Commercials

Commercials: adjectives packaged
as nouns, petty crimes committed
against ears and eyes, sometimes
full-on felony assaults paid for
by deepest vaults.

The White Supremacist cable
not-news shows raise volume
high, highest for commercials,
concussing brains to soften them up
for propaganda. Don't buy. Don't buy.


hans ostrom 2016

The Trinity in Your Hands

Believers, bow your heads.
Worship your phone. It is all things.
Its icons bind you
to the holy trinity
of Telecommunications, Infotainment,
and Consumption.

Accept the liturgy of apps,
the dogma of fake urgency.

Believers, tap your loving phone
with humble thumbs and fingers.
Stream and text. Forward and purchase.
Your phone will go with you
where you go, amen.


hans ostrom 2015

"City of Things," by Hans Ostrom

In the city of things, people
defer to heaps, piles, and stacks
of plastic and alloyed molded
things. The people are stopped
by stacked boxes, so they go
around or give up and sit
and lie. The people agree

to purchase, to take on and put
on a quota of things, a pre-set
set of things. The people
pray to things with the aid
of Thing Preachers in thing-
choked halls and littered
amphitheaters. Austere

and escetic people are shunned,
fined, scorned, and watched.
They're forced to wear
designated denigrating things.

It's quite thing, the city
of things, where over-abundance
is unlimited, loved, and legislated.
I got cut in the city
by an angular thing
I bumped into. I said I
am sorry to the thing.


hans ostrom 2014

These Things Called Years

These artificial things called "years":
how annoying. They're perceptual engines
that drive us through our lives, keep us
rushed and harried, depressed and habituated.

It all starts again on "January First,"
which we're urged to celebrate. On the
Second, we must report to work on time
or get fired, and we must start

counting the god-damned shopping-days left
til the Apocalyptic Sale. (Everything must go.)


hans ostrom 2013

make them want

make them want
what they don't
need and sell it
to them; that's the
creed of the
Consumocracy, our
churn of items.

the version of
that thing you just
bought's out of date,
ill-equipped by
equipment specialists
(go figure), ill-de-
signed.

instead of an apology,
you'll get an advert,
I said an ADVERT,
which will tell you
to buy thatthing2.0

or the all-new
SUPERTHING1.0.

get it, have it,
use it, show it,
talk about it. stroke
it. yeah, pet that
prime commodity.

goods and services,
Little People. get the
goods, or the
system will not
work, and you don't
want the system
not to work, now
do you? i thought not.

i say unto you,
consume until doomsday--
which has its own brand.


hans ostrom 2013

Corporations Keep Rats

Corporations keep rats.
They keep them running.
The rats have some cash,
which they pay
the corporation for stuff
the corporations make.
Run there! Pay here!

The bait is technology.
Hey,rat, run after
the new eye-fone 18.3Z!
Pay cash first! Or
put it on a rat-card!

Imagine if the rats
turned around one day
and said, Rat Master,
we don't want any
more stuff right now.
We like the look
of your throat. That's
what we want. For free.



hans ostrom 2013

"Consumocracy Blues" recorded

Consumocracy Blues

They're spending what they don't have
on stuff that they don't need.
Yeah, they're spending what they don't have
on things they do not need.
Maybe they need to slide into
life with a simpler creed.



hans ostrom 2013

Words Effective In Poems, Experts Say

(image courtesy of International PEN organization)








Make Poems Out of Words

If in doubt, make your poems with words.
It's awfully conventional, and individual
results will vary, but usually things work
out fine. Which words? Excellent question.

Let me suggest some possibilities: hail,
moist, ax, electron, pollen, choice, chew,
choke-cherry, Tanzania,, sweat, sweet,
sulphur, gluttony, knuckle, tongue, balk,
rip, Thunder Bay, and, the, when, hence,
fennel,Lesotho, slag, Uppsala, velvet,
and torque. Spread the words out
and place additional words among so
as to create meaning and pleasure.

Stop and take a look at what you've
arranged so far. Then rearrange
the words, as necessary. Rely
on instincts. If you need more words,
remember that English contains
between half a million and a million
words, that there are hundreds of
other languages, and that you may
create your own words. I myself
invented the word "consumocracy"
not long ago. This is just an example,
and I'm sure you can do better.
The number of poems
to be made of words is infinite, so
welcome to the big project.

Copyright 2009

Everything Must Go!

When I was in California briefly to visit a member of the family, I read in a San Diego newspaper that the corporation, Mervyns (no apostrophe, as far as I know), based in Hayward, California, had decided to declare bankruptcy. Mervyns is a lot like J.C. Penny, except with fewer household goods for sale. That's my sense, anyway.

The head of the corporation was quoted as saying (and I paraphrase) that they'd explored the possibility of being purchased by another corporation but that, ultimately, they decided that the best way to pay their creditors was to announce that they were going out of business and then conduct "going-out-of-business" sales (through the end of the year?). This was the first time I had heard a corporate executive articulate a business-practice I had long observed: Stores go out of business (slowly), but first they attempt to ingest one more large meal of cash. They do so by creating a sense of urgency, a kind of store-apocalypse, and consumers get the sense that they will be able to buy things very inexpensively by "taking advantage" of the "wounded" store, which is more likely taking advantage of them by "slashing prices" on things consumers don't really need and still making a nice profit.

