Shopping for Jesus

Could this headline ever run in a major newspaper?   

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Of course not!  Never is the alleged wall between the news department and the sales department of newspapers so low as during the holy season of senseless spending. 

Yes, I changed this headline to make a point.  The real headline disturbed me and I was struggling to effectively explain why.  I even considered an alternative make-believe headline: “In the name of Jesus, newspapers promote the buying of useless things, through purported news articles, to make their advertisers happy.” Both of my false headlines reflect the deep and disturbing reality of what drives modern day American Christmas better than the headline that actually ran.  Here’s the actual front page headline reporting the earth-shaking news that Thanksgiving Friday retail sales were brisk:

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The actual headline works hard to convince us that we the shoppers are heroes trying to conquer the challenge of shopping on a deadline or, perhaps, victims of the long lines.  I seriously question both of those characterizations.  I would say that many of us have been hoodwinked by fake news.

For the next thirty days or so, newspaper “articles” and television “news” reports will work hard to convince us to buy expensive and unnecessary consumer goods, allegedly to honor Jesus Christ.  The message is absurd.  Absurd, but powerfully seductive. 

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A Reprise on Fungible time

Last evening, I wasted about 1½ hours working in the basement on some uninteresting but useful titanium accessories that I call Fat Wires on MrTitanium.com. I had a dyslexic moment, and made them slightly wrong. Just wrong enough that I can’t in good conscience sell them. I found this very frustrating. A big waste of time.

This morning I started over. This sort of fine craft allows my mind to wander as I cut, hammer, punch, drill, grind, band-aid, polish, bend, re-polish, and assemble. I reflected on Erich’s post on Fungible time: The principle that time, like money, is commutative in an accounting sense. In brief, time is spent whatever you do, so you should make the best of it.

So I wondered (in between thinking about the imminent Buy Nothing Day and listening to FM blather) why I was so upset at having wasted 1½ hours on honing my craft but getting no product, yet a comparable time wasted playing Doom2 or watching YouTube doesn’t bother me. I quit TV several weeks ago.

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A haphazard list of some of Dangerous Intersection’s more memorable posts

We recently received this comment from Scholar:

Erich or Grumpy,

May I please have some more links to the discussions here at dangerous intersections which you have found to be most interesting, *must read*, or highlights in general.

Thanks,
Scholar

—

I took Scholar’s request seriously and went back to review many of our posts.  I still can’t get over how many topics we’ve addressed in nine months, covering 592 posts! 

Rather than call these posts the “best of,” I would merely call them the more memorable posts to me, keeping in mind the triple asterisk that comes with the assembly of this list:  1) I simply didn’t have the time to review each of the posts again.  Therefore, this list is only representative, not complete.  2) It is difficult to determine any meaningful criteria on which to base such a list, other than (as I’ve already suggested) the idea that this list includes many of the posts I found memorable.  Other people will certainly have different ideas of what posts are worthy 3) Scholar’s request puts me in an awkward spot, given that I write for the blog. 

To the extent that I’ve included my own posts, then, it should be with the understanding that I am not trying to judge the writing so much as considering whether the ideas addressed are memorable to me, whether the ideas expressed therein seemed important or whether they moved me.  Here’s another way of looking at it:  if you want …

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semantics, schemantics

I have a friend that is sometimes frustrating to converse with, because he always wants me to define the terms I use.  Our conversation is filled with his requests to explain just what I mean.  He says, with justification, that people may use the same word but often have different…

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We are drowning in material goods, yet we crave ever more stuff.

See them floundering after their cherished possessions, like fish flopping in a river starved of water. 

Sutta Nipata 777 (From What Would Buddha Do? (1999)).

A friend of mine recently returned from an extended trip to Egypt.  He found it striking that the 18 million residents of Cairo lived in tightly packed conditions and that they owned so very few possessions.  Based on his own observations, the average resident of Cairo owned about 10% of the property owned by the average American family.  My friend’s estimate was about on the mark.  Most Americans would certainly describe most residents of Cairo to be “poor.” 

Amidst this material “poverty,” though, my friend noticed numerous signs of family togetherness and harmony that he doesn’t often see in the U.S.  Parents and children were spending time with each other, smiling at each other, playing together and apparently enjoying each others’ company.  How could this be, that people appeared to be so happy when they owned so little?  As my friend described what he saw, I couldn’t imagine Americans getting along that well if someone took away 90% of our possessions.  In fact, we’d become embittered and we’d be at each other’s throats.

My friend’s comments caused me to think of the enormous amount of material possessions that Americans have and crave.  We have shameful amounts of material possessions.  We have many times more stuff than we need.  Yet we work very hard to have ever more.

We are afflicted with the all-consuming epidemic “affluenza,” …

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