Misery Loves Company

The day before Thanksgiving, every media writer was struggling to think of clever punch lines about the day after Thanksgiving. The most inspired quip came from an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution titled “Slack Friday,” the wittiness of which was only slightly diminished by the mismatched pictures that accompanied the article – snapshots of snaking lines of customers.

Now that George Bush is effectively out of office and now that the election is over, the media has, in its desperation for the derivative, cleaved to a new fad – one catchy and colloquial, and catchy because it is colloquial.

Broke is the new black, people, and the media wears it well.

But while the media is an easy scapegoat, the “woe-is-we” sentiment is more than just a media meme.

Suddenly it’s a foregone fact that everybody’s suffering, a storyline no one will give up no matter how much dexterity with reality is required to keep up the charade.

Take, for example, the story of the Wal-Mart worker killed in a Black Friday stampede.

Rather than view this as an example of a collective defiance to any obstacle to shopping, the media has stubbornly spun the story to fit their down-and-out narrative. Angled just so, the stampede story is itself evidence of slow sales.

New York Times writer Peter Goodman admits that the stampede signifies rabid consumerism, but he has the anti-intellectual nerve to liken it to the bread lines of the Depression.

It’s this kind of die-hard commitment to the doom-and-gloom theme that renders the whole thing inauthentic.

Sure all the traditional indicators suggest economic apocalypse, but indicators for their own sake shouldn’t be allowed to tell the whole story – but that’s exactly what’s happening. Programmed by pop as much as by politics, the media and everybody else robotically cite stats as evidence that nobody’s buying anything.

But what about the fact that somebody’s buying something? In keeping with convention, we’ve got a handy statistic with which to support our jaw-dropping assertion that Americans, industrious as ever, are making the only thing that Americans make – purchases.

Preliminary reports of Black Friday sales show an increase in business – 3% – over last year.

As we said, it’s quite clear that somebody’s buying something … so why can’t anyone admit it?

The answer to that question – like so many questions about human nature and American sensibilities and cold, hard facts – is hubris.

In this real or perceived Depression, Americans have quieted the nagging, niggling worry that they – each and singular – cannot stack up to the rest of us.

A years-old commercial hit on it precisely: A man, perched peacefully oblivious atop his lawnmower, said through a clenched smile that his mansion-sized mortgage and life of luxury had drowned him in debt. Implicit in the ad was the man’s assumption that his neighbors, with identical mortgages and lifestyles, could handle the responsibility. Implicit also was the fact that, like him, the man’s neighbors couldn’t afford their lifestyles, and like him, his neighbors were weighed down with the heft of the misguided belief that they alone couldn’t measure up.

If you’re honest, you know the feeling. You’ve wondered how your friends afford the dinners out and the weekends away. You surely couldn’t, after all. How much more can they possibly make, you wonder, until you hear them punt words like “commodities” and “diversification.” They know something you don’t, and it’s put them on the road to wealth – capable of affording that mortgage and those cars and that lifestyle. That must be it – they’re “investors,” your friends are – because how else to explain their lifestyles?

It’s insidious, having had a double-whammy effect on the economy and on how Americans situate themselves within it.

For one thing, everyone has become an “investor,” which has stocked the market with players who are not only ignorant of the rules of the game but who are unaware that it’s a game at all. That explains the market volatility – day-trading is nothing but a pastime of volleys to those who don’t realize that the ball, when it hits the net, ricochets viciously.

Which is the second point – the ball, like its wont to do, has backfired in a big way. Finally the plight appears to be not just yours and not just mine, but all of ours – a plight of the people. We look at the imploded market and the bankrupted businesses and the foreclosure bonanza, and we see not a symptom but a tumor.

The symptoms we shrug off as the lapsed responsibility of government – why didn’t they “do something” to remove the malignancy, to prevent it from metastasis? Now it’s a tumor, so looming that it’s started to eclipse us all.

Finally America is thinking in the collective: We’re all in this together.

To a culture that’s never known desperation, going down with the ship is not so bad as long as the ship’s going down too.

That’s also got just the right mix of Protestant altruism and Calvinist martyrdom – patriotic ‘til the end.

Misery loves company. Broke is the new black, so break it in and make it last.