Nonetheless, I'm sorry that Mervyns is going out of business. I kind of like stores that are on the lower end, so to speak, of the market, and my eldest aunt worked for Mervyns in Hayward for a long time. She died quite a while ago, but I tend to remain slightly sentimental about these things. I'm also sorry for the people who are working for Mervyns now. May they find good work speedily after Mervyns closes for real.

Anyway, I exhumed a wee poem about "everything must go," the customary tag-line for going-out-of-business-sales.

Close-Out


Hurry—everything must go!
This sale won’t last forever.
We accept all major credit cards
with unconditional love.
We’re closing our minds forever. The
savings are incredible, so don’t believe
them. We’ve forgotten what business
we’re in, so we’re closing our doors.
We know our business concerned
merchandise, which must go, so
hurry to the corner of Want and
Need. We’ve slashed our prices,
which are bleeding. You must
hurry, we must go, and everything
that doesn’t last forever is on sale.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Consumocracy Coda

Regarding the "consumocracy" (blog October 13, 2007), I must add that while glancing at NFL football games on TV, I saw three commercial advertisements, one for Burger King, one for Toyota, and one for Visa. Each has a tag-line or slogan, of course:

Burger King's is "Have it your way," which is lovely because it says the exact opposite of what Fast Food is all about--namely, that if you eat at a franchise-outlet, you will, by definition, have it the franchise's way. It's also lovely because it can be taken ironically, as being similar to "Knock yourself out," which is usually a prelude to conflict. "Have it your way" [followed by faux-weary sigh]--and battle ensues. Nonetheless, I do love the fact that burgers have a king. The universe of ground-beef is, indeed, feudal, a civilization in which the warlords McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King wage permanent war around the globe. If one were to open a Burger Princess restaurant, one would hear immediately from the King's lawyers, I assume.

Toyota's slogan is "Moving forward," which I presume is the least anyone would want from a motorized vehicle, although a vehicle's capacity to back up has proven itself to be useful, too. Why not: "Moving forward, backward, at angles, and in broad curves"? I guess that wouldn't be catchy enough.

Maybe you've seen the Visa commercial ad, in which "everyone" is swiping plastic Visa cards to pay for things, when someone who is obviously "different" pays with cash and slows down the pace of the crowd, which is being herded through a variety of retail-chutes. Apparently the herd-mentality in the U.S. has indeed taken over to such an extent that a) to pay cash is to be "independent," a stray from the herd, a rogue and b) to be "independent" in such a painfully basic way is to be disruptive, downright subversive, requiring the herd to become impatient with you, to threaten to ostracize you--to cast you out permanently because of the shameful behavior of . . . giving a clerk currency. The accompanying slogan is "Life takes Visa." This is a metaphysical statement. Reality now depends upon one's having an account at a large credit-card firm. Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, could not have written better cautionary satire. Indeed, the reality and language--the poetry--of the Consumocracy has far outstripped Orwell, who now seems a bit naive. It has also outstripped William Golding and Lord of the
Flies. Pray you have your credit-card with you if you are stranded with a pack of retail-shoppers.

As you move forward and have it your way, know, then, that Life takes Visa. If Visa is absent, . . . . yikes. I think we may safely conclude that the Consumocracy is permanently established. It is Life. We'll be right back, after these messages.

The Consumocracy

A brief recap: the U.S. ceased to be a republic long ago, experts say. We became an empire by pursuing expansionism. Then the U.S. apparently shifted toward a service-economy from an industrial or manufacturing-based economy. This is still a work-in-progress, I gather, but we import many more goods than we export, and more and more jobs seem to be in the service-sector. So the food served, the toy sold, or the car leased may come from outside our borders, but we still need people to bring the food to the table, "ring up" the toy at the cash-register (which doesn't ring anymore), and haul the car from the port to the car-dealership.

Because we're more of an oligarchic empire than a democracy and more of a service-economy than an old-fashioned capitalist, industrial political economy (smoke-stacks a-blazing), then maybe the proper signifier for the U.S. is "consumocracy." Everybody has the right to buy stuff, and we hope everybody does buy stuff, because the economy depends on these retail service-jobs. United we buy. In goods we trust.

Do I have the economic and political analysis all wrong? I sure hope so, and I think the odds are very good that my hope is supported by reason. Actually, I just like the word, "consumocracy," because of the way it sounds and because of the way it describes how I see the U.S. Before I turn this space over to a poem, however, I will recommend a book about American legal history and how the concept of laissez-faire took over. It's called Lawyers and the Constitution, by Benjamin Twiss, who knew what he was talking about (unlike some we could mention), and it was published way back in the early 1940s. Its style is fresh and direct, and the research is terrific. It was reprinted in 1973, so it's probably in lots of libraries.

The Consumocracy

If you don’t have it, you
must need it, and if you need
it, we can feed it to you. You’re
free to buy what you want,
and we’re free to buy ways
to entrance you to want what
we sell. This is not, as is
alleged, democracy mocking
itself. It is the consumocracy,
which the founding dads
intended their investment
to become. For a limited time,
we can offer you books and
digital videos that prove this point.
We’ll think of something
you don’t have and buy a
way to let you have it. We
like to let you have it. This is
how the consumocracy works,
see. See our product, sense
your need, see and want. Buy,
buy, see. See it there, laissez
faire. Eat the feed, pay
the fee, seed the greed. This
incredible deal won’t last! Call
now and we'll throw in something
else incredible for free. Call
now, or else.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom