Home Depot heaven

Did you know that "often the pleasure that shoppers get from anticipating an object is greater than the pleasure they get from owning it"? In fact, no sooner do they get it than they start fantasizing about how great their lives will finally be once they buy something else. Glossy magazines fuel this hunger because they are fantabulous dream factories, convincing us to aspire to the splendor of $1,400 cigars and to believe that "the cash register is a gateway to paradise." Brooks adds that all this is not "entirely benign." Really? You think? "Still, shoppers are bathed in hope. The products they confront might be trivial baubles or shams, but shoppers get caught up in the romance and spend optimistically, if not wisely."

Brooks may see this as an "impulse to utopia," but to me it looks a whole lot like what Marx called "commodity fetishism," a useful term for the aura of glamour advertising spins around some object in order to convince you to pay much more for it than it's actually worth. Marketing convinces you that the purchase will satisfy some inchoate longing and when it fails to do so, you keep coming back for more junk, hoping against all common sense that this time it will do the trick. How can anyone not see this? I mean, we're going back to Sociology 101, here.

Since Brooks believes in marketing the way other people believe in the Bible or, for that matter, in Marx, he can somehow envision the whole circus as a beneficent gift to the American people, rather than a sleazy racket. It doesn't seem to occur to him that there is a terrible waste in all that American ingenuity going to collecting more and more crap, that we might spend so much money and watch so much TV and eat so much junk food because we are bored, and we are bored because we are unchallenged, and we are unchallenged because we have been sidetracked by easy, pleasant piffle. "People who look at advertisements want to want," he writes. "They are not passive victims in these fantasies." This may be true, but people want candy, cocaine and cigarettes, too, and that doesn't make them good for us.

I'm placing Brooks' argument in the silliest possible light, granted, but it's not much of a reach to get it there. To be fair, "On Paradise Drive" is not completely specious. Brooks is right that there is something invigorating and life-affirming about the idealistic, can-do spirit of American society, hokey as it may sound. And any spiritual or philosophical system that doesn't allow for the pleasures of the physical world is impoverished and inhuman. But so is any system that doesn't account for the suffering and loss inherent to life on earth, and Brooks' sun-drenched vision of the ever-burgeoning American utopia is just such a system. (Even if he does offer a few demurrals about our willingness to sacrifice safety -- i.e., social welfare -- for opportunity -- i.e., minimal taxes and government regulation.)

"Hopeful American dreamers, who have their heads filled with visions of their own future glories, are never going to develop the tragic view of life that is supposed to be the prerequisite for the probing and profound soul," Brooks writes. Maybe, but to paraphrase a proverb from Alcoholics Anonymous (a quintessential American institution), you don't have to worry about getting in touch with tragedy, because sooner or later, tragedy will get in touch with you.

The categorical opposite of Brooks' outlook was elegantly expressed by Graham Greene, in his novel "The Quiet American." Brooks has read it, but clearly it hasn't sunk in, because in "On Paradise Drive" he describes Alden Pyle, the idealistic CIA agent hell-bent on installing democracy in Vietnam, who leaves a swath of catastrophe and carnage in his wake, as the novel's "protagonist." The book's actual hero is Thomas Fowler, a broken Englishman, a journalist, who knows just how dangerous Pyle's simple, arrogant optimism will be. Fowler is a man with the tragic view of life, and eventually, if briefly, Pyle catches up with him. Even Americans aren't immune to tragedy, a lesson that, apparently, we have to learn over and over again.

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