedly already drowned in a pool of Heidi Montag’s vomit, but the reason I bring it up is that I just saw Erin Brockovich for the first time last week, on cable. The reason that I saw it on cable is because I was being marketed to. The ads that played before and after Erin Brockovich and the ones that, overall, support the kind of shows I like to watch.
They are as follows (in order of importance):
banks
health insurance
car insurance
These commercials came on at that time, on that channel, because they were trying to find me. I am in their demographic, and they found me. They knew that I hadn’t seen Erin Brockovich and that if it came on at that time, they might catch me, needing to zone out, not up for educational TV but refusing to sink to anything resembling “reality” and figured that maybe I was one of the however point whatever million people who missed it when it first came out or who wouldn’t mind living it over again. And they know that I am in that select group of people with the privilege of shopping for a bank and insurance.
In an effort to entice me, these commercials have slowly morphed over time to reflect certain values and trends that I hold dear. I know I hold these values dear because of how glad I am that they have been reflected in these commercials. In their carefully constructed world view, there are minorities represented in all the portrayals of regular people and families. I probably trust these products because they know how important racial diversity is to me and how much I believe in the integration of America’s many races and creeds. And as long as everything is properly represented in these commercials, I don’t have to really do anything directly to affect diversity or the integration of America’s many races and creeds other than choose to watch these shows. Then I can count on these banks and insurance companies to treat these other races and creeds with respect – guiding them with a trusted hand through the uncertain waters of our capitalist system.
Right?
So, look, HBO caught me being lazy, but, in fact, this is the part of capitalism that I really like. It almost trumps the Catholic Church for the ultimate in institutionalized hypocrisy. That’s how it’s able to break borders of race, class and religion. In a pure expression of the philosophy, no one should really care what anyone else’s race, creed, or values are as long as all transactions include fair compensation for equal work – the definition of “fair” and “equal” being whatever numbers allow all parties involved to make an educated, mutual decision on compensation based on what is often a system of team-oriented survival.
Through capitalism, I can tolerate a degree of everything as long as it allows someone to make a buck that in no way effects my ability to make a buck or my ability to live the life I want to lead.
Furthermore, capitalism shows you who is paying for what and your purchase is your vote. But that can be problematic too. Some of my most favorite things are paid for by things I find somewhat questionable and confusing. For a long time, they showed “Girls Gone Wild” commercials constantly during The Daily Show. The Daily Show is arguably the most important show on television for young people and Jon Stewart is a personal hero of mine. But his show would not be on if “Girls Gone Wild” – the cheapest, most exploitative, piece of trashy media possible – paid for it. Though now that I think about it – those girls are hot!
I’ll never know if my post-30 Sapphic daydreams were conjured by repeated exposure to these inane commercials, but after a year of daily doses, I found myself frequently in cocktail party discussions extolling the merits of “Girls Gone Wild” (based purely on the commercials) with vivid and provocative declarations, by me, a former Women’s Studies Minor, that possibly, these girls were doing this of their own volition, in control of their own sexuality, out of their own pursuit of the pleasurable feeling of knowing that a million guys are getting off to you. Madonna built an empire by admitting this under-reported female pursuit that still barely anyone talks about. I, now a crusader for female empowerment of this unusual sort, can safely assume that it’s now okay to admit it because if it were really wrong, then surely Jon Stewart wouldn’t let it interrupt his show.
As such, the TV ad model (one of the last remaining to provide decent jobs of any interest in the American economy, presently at risk of total extinction) illustrates why capitalism will always necessitate hypocrisy. I am against “Girls Gone Wild”. At many other times of my life and probably some future times (i.e. if I ever have a daughter), I have found the mere existence of “Girls Gone Wild” to be reprehensible, pointless, and disgusting. But I am certainly not going to boycott The Daily Show for accepting sponsorship from it. And further, instead of at the very least continuing a silent objection to it, over time, I have come to embrace “Girls Gone Wild” and kind of can’t wait for it as a welcome respite from thinking about the hopeless realities of our country’s politics.
If the Bush Administration can be blamed on engendering an “anything goes” climate of greed and irresponsibility, perhaps it can also be blamed for the degeneration of the very morals it so voraciously claimed to protect. Its policy of deregulation of the financial services industry, resulted only in the production of hundreds of Madonnas without their own dance floor. Just as Madonna flaunted her desire to be desired, in a similar form of self-aggrandization, the financial services industry pursued their own desire for monetary alchemy.
Let’s be very clear. This was not capitalism. I love Michael Moore, but there’s no difference between what he is doing with his film and what the conservative right always tries to do to the idea of Socialism. Both are excellent systems based on a structure and guideline with the intent of creating a robust, happy society. Socialism and/or Communism are not great evils because horrible people did horrible things in the name of them or because they haven’t worked perfectly in every situation. Capitalism is not a great evil because selfish people exploited it for enormous personal gain. A great capitalist society requires an educated, engaged populace. I think we can all agree we don’t have that. A great capitalist society requires actual competition – not an insider, cronyist, pay-to-play economic system.
So, perhaps, “true” capitalism would not institutionalize hypocrisy. You could argue that capitalism in its pure form would prohibit hypocrisy. In a local, sustainable economy (the kind of society that our brand of capitalism would create), everyone’s notion of a fair price – the expressed purpose of a world ruled by supply and demand (with a touch of timing and circumstance) – is based on a more direct knowledge of everyone else’s financial situation.
