An American Experience: The Great Mall Opening

A piece in the LA Times caught my eye today as one more clear indication that Americans are living in what Chris Hedges terms an "Empire of Illusion." There might be an economic crisis going on, two wars, an oil spill in the Gulf, looming oil, water, and food crises, but the headlines continue to be littered with celebrity scandals, sports news, hi-tech wonders, and other diversions that keep us insulated from the outside world.

The triumph of the spectacle over the real is to be expected in a time of national identity crisis. As Americans are confronted daily by signs that they have not inherited the "Brave New World" that was promised to them by technocrats and pundits, illusion becomes the only refuge to insulate a steadily eroding sense of identity.

As Hedges writes in the July/August issue of Adbusters, "When a culture lives within an illusion it perpetuates a state of permanent infantilism or childishness. As the gap widens between the illusion and reality, as we suddenly grasp that it is our home being foreclosed or our job that is not coming back, we react like children."

Nothing exemplifies this retreat childishness and illusion than a good old Mall Opening.

As the article notes, "hordes of shoppers" gathered before the opening, some even camping out to receive free gift cards.

One woman described it as "a classic American experience: the Great Mall Opening."

The mall features several upscale retail outlets, and no one seems to suspect that sales at this mall will be less than spectacular. No matter how dreadful things in the outside world may become, there will always be people willing to exchange hours of work (either theirs or someone else's) for consumer goods made in some foreign sweat shop.

It is telling amidst the bleak economic reports of the past two years to see so many people flock to a mall opening. From the looks on their faces and their clothing, most of these people appear to be the same people who would suffer the most from an economic downturn. Or rather, they appear very different from the types who would shop at Louis Vuitton or Nordstrom's.

Were they out just to get some free stuff? To savor, in the twilight of a steadily waning civilization, a last glimpse of abundance, a taste of the "American experience"?

A simple fact of dying empires--Rome, for instance--is that as imperial prestige wanes, as social conditions crumble, as personal dramas assume more prominence than national or televised ones, illusions reassert themselves with a kind of desperate urgency, in the hopes of somehow keeping the charade of grandeur carrying on a little bit longer.

The arts become more engrossing, more spectacular, more "eye-popping," like the 3-D films in our multiplexes, like the Blue-Ray experience or X-Box 360 games.

We will continue shopping, even after our money--as individuals, as a civilization--has run out. Some day we will visit our malls as burned out museums, mausoleums holding the artifacts of the culture that never was.