“Give them an inch and they take a yard; give them a yard and they take a mile”—Bob Marley, “Real Situation.”
First it was superfluous luxuries, then necessities. It is Saturday June 8, 2024 and the muse has spoken to me as I sit whilst sipping tea in “Aromas” cafe and coffeeshop in Colonial Williamsburg, Va, USA. Over the past few days, my fiancée and I have been traveling from where we were staying in Florida for the past few months—on what will be referred to in the future as a temporary “expedition”—back to our transplanted home town of Annapolis, MD for work. Nonetheless, my experiences of the last few days have upwelled and distilled some deep-seated sentiments and lamentations about the present state of American civilization.
It needs but little qualification to acknowledge that America has long been a “consumer culture,” where the concept of citizen has been displaced by the consumer, whose existence is defined by an infinite procession of consumption—from cradle to grave—of commodified consumer goods. My experience thus far in the so-called living museum that is Williamsburg, Va has invoked in me, a deep sadness and consternation, because my hopes and expectations for what Williamsburg would or ought be, were woefully different from reality as I found it. I had visited Williamsburg as a youth and remembered it fondly, but memory is a strange faculty that is dubious even under the best of circumstances. What I found in 2024 was a place that was truly no-place: a locale with charming buildings and beautiful vistas that is contrived, artificial, and corporatized; it is not so much a living and breathing testament to the arduous past when life was mostly unpleasant, but rather a carefully concocted and curated experience oriented towards consumeristic tourists who either desire—or are made to desire by a lack of true alternative choices in an organic free marketplace—a litany of cute, cookie-cutter shops, many of which are simply ubiquitous corporate outposts.
Colonial Williamsburg: Where outward beauty masks inward horror.
Here in Williamsburg, I have not found the unique spirit of Colonial America, but rather an amusement park aimed at towards tourists who desire to consume entertainment and amusement as if it were a physical product, instead of a spiritually nourishing encounter with the past . Perhaps it is naively idealistic of me to think it was ever (or could be) otherwise. I do realize from its inception, Williamsburg was a philanthropic contrivance, but it is hard to imagine it being originally conceived as the vast and intricate shopping mall with paid parking that it is today.
What I wish to write about here is something adjacent and analogous but different: that is, the consolidation and commodification of everything into a consumer product has created a society whose aim is to extort as much money from the consumer as possible, rather than safeguard the well-being of the citizen and facilitate the common good. This process of mass commodification nearly everything has been unabated for so long, I think it no exaggeration to state that almost every product and service—from privatized healthcare and insurance, to public goods like basic utilities including water, electric, and heating—have become part of a grand extortionist plot to separate the consumer from as much of his or her money as is humanly possible without bludgeoning and subsequent theft. Dare I even mention zoning restrictions on the usage of private property, which has contributed to an affordable housing crisis that has caused mass homelessness, leaving America’s once-proud cities in squalid tatters? What “man of the system” can—or hypothetically, even could—fix this?
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