WRITER - Vancouver Lifestyles -
What You Want, What They Want
You may want a spouse and kids and a Labrador and a parakeet. Good. But, wake up, Dummy. You’re flying in the face of today’s verifiable urgencies. This is a Consumer Society. Even the chronically ill and the suffering are seen as consumers of medical services. Even schizophrenics, struggling from day to day with the questions of what balance their newest cocktail of approved and paid-for elixirs may bring them, even these unfortunates, are measured only a spit in the deep sea of consumers of psychiatric services. Next! Step forward please! Next!
Here is the vision that has been plotted out for you by the Captains of Industry, the plasma screen reality that you ignore at your own peril.
CKNW wants you to listen to Talk Radio all day. JR Country hopes that Shania Twain and Eddie Arnold and Eddie Rabbit will lasso you and corral you till dark and beyond. London Drugs has entered the hottest market of all – electric sex toys – and they are banking on you finding the perfect battery-operated companion on the open shelf right there next to the raspberry-imbued extra large condoms. Don’t tell the Catholic Church; they’re so awfully busy fighting homo marriage that adding mass-market self-abuse to their workload may just tip them over the edge.
The universe owned and inhabited by Global Television, radio, Major Newspapers, tiny throw-away papers, internet and lord-knows-what-else-they-run, yes, that universe, would have you vote for the federal Liberals somewhere into the next millennium, would have you believe (because they tell you so hundreds of times a day) that their national TV news anchor (who nobody admits to watching, whose name no one can recall) is greater than Walter Kronkite in his heyday. They would have you believe that their Sunday newsmagazine TV show, which no one has ever seen, which no one ever references, is the most watched and most revered half hour of broadcasting in the known universe. Or is it an hour?
But, you knew all that. Let’s get to the really spooky stuff.
In a true Consumer Society – and if this isn’t it, I’d like to see the Real Deal – the greatest social unit is ONE. Marriage, family, cohabitation are not only out, they are practically seditious.
Look at it from the point of view of three forces: the telephone company, your hydro provider and your friendly real estate agent.
In the world perfectly configured by the hydro company and the local water supplier, every loyal, flag-saluting citizen will live in a 546 square foot flat (2 bedrooms, 2 baths, of course). Every ONE will be individually metered, separately billed. You want to move in with your squeeze? And lower the municipal income by 50%? Are you mad? Are you a communist? You visited Cuba once with the school band, right?
Telus, Bell, whoever they are this week, are the same, only worse. Here’s what they want. They agree. Hole up in that 546 square foot rats nest (2 bedrooms, 2 baths, Starbucks in the lobby, psychotic Tae-Kwan-Do expert concierge on duty 24/7). Have a land line, a cell phone, a fax machine, high-speed internet connect, text-messaging, blackberry, Global Positioning, direct line to the Discovery Space Shuttle and wherever Jean-Michele Cousteau is lurking beneath the seas as we speak.
Like you, I’ve been threatening for some weeks now to ditch the fax machine. I mean, what kind of technology is this, anyway. Very cool, 30 years ago, when McGarret could get instant photos of the bad guys rolled into his office in Honolulu on “Hawaii 5-0.” But, those glory days are gone, Brudder. Now it’s all unsolicited messages about the greatest Real Estate seminar the Holiday Inn has ever hosted. Sign up now! Not many spaces left! Ed Lipowski made $40,000 on his first trade!!! Now, he starts every day with 18 holes of golf.
Which brings us to the World According to Remax, Sutton Group, Century 21. Now, what do these good folks want of you? Well, of course, like the phone company and the hydro provider and the cable guys, they also want you in that 546 square foot condo (Loft Living in the Heart of All the Action!) After all, they’ve got that sucker up to half a million now and climbing. And they want you decorating and upgrading. (The granite counters, the GE stove and the Sub-Zero fridge will look fabulous in here, trust me!) But more, important, they want you moving. Sure, stay a few months, stay. But just long enough to notice that #306 is available and it has a den, well, kind of a den, like an extra space where you could put your office, Eric, so, OK, it doesn’t have a window, but it’s only another $47,000.
Now, you may think at this point that I’m a Quaker or an unrepentant hippie claiming a back-to-the-land movement. Not at all. I don’t covet sheep anymore than you do. But I do have a 13-year-old car and a house I’m planning to live in for the rest of my natural days. And, like you, I’m working up my courage to detach myself from that useless, stupid fax machine and simplify the land line and the cell line into one universal number and simplify my cable package. Sure, I don’t need the Food Channel and Home and Garden, but I’ve still got to be able to see the golf, tennis and American Football, and the News Channels, you know, it’s my work, right? And…well, I’m working on it, OK?
