Our Excesses Set A Bad Example

There are times that the rest of the world looks at the culture we have created in these United States and wonders if we have gone nuts.

One need go no further than the phenomenon of the Tickle Me Elmo doll to find a prime example. Shortly, as the National Football League playoffs lead us up to January’s Super Bowl game, we will have another example.

The key word is “excess.”

We don’t seem to be able to control ourselves; we have given ourselves to excessive displays. We are a society revolted by $650 ashtrays in fighter planes but which spends similar amounts for a doll not worth a fraction of that.

Nothing can be more illustrative than the National Classified Advertising column of last Sunday’s New York Times which had, listed under “Miscellaneous,” a chain of offerings of the Elmo dolls, playthings that originally were listed to retail at $29.95.

In one of the ads, the Elmo dolls were priced at $1,250 each. Another was set at a minimum of $500.

Elsewhere, I read about a radio station that auctioned off an Elmo doll. The winning bid was $3,500 but at least this was an auction that benefited needy children, children whose parents couldn’t even afford the retail value of the doll.

Ever since the Christmas shopping season began in November, the Tickle Me Elmo doll has been climbing to astronomical rates. Early in the season, persons were stripping them from the shelves of toy stores in anticipation of the windfall based on their familiarity with America’s trendiness toward excess.

Tickle Me Elmo was (is) a doll we had to have for our children at any cost. Six months from now, it probably will lie dormant in the toy chest, but for Christmas morning, the holiday could not be complete without an Elmo under the tree.

I wonder how many Cabbage Patch Dolls - the season rage of several years ago - remain in exalted positions today. I also wonder what middle, lower and impoverished America thinks about an upper middle and higher class of citizens who demand we balance the nation’s budget, while at the same time spending outrageous (no, vulgar!) sums of money for a vogue toy for some 6-year-old.

Were it not the Elmo doll, it probably would have been something like Disney’s dalmatians. Everything, it seems, now comes with little black dots on it as the end result of another brilliant marketing campaign from the folks in the Disney suits.

Next month, we will be treated to stories - and advertisements - about the cost of Super Bowl tickets. It won’t be about the face value of the tickets, which is outrageous in itself, but what fans and corporations are paying above and beyond the face value for the thrill of being in the Superdome while the game is being played - no matter that it is on free television.

Super Bowl excess goes beyond ticket prices. Corporate planes, corporate skyboxes, corporate parties all are planned as lavish exercises of wealth, most of it wealth accumulated by what it is you pay for the retail products of the corporations.

I am not advocating any form of socialism here. But I wish to point out that the excesses of a capitalistic society are very much in the spotlight at this time of year, in a particular year when it also is reported that charitable giving is on the decline.

One only can wonder about the minds at work - even now - contemplating what can be overstated in time for next Christmas season. Surely, in board rooms somewhere, thought now is being given to a campaign designed to whip the buying public into a fervor over a mere object that will have its Andy Warhol moments and then fall toward the bottom of the toy chest.

I can’t help but wonder what the people in Rwanda or Bosnia-Herzegovina must be thinking about this.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Howard Kleinberg Cox News Service