The Amazon Public Wish List

ON THE DAY after Christmas, when Americans in their tens of thousands are happily returning unwanted Christmas presents, I am afraid that it is my duty to report that there is disquieting news from the on-line shopping front. I learned purely by chance of this unhappy development, one that I had not heard reported previously in the mainstream media or indeed any other, more reputable, media outlet. And I was shocked.

A young acquaintance told me that Amazon now allows you to publish your Amazon Wish List to the world. If your friends and admirers are wondering what to buy you for your birthday, they can save themselves a lot of trouble by going to Amazon.com, entering your name or your e-mail address and checking your Wish List.

Many of us have grudgingly accepted the idea of gift registries for weddings and even for babies. There was in the old days a solemn bourgeois gravitas about the department store wedding registry, and indeed a definite social utility to the rationalization and systemization of the harrowing business of choosing gifts for newly-weds, that is, if we pass over in silence that the wedding gift problem was created by the department store phenomenon in the first place. In the old days, there wasn’t much that you could give a newly wedded couple. But when the first miracle occurred on 34th Street (the opening of Macy’s, not the later, hyped up affair) a whole world of choice opened up to the human race. Women learned that they could gift each other without limit, and so they did.

Now Amazon has extended the sensible and practical gift registry concept beyond all bounds, encouraging rampant and unnecessary advertisement of needs, wants, and wishes online. With just a couple of clicks, you can publish your Wish List for all the world to see. How crass! How horribly dirty! How incredibly low!

But it’s worse than that.

Up to now, we American shoppers could at least hide our shameful little lusts away in the back of our minds, reasonably safe from the prying eyes and ears of judgmental liberals. An American man was required to advertise his choice in career, his choice of tailor, his taste in whisky, his house, and of course, his taste in women, but not much more. But now everything has changed. Now a man will be judged by the taste he displays in his Wish List. It’s just another darn thing that the modern man, pushed and shoved and pummeled as he is already, would rather not have to do.

The menace of an Amazon public Wish List is that it threatens to expose the universal banality of our tiresome little appetites. We are all so boringly alike; we want what everyone else wants. Take a look at Amazon’s top seller lists. The top-selling book this hour is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (pre-order); the top selling jewelry item is a Genuine Amethyst Peridot Citrine Crystal Chip Bracelet (for $3.99!); the top selling electronics item is a Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player. What do you think? I agree; there’s no other word for it: Boring!

If I were to have a public Wish List, it would have to be more about me than about what I want: it would advertise what I thought that someone like me ought to want, not what I really want. I’d be like the insufferable college professor who feels the need not just to be the world genius on the Duke of Wellington’s opposition to the Reform Bill but an expert on wine and a sophisticated art connoisseur as well.

Of course, you may say that I’ve missed the point entirely. The real problem with Amazon’s new wheeze, you’ll say, is that they will use America’s Wish List in their marketing, figuring out how to market new products to us based upon the contents of our Wishes. You’re wrong, of course. A bigger danger is that Amazon’s Director of World Domination will be able to call up Scholastic Books any time of the day or night and ask the Harry Potter account executive how much it would be worth to know how many copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince are backed up in Pre-order.

Could Amazon’s public Wish List bring the end of civilization as we know it? It could, but somehow I can’t get too exercised about it. You see, I don’t plan to use the Amazon public Wish List. Not because I don’t want other people to know how boring I am, but for a mean-spirited, selfish reason. I’d rather go out and buy stuff myself. And anyway, I buy my on-line books at BarnesandNoble.com. On Amazon, you have to pay sales tax on orders shipped to Washington State.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Home

American Manifesto

Chapters

Chappies

roadtothemiddleclass

presented by Christopher Chantrill

Follow @chrischantrill • Contact