Our Many Splendored Things

I was watching television last night, and came across a Hoarders marathon on A&E. I am quite simply in love with this show and the people it portrays, with whom I feel an odd kinship. I watched two or three episodes in a row as I cooked dinner, consciously, deliberately and unhappily not drinking or getting high.

Sometime during my meal of short ribs and asparagus, there was a dreaded commercial break, so I switched over to the History Channel, where the fairly new show American Pickers was on. For those of you who are not familiar, American Pickers features these two huckster scoundrels who scour people’s farms, warehouses and homes in search of their hidden and largely unknown valuables, then offer these folks a fraction of the value of these possessions in order to procure their sordid profits. At the end of each episode, the show tallies what these guys paid for the items versus what they are actually worth. It is a truly repulsive display of greed and opportunism in our national life.

What makes this juxtaposition particularly interesting to me is the fact that many of these people who are being taken advantage of in American Pickers are in fact hoarders themselves. So we have, side by side on our TV “dial,” one show where health care professionals enter people’s homes to inform the pack rat occupants that: 1) their possessions are valueless and 2) they are mentally ill for keeping them, and another show where two assholes roam the country making a very good living raping these same character types of their “hidden gems,” which reinforces to the viewer the whole reason for hoarding in the first place.

Now, I’m not saying that the people on Hoarders don’t need help. They are the most extreme examples of a pretty common method that humans have of externally and perhaps inappropriately dealing with stress and attempting to exert some level of control over their existence. (We’ve all heard of pregnant mothers “nesting,” for instance.) But there is a certain level of unacceptable contradiction in the message these competing programs are sending.

People in general, but American’s in particular, love their possessions. Some might call this love “materialism,” but I think there is an important difference in the common usage of the word that differentiates the two, at least much of the time. And it seems quite logical that we should love and be proud of these things of our making, for what else separates and distinguishes the human race from the rest of the animal kingdom more than our ability to shape and form the natural world into these myriad manifestations of our will?

This little discourse is not meant to solve the riddle. But, in watching these two programs last night, I couldn’t help but wonder where that hidden boundary between sickness and normalcy lies. More importantly, I wonder what our societal motivations and consequences are in creating these seemingly imaginary, constantly moving lines of acceptability.