The McBurney YMCA was a funky remnant on 23rd Street across from the legendary Chelsea Hotel, which was its atmospheric kin. Retired garment workers played handball in tee shirts that could have done service in the Eakins era. The running track hung out over the basketball court so that you couldn’t shoot from the corners; and the machinery of modern fitness sat uneasily in rooms designed for what was called, at the time, “physical culture.”
That machinery became a matter of much puzzlement for me. I’d watch members check in on the ground floor, take the elevator to the fourth floor to change, then take an elevator back down to the exercise rooms. There they would pump away on a Stairmaster, which simulates the action of climbing stairs, but with electric power.
What was going on? Why would people climb ersatz stairs but not actual ones — stairs to nowhere as opposed to somewhere? Why would they eagerly burn energy from fossil fuels but not from their own metabolic process? At first I was amused in a Those-New-Yorkers kind of way. Gradually it dawned on me that Stairmasters were everywhere, figuratively speaking.
I saw people walk past street musicians, too absorbed in their headphonic space even to notice. I saw them ignore companions and even kids as they gabbed away on cell phones. They sat in apartments and watched fictional streets on television instead of sitting on their stoops and watching their own. Then they’d be almost offended when someone ventured outside this strange and self-affirming commodity cocoon.
I once attended a labor union conference in North Carolina. It was a small gathering, at a motel along a neon strip. One evening I set out to find the least bad among the fast food offerings in the locale. A group of fellow attendees was setting out at the same time in a car; and they found it riotously funny that I was walking. They were driving a distance of maybe 100 yards, 200 at the most. But I was the odd duck. That guy from up north — he was walking. Can you believe it?
Again, what was going on? Why is it valid to sit in a large metal box and burn gasoline to move a short distance, but not to do so under one’s own power? The answer, I think, tells us much about the inner dimensions of enclosure, and how we all become collaborators with it.
Partly it’s the spell technology casts on us, the tendency of the tool to become the taskmaster. Not for nothing are the machines called Stairmasters. (The more recent iteration is the elliptical trainer.) But that’s not all. There is something about a commodity culture that gets into our minds — that becomes our minds, and channels us into the commoditized version of a thing as opposed to the vernacular or common form. This commodity status then becomes a kind of imprimatur, a stamp of reality.
The Stairmaster becomes real in a way the stairway is not. The cell phone call has a reality that the companions at the restaurant table do not. They are not packaged, or validated by celebrities and media. They do not come with the authority of the market. Why does the store clerk leave me in the lurch to deal with a customer who calls? Why does that caller’s pizza order go ahead of mine? In part it’s that the telephone has an authority that I, who am just a person, do not.
Branding partakes of this same alchemy, of course. But the subject here is branding at a meta level. The market culture itself becomes a kind of mother brand; which is why advertising is not competitive but rather mutually reinforcing. It reinforces the belief that happiness, relief, the fulfillment of our desires, can be purchased in the form of a product — can only be purchased in the form of a product — whatever that product might be.
Economists don’t get it. In their quaint model we all are cold calculators of personal advantage, separate from and unaffected by that which we calculate about. It’s the 18th century rationalist conceit: me and my “preferences” over here, the economy and its offerings over there. The observer and the observed separate and distinct.
Economists are flummoxed by the phenomenon of addiction, which is consumption that has no semblance of “utility maximization” or “rational choice.” Yet addiction is a trademark of the age, and the source of much buying. Eliminate it, and this thing we call “the economy” would collapse. The phenomenon is not at all surprising, given how the commodity culture gets inside us and becomes us. Addiction is more than physiological. Ad people understand this even if economists don’t.
The consumerists don’t get it either. They think the problem with advertising is that corporations use it to trick us and beguile us, which of course they do. But the deeper problem is how the commodity culture enlists us as accomplices, and co-producers of its deceits. (The content of the Nike logo exists in us not in the logo.) It works almost like a retrovirus, and turns our psyches into mechanisms for the reproduction of itself, The enclosure of the commons begins with the enclosure of ourselves.
