Christmas lights

The Christmas lights have been coming on for days, and with them comes that curious effect where traffic in cities seems to intensify and become even more difficult, more aggressive, more—precisely—impassable. Traffic jams without tone or sound, cars blocking the way wherever they belong, congestion on main roads, horns, horns, horns. A dissonant symphony of horns, loudly proclaiming one of the characteristics of this time of year: the surge in all forms of incivility. People calling out, people pushing, people fighting in the street, in entertainment venues, in shopping centers. "It's the Christmas spirit," they proclaim, while then hurling insults at someone who has just passed by or walked in front of them. Meanwhile, the Christmas lights adorn the streets and avenues, the facades, the shop windows, and even the trees on the street, with those absurd condom-shaped lights that are screwed onto the trunks. Globalization makes the landscape more or less the same in all large cities of the Western world, and Palma, which thanks to tourism has all the disadvantages of a large city but none of the advantages, is an exception.

Christmas isn't a time for family and reflection, as the tireless cliché keeps repeating (clichés, by definition, are tireless and sticky: the very act of writing 'tireless cliché' is itself a tireless cliché), but rather a commercial season. From a news perspective, it's measured by the average spending per citizen, by the quantity of hams and lobsters sold in delicatessens and fishmongers at markets and supermarkets, and, of course, by the number of hotel bookings. These figures are always exorbitant and are always followed by the appearance of some hotel representative who complains/threatens that the results aren't good enough and that the government must pour more money into their sector, because otherwise they'll have to lay off or put more workers on precarious contracts (then, or shortly after), someone else asserts. Christmas lights, like music and increased traffic, serve as incentives for shopping. They are nothing else. With the right lighting, human animals react Pavlovianly with the impulse to consume, to buy whatever, just as farm chickens eat feed as long as they are under artificial light.

Christmas lights are a blatant symbol of capitalist hegemony, and in these tense times, they have become an ideological banner. Faced with the threats of climate change—which should be, but aren't, a top priority for governments worldwide, especially those in the so-called developed world, and for their citizens—scientists have advised reducing superfluous electricity consumption, with Christmas lights being the prime example. The response from the right, and from capitalism in general, has been the usual one: if you don't want soup, you get a whole cup and a half. More lights than ever, competitions to build the biggest and tallest Christmas tree, and so on. The biblical parable of the golden calf, from the cycle of stories about Moses and the Exodus, has never been more relevant: it's a tale about greed and its close cousin, stupidity.