Top Shop Bottom-Feeding With The Sheeple

Warning: mild ranting ahead...

Watching sheeple in a shopping frenzy on TV the other night was depressing experience - woe is the world, the West, the West End of London at least. BBC Two's Robert Peston Goes Shopping, Addiction showed the extent to which some people are consumed by consumerism, the Primark riot  epitomising all that's pathetic about the sheeple's craving for cut-price crap.

I say make everything more expensive to starve them into submission. Submitting to what, though? The fact that they don't need most of the crap they buy and they'd be better off basket-weaving, baking cakes....even making Art...

Shops are the holy places where sheeple seek solace from the misery of their everyday lives in the form of cut-price salvation. Buy, buy happiness. We're all consumers, craving relief from the spiritual void where 'meaning' and 'belief' in something supposedly once existed. What else is there? God? Worship Philip Green, Top Shop's boss, instead. His retail group isn't called Arcadia for nothing - it's offering utopia, if you've got the cash.

Peston's programme partly covered the 'boom years', when everyone's credit cards got swiped to open the doors of the magic kingdom promising endless material goods. Typical of a business journalist he made no effort to explore the deeper meaning of all this. That would be too difficult. It would lead to the inevitable conclusion that Karl Marx was right about 'excess and immoderation' - sheeple of the world unite, you having nothing to lose but your chain stores. Change too many minds in this matter and the economic system collapses - we can't have that.

Like you, a person of Taste and Refinement, I'm immune to the lure of low-cost clothes and low-life desperation to look like a celebrity. We appear to be superior beings, you and I, as we mute all the ads on telly and shun material dependence for...er...something better. What is better? Anything's better than being a moron who's willing to trample over other morons to get the best deal. But hey, that's capitalism, eh? That's capitalism graphically illustrated as the sheeple succumb to the lure of pointless goods that will only give them momentary pleasure.

Thankfully I don't have loads of cash to fling around, otherwise I might be a fat Tory in a fast car and huge house. Or I might just own Merzbow and Throbbing Gristle box sets, which I'd house in a music room, right next door to the library. Actually, I don't think even wealth would inspire me to buy the Merzbow box set, which I see has sold out at Boomkat - well, there's people with money and a taste for Noise - who'da thunk it?

Come the revolution pianos will be as cheap as Primark t-shirts and equally desirable to the sheeple. Come the revolution Artist's materials will be as cheap as Top Shop fashion wear...but then The Kids would dispose of canvases and oils just as quickly, probably.

We're on a fast spin cycle of consume and reject, a bulimic binge on bargain goods. It has to end somewhere. We're in an economic recession, so roll on the good times when more of us can work to buy our way into a state of bargain bin heavenly bliss...