Giant skeletons and fake balls of string

What do our consumption habits say about America's values these days?

What do you imagine the people who manufacture these baubles might think of our values? (RS photo)

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Halloween season is past, meaning that people in neighborhoods hereabouts are packing up the 12-foot skeletons with LEDs in their eye sockets and stowing for another year the life-sized animatronic witches that for weeks have cackled and jerked suddenly in the night. Not soon enough for me, thank you.

Those giant skeletons started appearing on front lawns across the country five Halloweens ago, in one of the many disappointing trends that America has spawned lately. Every bit of outdoor holiday décor will someday wind up in a landfill, of course, aside from pumpkins, a blessedly biodegradable fruit. You might imagine a 31^st-century paleontologist digging up a jumble of what seem to be huge bones and concluding that giants once strode the earth in North America. “It was in the time of a leader known as Trump, when exaggeration became a norm, and the culture’s decline speeded up,” the scientist might assert.

“We don’t have many dependable sources from the time,” my imaginary future scientist would go on, “because that was when the government squelched serious journalism, and rewrote history to favor myth over truth.”

A silly notion, I know. But if you want silly, consider how Americans must seem to factory workers in China, say, if they hear that the giant skeletons they’re creating for Home Depot retail for $300 — which is nearly double that nation’s average weekly wage. What must they think we value?

Last summer we spent a vacation week in a rental unit that was decorated in a style that might be called “contemporary disposable,” its walls and tables adorned with stuff that looked vaguely authentic — including a plastic bowl made to look like shiny metal that was filled with little plastic globes resembling balls of string. (Yes, that’s the photo above.) What purpose is served by such decoration, beyond suggesting wealth enough to waste? A report released during the first Trump administration projected that America will run out of landfill space in about 2036. Why do you suppose that might that be?

It’s hard to say whether this is more troubling from an environmental standpoint or from a cultural one. A society that creates 258 million tons of trash annually might be considered criminally careless with its resources, and a culture that encourages the acquisition of worthless stuff hardly seems thoughtful when one-fifth of the children in the country don’t have enough food to grow up strong.

I don’t mean to sound like a grouch. I love the twinkling holiday lights that signal the season of Christmas and Hannukah, and just now our dining room table displays a centerpiece of colorful and odd-shaped autumn gourds from a farm down the road. Maybe I should see the display of giant fake skeletons as a useful reminder of our mortality, and extend generosity of spirit to people who consider Halloween their favorite holiday — because it’s all in fun, right?

But it’s hard not to imagine that the proliferation of junk on our lawns and in our living rooms isn’t somehow connected to the presence of a morally bankrupt and emotionally hobbled rich guy’s son in the White House. In the Age of Trump, authenticity seems to usually yield to performance, and acquisition is seen as an entitlement. The giant skeletons seem entirely appropriate, and depressing.

During the decades that I led newsrooms, delegations from other countries showed up a few times a year to see how American journalism operated. Even after watching me sketch a front page and hearing my explanation of how a free press functions, though, I imagined my audience was likely skeptical, because they couldn’t understand the broader context of the American experience. That is, a society is defined not only by the operation of its institutions, but also by the values that are shared by its citizens.

About four decades ago, a former federal official whose career had been spent in jobs aimed at bridging world cultures undertook to list the values that guide Americans. L. Robert Kohl, an Iowa-raised diplomat, wrote a short monograph in 1984, “The Values That Americans Live By,” which he hoped would help foreign visitors understand this country. He had earlier written a book to help Americans moving abroad understand the cultures they were about to inhabit.

Kohls came up with a list of 13 values that he had observed to be shared by most Americans — from “individualism, independence and privacy” to “future orientation/optimism.” From understanding those, he wrote, outsiders might better figure out activity in this country that might otherwise seem “strange, confusing or unbelievable.” For example, Kohls said, an American who is asked for directions would likely offer instructions in great detail but wouldn’t consider walking two blocks to lead the foreigner there, because Americans’ “self-help concept” — one of those 13 top values — would suggest that no adult would want to be dependent on somebody else, and another key value, Americans’ “future orientation,” would lead them to figure that it was better to prepare the foreigner to find their own way the next time they’re around.

From the remove of 40-plus years, Kohls’ list seems a bit naïve, not to mention dismissive of American diversity. But it also seems obviously and sadly descriptive of another place entirely from the America of today. We might wish American culture valued “directness/openness/honesty,” as Kohls said it did in the 1980s, rather than cheering on the success that seems to often follow deception. And we pine for the days when we truly believed that “the future will be better and happier” than now, since a large majority of Americans tell pollsters these days that the nation’s future will surely be more bleak than the present.

