The 1990's was a strange decade to have come of age in. By about 1991, Communism and the USSR were largely a thing of the past. One of the poles that propped up the world order had fallen, and barely 2 years into it, noted Historian Francis Fukuyama even went so far as to declare that history had indeed ended in the triumph of liberal democracy and market capitalism. It was a strange and foul decade presided over a by a Rhodes Scholar Bubba from Little Rock who put his indelible Teflon stamp on the time. If Richard Nixon "broke the heart of the American Dream," Bill Clinton pinched its ass and gave it a leer on the way out the door. We didn't mind, our thoughts were elsewhere, for in the closing of the American Century, we wept for there were no more worlds left to conquer, and we did it at the mall.
Like many American men who spent their adolescence wafting past the strains of NAFTA (that great sucking sound is a problem for another day) and worrying about the twin spectres of the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain, I enjoyed the carbonated, caffeinated nectar known as Surge. A citrus soda designed to compete with the venerable Mountain Dew, Surge was a "hardcore" experience that was evidently worth a hockey scrum to achieve. It's caffeine content was such that a 12 oz bottle was sufficient to give you heart palpitations and allow you to hear colours. Its flavour wasn't so much "good" as it was a "a lemon and a lime screwed in the underarm of a radioactive clown." It was the pick-me-up accompaniment to pizza rolls for the more discerning Dungeons and Dragons nerds.
The thrust of the ad campaign for Surge was the lengths one would go in order to get your hands on a bottle. There is a veritable fight in the above video, which is a fair example of the genre. Just a bloke and his five closest mates scrambling over a half-dozen hastily assembled filthy hobo couches in a back alley of some major Western metropolis. No, no, nothing to see here officer. No need to stop and frisk. Just me and my friends here enjoying a soda.
All those fine upstanding young men being reduced to an atavistic frenzy at the merest chance at the bottle floated into my mind recently as we, once again, came around to that center of the charitable year: Giving Tuesday. For those of you playing at home, Giving Tuesday is the youngest of a trio of psuedo-holidays that have sprung up in recent years between Thanksgiving Day and the beginning of December. Those are, in order:
- Black Friday- The Friday following Thanksgiving, emerged as a distinct concept in the 1950's and is one of the largest shopping days of the year. Named because this date often marked the breakeven point of the year for a retailer (moving from being "in the red" to "in the black").
- Cyber Monday- The Monday following Thanksgiving, the emergence of E-commerce in the 2000's marked this term being coined in 2005. This is where people do their online shopping for the holiday season, usually on their computers at work.
- Giving Tuesday- The Tuesday following Thanksgiving, has become a focal point in the nonprofit world, with numerous giving challenges, matching funds, and other gamified incentives to spur philanthropy. The perfect opportunity to balm your conscience for dropping cash on Amazon or at the mall. You might've spent enough money to install running water in a small village in the Sahel, but at least you've still got a bit left over for the "widows and orphans."
This unholy trinity in some ways form a henge of idolatry to the gods of late-stage capitalism. Grouped with Thanksgiving in the United States it is a triptych of indulgence that would make Hieronymous Bosch slightly ill, followed by the figleaf of charity to set the consumer's mind at ease. He can rest easy as night for he is no wallower in the city of swine, content upon his relishes. He has also given to the Kiwanis, and thus can continue to dream his gravy dreams, content in the knowledge that he "helped make a difference."
Charity degrades and demoralises.... Charity creates a multitude of sins.
There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.
--Oscar Wilde
Giving Tuesday is the foul idol to the neoliberal dogma that offloads the public good into private hands, trusting to the wisdom of the marketplace to decide what is worth keeping. It is the logical outgrowth of an American cultural policy that created the 501(c)3 nonprofit system, which assumes it is sufficient public support to exempt from certain taxes organizations established for public benefit. Celebrate them and encourage the individual to give. The steel strings of gratitude that were played upon the previous Thursday and turned to garrote the individual. "It's Giving Tuesday, after all. Why aren't you giving?" It becomes the individual, driven by guilt, who is called upon to contribute additionally and prop up the public good.
Giving Tuesday is prominent on my calendar because I work in education. Not only do I work in education, I teach the theatre arts at a chronically under-resourced branch campus of a larger institution. Each year, I go about my social media, hat in hand, and I ask support. My workplace has incentivized this by offering $100k in matching funds, until it runs out. But! If you get X number of individual donors, your fund gets a $500 boost! So every fund and unit in the school dog-piles, throwing elbows, biting and gnashing, the fashion school is particularly adept with their scissors, and the athletes get in ahead of us all and drain the pot like a refreshing bottle of citrus soda loaded with carbos.
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