we keep the wheel turning

Dante knew, describing in that great epic Divine Comedy the awfulness of hell aka a visit to The Toy Shop. With kids. "Though me is the way to the city of woe... abandon hope all ye who enter... Here sighs, laments, and deep wailings were resounding through the starless air; wherefore at first I wept thereat. Strange tongues, horrible utterances, words of woe, accents of anger...."

Let's look at the child in the toy shop now, four or so, a little girl all turned out in a fuchsia polyester tutu and with the arms of her plastic tiara firmly tucked behind her ears. A photogenic child. The reason the barren and the seedless spend desperate years in IVF. She is accompanied by a grandparent who pushes a trolley laden with large cardboard boxes filled with the latest Chinese-made plastic. It isn't her birthday and it sure as heavens isn't a July Christmas, of course, but this is the way of modern parenting. The determination to provide the warmest and most generous of childhoods. Something all of us were apparently denied.

At the little girl's home in outer suburban Sydney a room is given to the child's caprices, her whims. Ikea shelves bend under the weight of Fisher-Price, Mattel, Hasbro, Lego, Hot Wheels, Tonka, Dora, Transfomers, Skylanders, Barbie, Playskool and Nerf. An inflatable castle fills the garage.  Plastic walkers with wheels that spin and horns that honk are parked side-by-side along a wall. The gal's bed is a home for vulgar faux-velvet toys, each one rank with spit and old food.

All toys that were madly yearned for, the kid driven crazy by television advertising. It's life or death! Must! Have! But whose pleasures quickly wear out once the box is ripped open, the wires snipped, Electricity monitor,the batteries installed, and the realisation that the toy ain't anything like the magical device so deftly presented on screen.

"I want a new pillow pet! I want a new pillow pet! Nan! Buy me!" The kid holds a gaudy fur toy that resembles road kill tightly to her little breast. She isn't letting go, whatever the oncoming threat.

"You've already got 10 of 'em. I can't get another one," says Nan. But nan's are the softest touch of all, one foot in the grave will do that. And given the proximity of death and the instant love of a child, is their anything wrong with a small indulgence, a touch of gluttony?

"Oh,alright, put it in the trolley," she says. "You're so cute when you want something."

Over at checkout seven, a boy just about to enter puberty, has convinced his mum to sling a 50 at a Call of Duty cartridge for the his Playstation 3. One-hit kills and the ability to gamble online for money. What isn't there to love?

It's a miracle of marketing that a kid of three can recognise a brand that she's seen on TV and then locate it inside the toy shop. She can't read, but she can recognise the familiar logo and the brilliantly arranged graphics.

And it's a miracle of technology that boys, bursting with testosterone and energy, whose genetics make them unsuitable to sit still in a classroom for six hours a day, can remain motionless in front of a monitor playing video games throughout entire weekends.

We are sold a lot of things that stink.. It's part of the Capitalist game. Consumerism, however rank it is, moves the economy. We work, we spend, we generate employment, we keep the wheel turning. Even if it is mostly unnecessary, poorly-made junk that occupies a brief moment in the sun before becoming nature strip fodder, our spending is society's primary driver.
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