Yet some of what Kohls observed remains current. Notably, Kohls listed “materialism/acquisitiveness” as an American value. His fellow citizens, Kohls wrote, “give higher priority to obtaining, maintaining and protecting their material objects than they do in developing and enjoying interpersonal relationships.” Kohls wasn’t judgmental about it; he wrote that Americans see what they own as “just the natural benefits which always result from hard work and serious intent — a reward, they think, which all people could enjoy were they as industrious and hard-working as Americans.”

And there it is, a piece of the American exceptionalism that skews our relationships with fellow travelers on this small planet, as present then as it is now. You know, other nationalities could be rich enough to buy worthless giant skeletons, too, if only they worked as hard as Americans. Kohls listed contrasting values in other societies, noting that American materialism might yield elsewhere to spiritualism. Likewise, where Americans stress competition, others might value cooperation. Too bad for those other folks, right?

Here at home, those $300 giant skeletons and living room baubles, then, might simply be a way of showing the neighbors that your hard work has yielded rewards: You, too, could afford such frippery if you worked as hard as I do, say the Joneses to the Smiths. Keep up!

And you have to wonder if the dissatisfaction and alienation that is so apparent across the land, which pundits have said explains the success of Donald Trump, doesn’t have something to do with this superficial set of values. How much happiness can you derive from yard décor? Even the most acquisitive among us surely realizes that adornments don’t really connote wealth or value, any more than the “Hispano-Moresque” style of Mar-a-Lago and golden tchotchkes in the Oval Office signal good taste.

They’re more akin to the staging that real estate agents now recommend when it’s time to sell a house, a substitution of superficiality for authenticity: For an investment of a few thousand dollars, you can remove what’s personal, replace it with the ordinary, and prime your home to be the kind of neutral anyplace that is the antithesis of authentic. That’s why there’s a market for make-believe balls of string.

So we are left to ask: What do we really value now as Americans? After decades witnessing the decline of institutions that used to set our standards — including religion, the media, higher education and government — how do we even choose what matters to us?

If we are born very lucky, we are raised to be not just reactive, but reflective — though we also can learn the skill of thoughtfulness along life’s path. By examining our experiences, feelings and actions, and by considering the qualities we admire in other people, we can usually figure out what brings us joy, fulfillment and purpose. Then our task is to pursue those personally rewarding priorities.

But we are all influenced by what surrounds us, and we can be weighed down by a range of pressures, both individual and societal. Indeed, most lives will be marked by disappointments and tragedies involving work, loved ones and physical circumstances. Many of us are frustrated these days because on top of those inevitable life pressures, we are now continually bombarded by the effects of a culture that is under attack by careless people of dubious morality.

You can list the ways that this decline is touching us all.

Our society decades ago proudly valued egalitarianism — in Kohl’s 1984 version, “Americans believe that God views all humans alike without regard to intelligence, physical condition or economic status” — but now we witness growing division based on how people are born and where they live, and government policies that intentionally increase economic, racial and ethnic inequality.

The notion that change is positive and good, long a tenet of America’s self confidence, has been sacrificed to a MAGA vision of returning to the supposed greatness of some earlier time — when nobody worried about climate change, for example, when people believed harmful myths of history that kept segments of our society repressed, when bland homogeneity was valued over glorious diversity.

And Kohls’ perception of an America characterized by “directness, openness and honesty” has vanished. After all, that can’t be credibly asserted when the political party that controls our government kowtows to a leader who blatantly lies as a matter of course — a fact recognized by everyone, but which partisans refuse to acknowledge for fear of retribution.

This decline of American culture is deeply troubling, even though many people may not cite precisely this as the cause of their distress. But the impact is felt by millions of Americans in their discomfort with the way things are now.

No, this doesn’t explain entirely why people want to put giant skeletons in their yards or worthless baubles on their shelves. But it does underscore why we who are fortunate enough to perceive this malaise — which you may feel as an ache, a disappointment, or a sorrow — must commit ourselves to working for a change of course. The values that have long guided us are not entirely lost, certainly, but it is surely our task to renew the best of them.

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IF YOU’D LIKE TO HEAR MORE from Rex Smith, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay, which is an earlier version of this week’s column, adapated for audio.

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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address. I love to hear from readers.

-REX SMITH