In a small to medium sized town, or even a neighborhood in a large city, a contractor knows what’s a fair price for tools he needs for his trade. If he frequents the same hardware store, owned by another individual, over time, they form a relationship based on the premise that neither will take advantage of the other with the understanding that their price balance is critical to the future success of both of those businesses. From time to time they may inquire about the other’s family or business and may present to the other a gift on occasion or invite the other to an event on occasion – the social contact supports the mutually agreed goal of fairness in business. The trust built from each one’s acknowledgement of the other’s basic humanity fosters a mutually agreed upon level of success. Neither would feel comfortable upgrading to a level of riches that was in inverse proportion to the other’s hardship.
There is no such relationship within a corporate structure or business at a large scale. I don’t know how much the guys who run the international corporation of Staples make. I don’t know if they just have kids in private school or if they eat off of plates of 14k gold. Although, right now I don’t even know if plates of gold would be that expensive. Maybe all those cash-for-gold programs at the local churches are melting that stuff down and making it into plates that I can buy next week at the community craft fair as “artisanal” and purge myself of this entire link of thinking.
The point being, that I don’t know whether I’m getting robbed on the price of pens because i don’t know what’s an appropriate markup for the people of my community to pay on pens so that the shopkeeper (ha, what?) at Staples is making enough money to stay in business and that the price of pens will never go so high as to put me out of business. The reason the wealth gap in America is allowed to grow and spread is because nobody is sure just exactly who has their money. Whatever representative of who has their money (ie the clerk at Staples, the loan officer at the bank) does not have the money either and the shared acknowledgment of humanity with that person prohibits any rioting in their general direction thus protecting the injustice, unfairness, un-capitalist-American-ness from challenge.
Conversely, nobody at the top level of Staples has any idea what’s happening in any of its regional stores apart from probably what are their “net returns”. It certainly has no idea what’s happening with me. Ah, but Staples does give me coupons all the time, so they are cheap and I, like most Americans, cast my vote with cheap. So far none of their prices have ever caused me to fear for the success of my business so I keep shopping there. But from time to time, I am deeply affected by the fact that nobody could put a child through college on the money that one makes working at Staples. That job, working in an office supply store, is the same that it always was. But in the generations before, a person who owned an office supply shop could save and send their children to college on that money. They could afford basically whatever they needed. Now, that is usually one of several jobs that a family member might have and still the children who do go to college will graduate with a six figure debt before they’ve ever had their first job.
Really, this financial crisis has done little more than illuminate just how many people were being so royally fu—d in so many different ways in the name of “wealth creation” and “opportunity”. This student loan industry made a lot of people a lot of money. Big money. Buckets and barrels of money and the power to be “too big to fail”. Our American “capitalist” system allowed a bunch of dynastic entitled ass—-s and newly entitled social climbers to sell worthless pieces of paper two or three times over based on highly leveraged bets in the form of other people’s homes and dreams.
But to themselves and to the relevant members of our previous government, these “financial service professionals” were “innovating” and “achieving maximum returns”.
The only reason something like this can happen without people looting and rioting in the streets is because people are so uneducated that they aren’t smart enough to see it and when they do, the time they would spend to understand it is instead spent figuring out how they can one day ride in a private plane of their own.
These people, these “heroes” of business who make barrels and buckets and bags and troughs of money are almost always stealing outright or cheating money from other people. In rare cases, they are just people who had extremely good ideas and products at the right price at the right time. These are the only circumstances where this kind of extraordinary wealth should be created within the capitalist system, but instead, it has been treated as an entitlement of the upper classes and the fiercely socially mobile and any number of short cuts, subsidies or outright cons have occurred to ensure its delivery to those with sufficient access/resources/hustle.
So, by now I know you’re asking yourselves, what in hell does this have to do with Erin Brockovich?
It’s simple – ladies of the world, unite. Only straight-talking, inappropriate-cleavage-flashing women will be able to deliver this kind of truth to the Republican party. Somewhere we need to ask these people, point blank, why some people need to work three and four jobs to afford their rent, food and healthcare and other people can work just one, not very well, and still afford a 10,000 square foot McMansion full of fat kids who can probably start a war on their computer (and not in a cute War Games type way). They need to get their capitalism in line. If it takes some anachronistic female sexuality with a chip on its shoulder to get it going, let’s do this.
Competition works just fine when everybody has information and a little bit of knowledge and training. Their version of capitalism is based on the preservation of their own wealth-creation engines. It’s not competition, it is not a free market, and its morals are a sham. Real capitalism doesn’t need enforced morals because an ever-shifting reevaluation of supply and demand will usually keep a balance of its own. Every single “social” issue that wedged this insufferable divide between people with brains and people who believe in fairies would have been settled very easily by economic concerns. Are you really going to prohibit gay marriage from an economic point of view? That industry alone could save the country from recession. Add legalized marijuana and America is back in business!
Don’t let a bunch of dishonest hacks deter you from a great idea. Business is fun. If you get into it and do something you like, chances are you can find an economy to join or build one of your own. All the price points have been toyed with and manipulated to make certain faceless people a lot of money. But they went too far and now everyone’s got to start over.
And you’ve got as good a chance as anybody.
xo
Saint B
Patron Saint of Dignified Poverty
