Friday is Black Friday – the day of “sales and offers” following Thanksgiving Day. Starting Thursday midnight and lasting thought to Sunday night. Monday is Cyber Monday – after three days of intense mass shopping, one more day–online this time. On Tuesday, we learn that the turnover of the last four days amounts to nearly five billion dollars. It is also the opening day of the holiday (Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s Day) season. The big tree in Rockefeller Centre is lit up. The weather seems to comply. Another storm hits the city, enveloping us in a rather cute and certainly not destructive cloud of snow.
On Wednesday, the sun comes out and the cold is milder. Everyone talks about the lottery jackpot and the amazing amount of half a billion dollars the winner will take after three consecutive draws without one.
On Thursday, we wake up to find out that the city has been miraculously decorated overnight with Christmas trees and festive lights. The weather is even milder and the talk is now centered on the harmful effects of gambling (lottery). Several people argue in favour of banning gambling when it comes to the weaker members of the working and middle classes because it essentially it constitutes an indirect tax on them. Barack Obama starts intensive meetings and debate to avoid the fiscal cliff, meeting, amongst others, the CEOs of the biggest financial institutions in the country (Goldman Sachs), as well as Mitt Romney. In both cases, both sides agree that they strongly disagree.
On Friday, the temperature rises and there is a feel of spring in the air. The "fiscal cliff” threat if the new federal budget does not pass until the end of the year continues despite the overall lack of interest from the public who are convinced a compromise will be reached eventually. They just hope Obama isn't the one doing most of the compromising… The battle is fought around the increased taxes of the people who earn more than 250.000 dollars per year. The Republicans don’t want the rich to pay any taxes because, as they say, they won’t have an incentive to create new businesses and new jobs. The CEO of Goldman Sachs put it more diplomatically: “The issue is not whether the government imposes more taxes to the rich in comparison to the poor, but whether it can find a way to create more rich people.” Just like Harry Potter.
Europe does not exist here – only as a fleeting reference in financial news shows. There is only America–and the "others", amongst which the Middle East whenever it ignites.
Television is indeed an integral part of this reality. The majority of journalists and newscasters are under 40. Most men seem between twelve and twenty years old and most women seem in their late twenties-early thirties. They talk as if they were at home or in the street – without any sign of formality albeit with great civility and eloquently succinct. The women wear revealing smart dresses and twenty-centimetre heels and they are gorgeous. They are also super-smart, shrewd and tough, doing their job with a straightforwardness that cannot be misinterpreted for rudeness, dispelling the clouds of obfuscation and evasion that politicians seek to raise.
TV ads are a completely different story. Companies selling similar products accuse each other. Big Pharma and companies peddling financial products are forced to dedicate 1/3 of their ads to the potential side-effects and risks of their products. After such barrage, you feel repressed: you can do and be anything you like – unless it kills you.
Warren Buffet, the richest man in the world according to Forbes, appears on every “classy” television show along with his best friend, the female journalist who wrote his biography. His aim is to help her become famous and her book a bestseller. In order to achieve the greatest possible impact, he offers a tasty news nugget to every show. In one he says he is passionately in favor of increasing in rich people’s taxes. In another he enthusiastically comments on the rumor that the head of JP Morgan may be appointed new Secretary of the Treasury. At Jon Stewart's Daily Show, Buffet says the money business is a relatively easy way for people of average intelligence to make vast amounts of money “simply because there are so much money on the table that even the crumbs the ‘experts’ pick are too many.”
Barbra Streisand is also currently on every television show to promote her new movie. As are all actors, singers and writers who have new products to sell.
Even if you are super famous or rich here, it is obviously a matter of principle to always fight fiercely for even more. As long as it aims at the promotion and profit of your work or the work of a company, an enterprise, a human being you are devoted to. Because it is also highly commended here to do something for people, or even a single person you care about even though you "don't have to".
This often conflicting mentality is the embodiment of idiosyncratic romanticism and innocence combined with incredible energy and practicality. At first, it seems alien to you. Then, it overwhelms you. It gradually becomes part of your mentality. Even when you sleep, you find yourself reviewing your life through a new prism, as if it were the life of another person that all of a sudden became yours.