The pathology is most aggressive in the lives of kids. The extent to which children — the content of their experience, their identities and desires — have been commandeered by the corporate commercial culture, hardly needs elaboration here. If you doubt, just go to a McDonalds, or Toys ‘R’ Us. Better still, talk to any parent. The latest development is something called “exertainment,” which refers to video games that encourage kids to move around a bit. In the baseball version, for example, they swing a bat with sensors in it, instead of just flicking a joy stick on the couch.
In a way it’s comic. First corporations plant kids to the couch with television, videos and video games. Then they devise a new video game to get the kids off again. It’s not the first time the market has created a problem it then sells a purported answer to. Cancer drugs for environmentally induced cancers are a notable example.
So too are chemical calming agents for market-induced stress. Further demonstrating their disconnect from reality, economists call this a “virtuous circle” or some such thing. They call the result “expanding GDP” and “growth,” with all the positive connotations of that term.
As I said it’s almost funny. But these are kids we are talking about, kids who are getting sucked ever deeper into a world defined and mediated by corporations and their products. Consumerists see the problem physiologically, in terms of obesity, diabetes, and the like. Damage to the body is the only thing that can be wrong. But the problem really goes much deeper, to the way kids define themselves, and to their ability to interact with their world and change it.
It was not that long ago that kids didn’t need a corporation to create a baseball game for them. They slung their gloves over the handlebars of their bikes, held bats across the top with a finger of each hand, and peddled off to the playground. If one wasn’t available then they invented games with wiffle balls or pinkies in back yards or even streets. If there were only six kids then they came up with rules for six kids. No right field in this back yard? Fine. You have to hit to left. This is not nostalgia; it’s fact. I know because one of those kids was myself.
You don’t much see kids playing ball that way any more. I’ve lived in numerous parts of D.C., most recently near a beautiful ball field in the affluent Northwest. In two years I never once saw kids playing ball there in an unstructured setting. It was always a little league practice or game. Adults were always present and in charge, running drills — drills — and establishing the rules. (I lived for a longer time in the Northeast, which is almost entirely black. I don’t think I ever saw kids playing baseball in the playgrounds near my house there. But that’s more about baseball in the inner city.)
An acquaintance from Britain remarked once that American kids don’t know how to play. They have become almost entirely dependent upon structures created by adults; and in this, the empty ball fields and exertainment videos are of a piece in more ways than one. The enclosure of their time mirrors the enclosure of their minds. Their lives are scheduled-out like their parents’; they march like them to the metronome of the clock — which is to say, the temporal regime of the market.
They are subject to the same pressures as well. The Wall Street Journal recently ran one of those stories that make your heart sink. It was called “Preschoolers Prep: Courses Help Kids Get Ready For Kindergarten, Which Is Like First Grade Used To Be.” It described a new growth market in the schooling biz: four-year olds who are lagging in number recognition and the like. Kaplan Inc., the test-prep company which is owned by the Washington Post Company, is a major player in dragging young children into the rat race. Some start as young as two.
Kiddie prep seems to arise more from parental anxieties than from kid’s deficiencies. Perhaps “market prep” would be a better term, since this extra schooling takes kids at an early age and structures their cognition in a way that makes them market-ready. “We pay for soccer, we pay for karate, we pay for basketball and piano, and we pay for reading,” a New York mother told the Journal reporter.
She was revealing more than she realized, I suspect, about the nature of childhood today. Kids have become products shaped by other products. Very likely they will become markets for Ritalin, Prozac and the like before long. Another virtuous circle. Stairmasters or their equivalents will be next.
There is a hint of awareness of this in the Journal piece, a bit of dismay beneath the deadpan reporting. In this there is hope. Enclosure is complete when we no longer are aware of it — when it seems to be the way things always have been. So long as there is a memory of something different, a sense of possibility that they could be different still. So long as the captive knows he isn’t free, there is still a chance of escape. In discomfort ? not wildness, discomfort — is the future of the world.