It's mid-morning out here in Oregon and a local CBS affiliate station has been talking about the upcoming big game for over a week now. In a few hours there'll be the kick-off and the game will commence, run for a few hours more and then conclude with a victory for somebody. Certainly a victory for the grocers who sold all the chips, the bars who staged all the watch parties, and the licenced liquor stores who sold all the hooch imbibed.
After a brief period of awards, trophys held aloft, postgame interviews and wrap-ups, the network will return us to our regularly scheduled programs and lives; people will get up from carpets, chairs and sofas, the half empty bags of chips will be policed up, the empty plastic beer cups will be nested and tossed into the trash and life will resume its even flow. Year after year that rhythm of slow buildup followed by brief high excitement followed by quick restoration of normalcy. Very familiar in lots of processes both inorganic and organic.
What's striking is the suddenness and completeness of the end of the hysteria; it's rather like a soufflé collapse. No bell curve here. It reminds one of the sudden collapse of the retail and television coverage of Christmas. Here today, gone tomorrow and we move on to the next big thing.
Christmas and the Superbowl are the two biggest yearly celebrations in our nation’s calendar (though the wall calendar makers haven't yet gotten that memo.) They really have been on parallel tracks for the last fifty odd years and for exactly the same reasons
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“What we have here is (a) failure to communicate,” announced the Warden (played by the immortal Strother Martin) in the Cool Hand Luke film. In regard to the parallel tracks what we’re witnessing is the triumph of quantity over quality, of consumption over meaning, form over substance. Appearance over essence. The defeat of “Esse quam videri." Blind economic forces led to a huge increase in manufacturing capacity in WW II and the growth of a citizenry who slowly morphed into consumers as the imposed austerities of the Depression and the war relaxed, the baby boom arrived and consumption revved up. Europe and Japan, both recovering from the war, lagged behind but eventually recovered and joined the wave of mass production and mass consumption. With the arrival of China with its rapid and massive build up of manufacturing capacity we've arrived at a pinnacle of production, an apotheosis of consumption- you need only go into a Walmart or other big box retailer to see the outcome. History lesson over.
I think what happened was that as production of manufactured holiday goods increased quality declined and in direct inverse proportion. The handcrafted and rather bespoke.gifts of the 18th and early 20th centuries disappeared and ever more cheap but shoddy products replaced them. Flimsiness enabled greater production, greater production led to economies of scale that led to lower prices that enablef greater consumption. Economics 101. A win-win for everyone seemingly except for the small manufacturers whose profits, less overhead costs, dropped into the negative numbers. Also left behind by the careening shopping carts were the picky customers who remembered how items once were. How very Dickensian of them!
Younger folk don't know what's been lost unless they’re children of affluence. But more was lost than just quality and it was a grievous loss. What was lost was the meaning of Christmas. Why many celebrate it in the first place. Yes of course most know the story of Christ and the nativity, but every year fewer know the details, the reasons Joseph and Mary were in the stable, the reason the inn was booked, the census and tax rolls, the wars that Rome waged that forced the exaction of taxes from its tributary states to finance. In a sense War was the parent of a great religion just as a later and much larger war was the parent of modern consumerism. In our case many of us have forgotten causes, outcomes, and details and with successive generation more is lost until only a fuzzy image remains and the original meaning is lost. Christmas becomes just a season of increased shopping and festivities.
It may not work out that way, indeed the shopping carts may be left out in the empty parking lots and America enter a new age of piety and worship. I'm not sure that would be an entirely good thing.
But I do think the general outline is generally accurate quantity drives out quality the importance of consumption increases and life's other meanings and purposes are proportionally diminished in a zero-sum game.
The same is happening in politics and in a multitude of other arenas including sports; the Superbowl has morphed too under the hydraulic pressures of its mass consumption. Its very meaning has been distorted from sport for sports sake to sports for entertainment’s sake. There are many such tracks running in parallel. But the tracks are fast approaching the cliff of catastrophically rapid climate change. Agriculture may collapse, just like the soufflé and the stadium lights go out, the global entertainment cum shopping cart roll to a halt and ravens and coyotes usurp the empty aisles and bleachers. And that might not be an entirely bad thing. In fact I confess I'm okay with that- the world badly, sadly, needs a reboot.
Excellent point: "...triumph of quantity over quality, of consumption over meaning, form over substance." Sad but true. I see much the same here in Canada as we're just as much hitched to that global shopping cart.
I hear the average football TV only has like 18 min of actual football and the rest is ads. It blows my mind that sports have not found a way to be ad free. All of our streaming services are ad free now. Maybe it really never was about the actual sports?