Sign of the Apocalypse #39: Spend-crazy Americans

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Here's a slightly more serious SOTA than, say, Britney's birth sculpture or Jessica Simpson.

Or perhaps it isn't a SOTA at all.

Perhaps it's just a Sign of America's Imminent Collapse -- a SAIC, that is. Oh, wait, there's another series.

SOTA #39 = SAIC #1 (and this doesn't take account of the Bush presidency, which, along with its evil policy spawn, is as big a Sign of America's Imminent Collapse as there is)

So what is SAIC #1?

Here's the AP: "People once again spent everything they made and then some last year, pushing the personal savings rate to the lowest level since the Great Depression more than seven decades ago."

More specifically, the 2006 savings rate was -1 percent, the lowest rate since 1933. (And that was during the Depression, for fuck's sake.) Indeed: "The savings rate has been negative for an entire year only four times in history -- in 2005 and 2006 and in 1933 and 1932. (But Americans needed to spend whatever they had, and more, during the Depression. There's no such excuse now.)

I realize there are a lot of wonderful things to buy out there in the consumer wonderland, a lot of things you just have to have, that your very identify depends to a great extent on what you buy and what you own, that you are your possessions. I realize that our desire to acquire knows no bounds, as I said in the SOTA #38 post, and that our consumer culture is similarly boundless. I realize that our boundless consumerism is a consequence of the self-deification of man that coincided with the death of God, that is, of the modern project itself.

One of the founders of the modern project, Francis Bacon, referred to "the relief of man's estate". Apparently that now means owning, or putting on credit, as wide a widescreen TV as possible, an iPod that can hold more songs than have ever been recorded, a luxury sedan that can basically drive itself, a computer that attends to your every virtual need, and so on and so on. Like I said, there are no limits. Limits are for chumps (pre-modern chumps). Except credit limits. Thankfully, they keep raising them. Until...

Americans are spending more than they have and their country is doing the same. One day, one day soon, this recklessness will destroy them.