I was floundering through French class the other day when my professor asked the class, “Qui est-ce que tu admires?” and “Qu’est-ce que tu admires” (translation: “whom do you admire?” and “what do you admire?”). The class was required to decipher which question was more appropriate. “Qui est-ce que tu admires?” turned out to be the answer. One could admire a person and not an object. Our professor informed us that the phrase that asked “What do you admire?” was “stupide” and would not actually be used in French conversation. The class moved forward, and after a couple of joyful “hoh hoh hoh’s!” and a few frantic searches through my French-English dictionary, we were dismissed.
As I exited the building and began walking through the South Mall, I saw many owners of Dolce&Gabbana sunglasses, MP3 players and cell phones passing one another staring straight ahead unconsciously. I began to follow suit as I grabbed my iPod out of my backpack and prepared to assume my role in the zombie nation. That’s when I stopped myself and rethought the question posed in class. Which really serves as the more relevant question in today’s society: “Whom do you admire?” or “What do you admire?” Perhaps the question isn’t as “stupide” as first suggested. Is it possible that we do put more stock into material objects than we do people?
It was Madonna, the great poet herself, who once said, “You know that we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl.” Times have changed in that Madonna is now old and crazy, but the world she described is not that different. Purchasing items we don’t really need is an American pastime that we cling to as dearly as guns and religion. And buying stuff that we can’t afford, well, that’s more American than a McDonald’s baked apple pie that was probably made in China. As was once written in Mad magazine, “The only reason a great many American families don’t own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.”
While the conventional view is that our material objects are merely status symbols, Andy Warhol had a different take on the matter. He once said, “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see a Coca-Cola, and you can know that the president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.” Whether our consumerism serves as our great equalizer is debatable, but Warhol most certainly had a point. Owning a MacBook at UT won’t distinguish you, but it will certainly give you something in common with thousands of other students here.
There’s a medium between being consumer-obsessed and being Amish. It seems that most of us, including myself (hell, especially myself) fail to achieve this medium. It is our constant need for more that shields us from achieving true happiness, which, with time, I’m starting to learn isn’t necessarily a 90-inch plasma TV. Paul Heyne, a former economics professor at the University of Washington, summed it up best when he said, “The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have — and that is a moral problem, not an economic one.”
How do we rediscover the value of true human contact and interaction? Honestly, I’m not sure, but a possible solution may be to spend a day on skates rather than online, or to try striking up a conversation with the stranger who’s digging his elbow into your kidney on the 40 Acres bus rather than plugging yourself into the matrix and ignoring your fellow squished patrons. The sad truth, however, is that the odds that we will become less disjointed with one another as technology advances is unlikely at best. Which brings me back to another phrase often uttered in my French class: “C’est la vie.”
Treadway is a radio-television-film junior.
