The
Brady Archive
Variety
and What Happened to It
By
Robert Brady, (KJ
48)
Long ago,
when true variety was in our own hands, the choices were always right
before our eyes. Today, when our global spectrum of choices includes
not only whether to buy a house or a car in which hemisphere, but whether
to buy an infinitely colored version of a hundred models of a thousand
brands with or without bay windows or infinite options, or which of
the dozens of meals on the menu or several hundred tv channels or thousand
destinations, magazines, cookies, shirts, bicycles, living rooms, shoes,
computers, degrees, CDs or lifestyles we prefer, we may not be aware
of the extremely narrow range of choices whence our newly overtaxed
powers of decision evolved. Our forebears had no loincloth, then after
a very long time they had one loincloth. And until but a few lives ago,
variety was a matter of actual choice: if we couldn’t find it,
we made it, out of the various materials locally available, and we made
it well. Or we knew who made it. Now with fewer stars in our skies and
fewer life forms on earth than ever in history, thanks largely to our
rampant taste for variety at any cost, we get to choose in a new dark
among millions of blackbox products made far away by strangers and machines,
and what does it get us? Overstocks, remainders, fat, sick, depressed,
overflowing landfills, newly discovered toxins. Can we really handle
so much artificial choice, not to mention the resulting detritus? As
with any other habit, we need more and more of the stuff to veil our
accruing loss. In the space of our own lifetimes we have diminished
the world’s very own original and beauteous variety, until now
we depend upon vast warehouses of artifice for proof of life’s
diversity and interest, the “gear” of living. Are we now
cryptically seeking reasons for living in these things? Back in the
days when true variety comprised not hangars of inventory but the actual
world around us, with skies full of various birds, forests full of various
trees, fields full of various wildflowers, waters full of various fish,
we were nourished every moment by the natural variety we’d evolved
and grown up with (and still carry in ourselves, but seldom visit).
We weren’t yet the patchworks of curricula/career/retirement that
we are today, melanges of soaps, sitcoms, news sports and entertainment,
behaving like the movies, living out our self-help bestseller lives
with shrinking forests and emptying oceans beneath contrailed skies.
Beyond the turning point, which is right about here, variety turns out
to be no choice at all.
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