Gathering Around Our Commodities

In the summertime here in Michigan, as elsewhere, you can often hear the approaching roar of man and machine. I often hear this roar pour down through the valley as if Odin himself were coming. But I know better. It's just a group gathered together atop their Harley-Davidsons.

The thunder rolls down the blacktop. Moving from town to town. That uniting element: it is the machine: it is a commodity.

You will often hear talk of Doctors and Lawyers hooking up with Mechanics and Oil-Rig Workers. Here the different classes mix. Here the socio-economic divide collapses. White-collar and blue-collar converge atop the unifying commodity: the Harley-Davidson.

Your leather. Your sunglasses. Your lid. A Harley. An open road. That's it. That is all that matters. And when you ride you ride with those who understand. When you ride, you ride with those who know what you know.

You ride with kin.

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Part of me wonders if the experience itself is the unifying element; or, if it is the machine--the commodity, the consumer item purchased from the showroom or the dusty barn. In short, would these people gather and unite without the presence of a Harley-Davidson?

Would we be able to see a socio-economic divide collapse short of the unifying element of the commodity in question? Is the commodity responsible fopr bring people together? Are commodities vacuums in which communion forms?

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It feels to me like there is at least some partial truth to this realization: that people gather around commodities now as an excuse to connect to some more basic, fundamental, primitive.... and dare I say, essential?

It's as if 'things' are capable of gifting us with a reason to commune: we have some 'thing' to connect over. In this view commodities act as bridges that unite the separative ego with others of its kind or ilk.

In one sense this is sad and speaks to what we have lost: that we are incapable of basic human connectedness; that we now need the crutch of a commodity to connect--i.e., an iPod, a Mac, a Movie, a Harley-Davidson. Which says to me that we are not entirely capable of connecting any longer without and apart from commodities--even spiritual commodities we find and discover in the spiritual marketplace (after all, let's not kid ourselves here that we are above it all!!)   ;  o )

And yet that is not the whole of it. I also feel a sense of hope in the possibility offered to us by 'things.' It is as if there is a power of communion lying in wait in the 'stuff' of the world... so that when two or more notice a 'thing' they are unified in and around.... neigh, because... of that 'thing.'

It's as if commodities can allow us access once again to the very experience of communion and connectedness with others that we maybe assumed at an earlier historical period commodities would replace.