so, did you help kill anybody yesterday?

if, good netroots activist that you are, you observed buy nothing day this friday, you probably didn’t find yourself involved in a murder. thank you and congratulations!

but if you were one of several hundred shoppers mobbing up at the valley stream wal-mart before its 5am opening bell, maybe you did help kill somebody. could your foot on the neck or chest of Jdimytai Damour have been part of the straw that broke his 34-year old back? you may never know. or maybe you will, as police are now reviewing the surveillance tapes (hard to call them security tapes, since they ain’t seemed to make a fucking thing any more secure) in an attempt to identify the people who walked over — WALKED OVER — Damour after knocking him to the ground. criminal charges may result if any positive IDs can be made. unlikely, but i’m glad they’re trying.

i remember the first time fans were crushed to death at a rock show, almost thirty years ago, when 11 people suffocated in ohio when all they wanted was to see The Who live. since then, dozens more – from denmark to venezuela and london to indonesia – have died this way at concerts.

though the surface details of these killings are the same (too many too-eager people in a too-small, too-poorly-supervised space) there are stark differences at their core.

at a live show passions run high for two reasons: the love that the audience has for their artist, and the prospect of that artist taking unexpected risks to push that night’s performance over the top and into brilliance. it’s the anticipation of shared magic in a dark theater before thousands of sympathetic witnesses. there is a breathless pre-show exhilaration in the air, among the crowd, that is unlike anything else. i understand this feeling well, having spent countless hours on line in the freezing cold hoping to get belly-to-stage for patti smith, driving all the way to albany to see amanda palmer, sleeping overnight outside now-defunct tower records on 8th street in hopes of snagging a pair of tickets for mj’s Thriller tour. (what can i tell you? starting something was my twenty-something soundtrack.) so, while concert crushings are insane and utterly unjustifiable, the causes of the headlong fan rush are not incomprehensible for anyone who has been deeply touched by the work of an artist.

now consider what is at the core of something like yesterday’s wal-mart stampede. i must have that wii for johnny. i must save that ten dollars on the food processor. i must stretch those xmas shopping dollars far and farther and farther so that the kids can have more.

then consider what generates this bottomless need, what has turned us into a nation of eternally unsatisfied must-haves, where even houses with two dozen closets can’t contain one family’s shit, all the single-season wonders that simply must be had. that one must trample the part-time store clerk to get one’s holiday-shopping hands upon. people weren’t always like this, and it’s no accident: this eternally insatiable thing has been quite consciously and intentionally generated by the multibillion dollar advertising economy. it was not rockstar love pushing those black friday hordes forward; it was the glitz and seduction of nonstop, often subliminal, advertising campaigns. it was the neon sneakers in times square and dancing dinosaurs on the back of cereal boxes. that sweet recorded voice crooning over canned music at the mall.

consider the fact that even your bailout tax dollars are being used to fund corporate branding expenses. consider that some schools even sell ad space on their closed-circuit TVs and classroom walls.

we live in a culture so consumed and subsumbed by flashing ads lunging at us and over us and into our ears and onto our t-shirts and being sent home in brilliant four-color slicks with our kids from school and arriving in your mailbox and your email and on just about every single fucking page you visit on the web. 24/7/365, created by marketers with psychology degrees and billions of dollars of research at their disposal.

by all means, let’s hold the tramplers accountable if they can be found. by all means, let’s hold wal-mart accountable for irresponsible marketing practices like pairing “while supplies last” with a 5am opening time that guarantees a cold and impatient mob gathering for hours at their flimsy doors.

but let’s not forget the masterminds behind the monster of american consumerism and all its associated ugliness (not least of which is the environmental destruction caused by mindless mass consumption). we need to cut this kind of evil down at the root, and the root is on madison avenue. it’s time to regulate the where, when, how and how much of advertising in our lives. it’s time to take the public commons out of the hands of the advertisers who presently control it, and who do it, and us, absolutely no good.

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