Let's Go Worship

"It is doubtful that the love of material goods which seems to appear in every nation that attains high industrial capacity is, properly speaking, 'materialistic' emotion. After all, the word which has become more common than any other in English in referring to this phenomenon is 'consumption,' and to consume matter is to annihilate it. There is an agitation and ingenuity in present-day consumption which seem to reflect something far different from the immersion of the spirit in matter."

― Glenn Tinder, "The Crisis of Political Imagination" (1964)

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Consumer noun, often attributive

Definition of consumer
: one that consumes: such as

a: one that utilizes economic goods

b: an organism requiring complex organic compounds for food which it obtains by preying on other organisms or by eating particles of organic matter

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“Go find this child. Leave no stone unturned. As soon as you find him, send word and I’ll join you at once in your worship.”

― King Herod the mass murderer/consumer

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Dear Kate,

How did we become "consumers"?  You said you like words; do you know the history and etymology of the word "consume" and how we have made it the defining verb of our time?

We are not true "materialist," as Tinder suggests above.  To call ourselves "materialistic" is to imply we love stuffs the way they are without our first imposing control over to make use of them, that we are intimately wedded to the physicality and the sensuality of our realities.

It's to say, for example, before you read a book and try to find what you want to find in it to reinforce your prejudices, you would have been aroused by the sound of the book's spine cracking open tentatively for your pleasure, the smell of its printer (the factory...the factory workers?) and at various midway stops it has collected like a dog paw before landing in your lap, all to remind you of something you can't or can't bear to recall, a dream too real that you must annihilate it and "stick to the point" of why you are picking up that particular book at all.

I do not know another generation knowing more about sex and fucking up worse with it.  We eat just to know we can still shit; anything else is too deep and too painful for us, "over the top of our head" we say.  I don't think I am exaggerating.  When was the last time you heard someone saying, "Eat/travel/etc. while you still can." "Thank God we can still eat well, move well, sleep well, shit well."  From the mouth of young, strong people too, such Consumer Manifestos.

We are in nothing together but to conspire to kill Jesus again and again.

Whatever that is real, true, deep, thoughtful, beautiful, material, let's come up with a way to make it consumer-friendly and annihilate all its sacredness.  See beauty?  Make a whore of her, now!  Want justice?  Make him whore for you, here!  If we don't burn things up we don't know what to do with them.  You snooze you lose; someone else is bound to burn it, so might as well be you.  Burned this planet?  Go to the moon.  Burned yourself? Say a prayer and ask for better power and more things to burn.  Go find this child. Leave no stone unturned. As soon as you find him, send word and I’ll join you at once in your worship.

Christmas burning bright.  Let's go worship.

Yours, Alex