By Joe Bageant -- World News Trust
Like many older married men, I’d rather have my fingernails pulled out with heated pliers than go with my wife to an allegedly cultural event, which in our still quite Southern town of Winchester, Virginia, usually means attending yet another local history or genealogy lecture. And I’d rather have the late Uday Hussein personally administer the ball shockers to me than attend one of our town’s many commercial events such as First Night, First Friday, or any “celebration of” (pick your own noun) such as Winchester’s spring festival of the apple blossom, downtown days, historic main street or any of the other thinly masked events which I call “Chamber of Commerce coordinated purchasing opportunities.”
But when my wife Barb pointed out, rather firmly I thought, that main street Winchester’s “First Friday” celebration was tonight, and given that I have not been outside this house for most of the month since returning from my shack in Central America, I knew that I’d better show a bit of enthusiasm.
And so I find myself standing here holding one of those ubiquitous caterer’s plastic wine goblets in the middle of a boutique whose theme or purpose, as near as I can tell, is cool looking weathered outdoor stuff brought indoors, then matched up with expensive new china and linens. Immediately, that high whine of hysteria in the back of my head starts its klaxton: Get me the fuuuuuck outta heeeeeeeeeere! Ooooooooooooweeeeeeeeeee…. Get me the fuuuuuck outta heeeeeeeeeere! I call it the “Dead Man Shopping” siren. Or “Rod Serling’s Lost Potpourri Zone.”
On the face of it, First Friday, which is “celebrated” in thousands of American downtowns on the first Friday in June each year, seems mainly an opportunity for merchants to give away wine and cheese and crab salad cracker spread in large amounts. Almost none of the attending crowd purchases. And when they do it seems to be one of those reflexive small token purchases one sees only in America: as in, “I am occupying space and breathing inside a retail establishment and the owner greeted me, so I must buy something. Especially since I ate a piece of his cheese.
If First Friday is purely a cheese giveaway, they might do well to emulate our first populist president, Andrew Jackson, who let a 1,400-pound block of cheese age in the hallway of the white house for two years. Then in 1837 the President, on his way out of office, invited the public to come and eat it. It was gone in two hours. But the stench in the White House lasted well into the following presidency of Martin van Buren in much the same way our current president has crapped upon the carpet of American history for the next president to clean up. Jackson knew he had caused the oncoming economic crash through over-extension of what we would now call sub-prime credit, leaving Van Buren to campaign on a platform of “Everybody gets a helluva lot less from here on out, so get used to it.” Not an enviable campaign position, to be sure. But at least Van Buren stood against the idea of allowing Texas to become a state, which, if he had been successful, might have saved us all much subsequent political grief. Earth to Bageant: Snap out of it! Someone is talking to you.
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