Hoarding

I'm living in a hotel room for this next week and therefore have a TV!!!! very exciting!!!... anyway, I came across a show called 'Hoarders' on A&E which was pretty enlightening and pretty relevant to Excess!

According to Wikipedia Compulsive Hoarding "is the acquisition of and failure to use or discard such a large number of seemingly useless possessions that it causes significant clutter and impairment to basic living activities such as mobility, cooking, cleaning, showering or sleeping.".. .. showering?? sleeping!?!?!?!?!? ack!!

Here is a picture of hoarding I found online at www.anxietyandstress.com/hoarding.html:



I found this fascinating for a few reasons:
the hoarders on this show seemed to know that what they were doing was detrimental to them and those around them, but just really didn't know how to stop...
there are probably many people who have not let their hoarding get so out hand, but are also close to the edge- my dad used to keep a lot of useless things and I have this distinct memory of the family helping him throw things away once a year..
I also relate to hoarding!! I find myself battling with throwing things away that I don't have any use for... part of it is the want of stuff and part of it is hating to feel like something is going to a landfill (and maybe a little genetics??)... I wonder if I could ever get out of hand like the people in the A&E show?!?!?! am I a closet hoarder?!?!?!?!

Cargo Cults: The Worship of Objects

I came across this interesting and somewhat disturbing interview with monologuist Mike Daisey in last week's TimeOut New York. Here's the link to the whole article:
http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/theater/81093/mike-daisey-qa#ixzz0ZJiXBqTs

In it, he discusses his new piece, The Last Cargo Cult. I'd never heard of a cargo cult, and was shocked to find out what it is:

What exactly is a cargo cult?
During World War II, the United States set up military bases on islands far away from the conflict. That meant that some islands that had very little contact with the outside world abruptly had airfields and U.S. airmen on them and chocolate and cigarettes and refrigerators and radios and all this magical awesome shit. When the Americans left, religions sprang up that worshipped America—or, more specifically, the objects of America. What they want is cargo, which we often infantilize as, like, iPods and tissue paper and jewelry. But cargo is medicine and guns and knives: It’s tools. They want power. And they want that power explicitly to preserve their way of life.

Can you imagine?! An entire religion centered around the obsession with material objects?! And how fascinating that the possession of these objects in turn symbolizes power for these isolated islanders. Daisy goes on to talk about the parallel with this seemingly absurd belief system and "what I believe is the overwhelmingly dominant religion of the first world, which is the financial system—a belief system that relies on trust and faith and sympathetic magic." Our belief in the financial system and desire for wealth in turn leads to the buying of, and perhaps obsession with, material objects. So in actuality, while it may seem crazy to create an entire religion around cargo, how far removed are we Americans from the things we worship ourselves?