Birth of a Plutocrat

The news is on for a couple of hours each day, whether or not I’m in the kitchen. Alice and I bounce back and forth between CNN and MSNBC. Since I can’t remember which is which, it’s either the Rachel Station or the Anderson Station. I actually prefer the Rachel Station, but the other will do just fine in a pinch.

The result is that I see actual commercials, which is another way of looking at America. Virtually all of them are for prescription medicine, and I know all the ditties associated with each. Not only that, but I’m in love with some of them, especially the one with the original Jardiance Lady. She’s happy, optimistic, and at home in her body. We all need a role model exactly like her.

But the ones I hate, I really hate. The latest cow pie is the one from Chase. A perfectly nice kid walks down the street somewhere in America that sells fancy clothes for teens. You don’t know until the end that it’s about credit cards, because the kid never actually enters a store. All he does is a jaunty little saunter.

But he doesn’t look especially happy or even eager. Instead, he manages to communicate entitlement. The street is a garden of earthly pleasures—a set of sneakers, a hat, a jacket—to which he seems but mildly attracted. With no special effort he manages to communicate telepathically and everything he wants responds with a little quiver. Two seconds later, it has teleported to his body as he continues to swagger/strut down the street. At the very end, he is kitted out with goods, but you get the feeling that they bring him no real delight. Instead, they are simply material accoutrements, status markers in the game of adolescence.

This is not so much a portrait of wanting as it is a souless version of greed and acquisition. No effort is expended, no gratification is delayed. The transaction is perfectly frictionless and automatic, just what Chase wants you to experience. In this corporate vision of life in America, human beings communicate with inanimate objects which respond to even their faintest signals. The coat with the luscious shearling collar doesn’t even open the door to the street. It imagines itself swooping through the window and—poof—there it is on the shoulders of the boy.

There is, of course, a kind of reckoning. Unbeknownst to the boy, his parents are surveilling him. They’ve got some intrusive app from Chase and they monitor his “purchases” as he makes him. They have no special interest in the purchases themselves, whether they are appropriate to his age, duplicative, or stupid. Their job as parents has been reduced to a least common denominator: whether the total spent exceeds the established limit. They say nothing at all to their child throughout, but comment at the end that he obeyed the ground rules. If this is parenting, bring on the apocalypse.

Or maybe it has already come: a soft apocalypse of plutocratic behavior in a young, American teen-in-formation. I think that his life is supposed to be more thoughtful and reflective. It should be marked by values, ideas, and insights. But the gods of Chase have other ideas.