The Joyless Dead-End of Consumption
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a good op-ed piece by Thomas Frank, “Wall Street Mocked American Values.”
Frank talks about the demise of niche periodicals devoted to helping the really rich figure out how to spend their money “properly, conspicuously, flamboyantly.”
Reading Frank’s piece theologically, one can hear echoes of Augustine, speaking about God: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”
Consumption, even in the extreme, can only provide distraction, not delight.
Frank writes:
One does not get the sense that its trader readers aspired to live this way because they were jolly bon vivants. Quite the opposite. At one point it its intermittent pursuit of the best possible record player, for example, Trader Monthly described what it claimed to be a $300,000 turntable as “a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home.”
If you didn’t understand why someone would want to greet their guests in such a way–and as a nation we certainly didn’t–then you didn’t understand what it meant to be a trader.
But Trader Monthly did, and in limned the trader so that all might behold his glory. A trader was a sort of embodiment of the primal drama of capitalism; not just an uberconsumer, but a bullying, self-maximizing, wealth-extracting he-man, a lout in full.
Traders often “craft themselves to be shocking,” says Caitlin Zaloom, and anthropologist at New York Universty who has studied trader culture. “They try to make themselves into characters that embody the dog-eat-dog character of the market. In order to be a top speculator, you’re supposed to be able to crush those around you and aspire to your self-interest.
Scott Lamb pastored Providence Baptist Church in St. Louis for seven years, and now serves as Director of Research for the President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. 
Wow, $300,000 for an obsolete technology turntable? The middle finger gets bigger if the turntable was purchased with tax free money from a foreign source. Traders, who apparently define themselves by what they own or control, would be funny if they weren’t so sick.