With the death of communism, capitalism now faces a far graver threat. The threat that it faces is white America.

When European immigrants flooded into this country during the Industrial Revolution, every effort was made to assimilate them.

A deliberate attempt was made to destroy the European culture of immigrants so that they would become “Americans.” The gateway to becoming American was the newly emerging consumer culture.

If you are wondering what consumer culture is, it’s the billboard flickering in your living room and the pile of CDs in your bedroom. It is the clothes in your closet and the junk that fills your life.

The result of this transformation is familiar to us all. Despite the misunderstandings of some of my more casual readers, I have never made the claim that race and culture are identical.

Indeed, my celebration of multiculturalism necessarily cuts across all racial lines. However, the sad truth is that mainstream American culture is a consumer culture, and Americans of European descent are at the heart of this culture.

The European cultures of these immigrants were systematically cloned by consumerism and then systematically destroyed. The result is morality through TV commercials and the pile of junk you get at Christmas.

The holiday of Christmas is a perfect example. What was once a Christian holy day has become an extended advertising campaign encouraging people to wallow in greed and materialism.

It is a sad comment on how far Christianity has deteriorated that the most we hear from Christians are feeble calls to remember the “reason for the season.” A Republican Christian should be an oxymoron instead of a sure formula for political success.

But all of the European traditions of white America have suffered this fate, and white America has come to accept it.

Our holidays are excuses for credit cards. Buying junk has become our culture.

Now some will claim that I am a Marxist. In the old days, anyone who criticized consumer culture was labeled a communist and quickly put in his place.

Now, communism is dead. The boogey man is dead. Those nervous defenders of the status quo can only titter and say, “He’s a Marxist, how quaint and ridiculous.”

Well, I am not a Marxist. It’s just that anyone with character has to be turned off by the hallucinatory commercials that tell us that buying gum will make us happy.

If you have eyes, you can see the Nike shirts competing with the Eddie Bauers to see who can be the most mediocre.

Why does Christmas seem so empty? It seems empty because it costs $19.99. It doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s a big lie and a bad joke.

Race and culture are not the same thing, but white America has the mainstream junk culture in a death embrace because it’s all that white America has left.

As whites become a minority (and the day is not far off), the problem will become more pronounced.

You see, consumer culture knows no color. It will make a commodity of any culture it can, creating junk analogs and discarding meaningful culture. The thriving cultures of the fringe have no natural protection from being sucked into the junk machine.

Their protection is the racism and xenophobia of white America. Consumption is all that white America has left, and it will not relinquish control.

In order to make commodities of other cultures, consumerism must incorporate those cultures, but white America will not allow this.

Introducing new holidays and traditions necessarily implies a loss of control for white America, and however much consumerism might try to drag white America along, it will not be moved.

An essential component of racism is paranoia. As commercials start to speak to other cultures, white America’s paranoia will grow. Its racism will grow.

It will clutch consumer culture ever tighter, excluding all others from the center. Consumerism will buck and struggle to escape the icy fingers of an atrophying culture, but it is too thoroughly tangled in the web of white America.

Consumerism helped plant the seeds of racism in mainstream culture, because racism is the whip of assimilation. And now that same racism will drag consumerism down with it.

Already the commercials are growing more frantic. Already consumerism is struggling against the chains of racism, but there is no escape.

Consumerism and white America will dance around and around each other until both disappear in a flash of irrelevance. White America is fascinated with the apocalypse because Armageddon is far easier to face than disappearing without a trace.

The future, once again, is on the fringe. Life is on the fringe.

How ironic it is that this life is protected from the junk machine because the junk machine doted too long on Europeans.

It is easy to slip out of mainstream culture. It is easy to find life on the fringe. Again, everyone is welcome. As for the rest of you, keep defending that house on the hill. You go on defending it until the roof falls in.

---

Brian Johnson is a junior in English and philosophy from Amarillo, Texas.