Shopped Out on the Homefront

I Want You ... To Buy More Stuff!
Gluttony at home is not necessary for victory abroad

By Jane Holtz Kay

Standing Before the B-17

My grandmother, the family provider in World War II's market of scarcity, pleaded -- or was it flirted? -- with the butcher for meat. My father, who couldn't hit his hat with a hammer, volunteered and wound up in Boston army ordinance helping "our boys" make munitions. My mother on the "home front" taught my sister and me to paste savings stamps in a book to buy war bonds.

Abroad, my Polish cousin, a secret agent, did underground duty in Paris. My uncle, a bombardier, flew the B-17s of "Bloody Hundredth" fame while his wife worried and wrote and volunteered and his mother sent her sewing machine to the Red Cross. That was the war on the homefront.

In the larger nation, Rosie became the riveter and anybody who wanted just a little bit of butter with their bread got white margarine accompanied by a coloring tube. Conservation of rubber, metal, gas, was the order of the day; the train stations wedged a thousand -- and then another and another thousand -- soldiers saying sad goodbyes. And this (no need to say) was small stuff compared to those in the trenches dreaming of a white, or maybe just safe, Christmas.

So here we are at holiday time on a home front, now called the "homeland," with today's commanding general a life and a lifestyle away from conservation, exhorting us all to consume. The call to buy, buy, buy hyped since the economy's skid and the World Trade Center's explosion could power enough hot air to send Santa into orbit. And, like do-good reindeer, the president and the ex-president joined hands across the mall as the patriot's place at Thanksgiving.

George and Bill, Together At Last !!! In their jingo-esque jaunts, the heads of state were plumping for anything but abstinence, seeking salvation far from their ancestor's axiom -- "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without," as they shopped, not saved, for victory.

Not that World War II's "greatest generation" was all so great. The post-World War II heroes came home to trash the cities and hard top the country, to spread the houses over farm fields and wetlands.Via VA mortgages to ten million vets and mortgage insurance to the entire nation, via highways and more highways, they celebrated victory with profligacy. While that made us fat and happy, it launched the worst human degradation of the continent in its history. And with it, the envy and anger of the world, now called McWorld where absolute poverty is the lot of one billion, hunger of three billion and death though starvation of sixty million every year.

Now I don't want to block the passion to keep America rolling," as the Saturn ad puts it. But I, like many others adrift in the media tales of shattered lives at home and shattered circumstances throughout the globe, wonder what that buy-first bromide can bring us. And where we are rolling to with this heightening of capitalism versus spiritualism in the post 9/ll era. The power of our footprints on the earth and the power of cashing in at the great American marketplace have made us prey to oil mongers and hostile to the environment as we plump for more nuclear plants and filthy fuels to fabricate the artifacts of affluence

Enough, as the magazine for the Center for the New American Dream puts it.

World War I was to make the world safe for democracy; World War II for ourselves and our allies. Is this new breed of war, this campaign of the Caves and Catastrophe, simply to make us safer for consumption? We have been spending and spending and wheeling and dealing, and whimpering that nobody likes us any more. And now some of us don't like ourselves or our government either as we bail out the airlines and bust their workers; as we subsidize the oil imperialists and slice the environmental budget.

At home in a state of suspended anxiety, some are beginning to question the voraciousness that has subsidized our "buy first" presidential prayer. While we take our supersized SUVs to our mammoth malls, and spin down our sprawl-breeding superhighways; while we scrimp on saving and spend on swallowing the landscape, isn't it time to turn the headlights on the danger of this quest for "victory" abroad through gluttony at home? In the end, wouldn't it be better to enscribe Jack Kerouac's classic question on our Christmas cards this year: "Whither thou goest, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

A version of this appeared on www.grist.com, December 14, 2001.

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