The Consumer's Guide to Physics

In the capitalist cycle, consumers plays a small but noticeable role: through their purchasing patterns, they determine what is developed for sale, its location and means of assembly & distribution, where it is sold, its method of use, and how it is disposed when obsolete. This customer-focused cycle began with the Age of Marketing and it dawned when someone asked, "why don't we listen to the buyer for a change?"

The marketing concept worked very well for many years. Manufacturers listening to the focus-group mob psychology of the customer is why we pay less for better products. But something happened along the way. Instead of making purchases based on a calculus of quality and price, i.e. healthy competition leading to improved value, the overriding factor became price and price alone.

As a result, we have perceptually raised the standard of living through purchasing power while keeping real wages at 1980 levels - in effect, we are erasing the middle class yet everyone can still afford a houseful of stuff. The monster that was created got a will of its own, and shoppers were transformed into voracious, conveyor-belt consumers.

Consumer demands for ever cheaper stuff - and their concomitant loss of manufacturing jobs, tax revenues, and the 10X economic multiplier effect - are a key driver leading to a greater separation of wealth in the U.S., as determined by the Gini coefficient. From a figure of 40.3 in 1980 to 46.6 in 2008, this number indicates that the spread between the Haves and the Never Will Haves is widening like the Las Vegas odds of St. Louis winning the Super Bowl in 2010.

The rich, particularly Wall Street gamblers, are handy scapegoats, but ironically it is consumers and their insatiable desire to own stuff that is the root cause. The obvious question is "why would someone sell out their neighbor, town, or state just to own stuff? And what is this 'stuff' anyway?" Psychologists will certainly posit human-behavior theories, but I believe that this is a matter of high energy physics.

Ever since Einstein figured out that the fabric of space-time could be ripped like a cheap prom dress in the back seat of a rusted Buick, physicists have been working feverishly to find a theory that unifies all forces in the universe, what they call the Grand Unified Theory (GUT). The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is coming up to speed with the express purpose of finding the Higgs boson, the gravity or "God" particle that will supposedly explain why we have mass. And I thought it was because of high fructose corn syrup, saturated fat, and 500 cable TV channels.

In contrast to the real scientists, I have a theory that renders the GUT as useless as that term paper I just sold student #472-14-4916 titled "Probabilistic Outcomes Of Imbibed Fermented Agricultural Products and Coital Activity." But first, what are these forces?

The strong force is akin to being trapped in a mosh pit with experimental chickens, each equipped with a stainless steel beak and fed nothing but human growth hormone, anabolic steroids and espresso. Not much reach, but up close those psychotic little buggers can pack a wallop.

The weak force is like trying to get a drink at a biker bar when the Hawaiian Tropic tour bus breaks down. You can yell from across the room, but the only thing that is going to materialize is a fist with “L-O-V-E” tattooed across its knuckles.

Electro-magnetic forces are why your iPod can recreate the Metallica-Kiss Battle of the Bands concert, causing your blood-soaked ear buds to cake permanently in your auditory canals.

And gravity is why Pamela Anderson will join the circus freak show in a few years.

But how can we unite these forces and, more importantly, why do they result in the downfall of the American Empire? The current theories - relativity, quantum and string - are all off track. The force that unifies all, the ultimate common denominator, is crap. Also known by its Greek name 'quark,' crap is the underlying structure that binds everything ever produced by human beings. You start with basic crap, and if you apply enough energy, you get stuff. When stuff is exposed to an intense intellectual and capital investment beam, you get quality goods regardless of their origin. But without the added energy factors, all you have is crap.

Some factories in China churn out crap on giant assembly lines, where, interestingly enough, the workers are also paid crap. Flea markets, antique malls, garage sales and eBay ensure that crap never dies. But the black hole of crap, the giant vortex from whose event horizon no pre-consumer debris can escape, is WalMart. From the zombie greeter, kept alive with Jolt cola, energy bars and a bug zapper, to the Happy Face, leveling whole towns with a destructive force that makes a D-T fusion reaction look benign, WalMart has compressed crap to neutron-star density and created new forms of life in the process. Having achieved the super-symmetry that eludes high-energy physicists in the laboratory, consumers pay squat for crap, workers get paid crap for selling squat, and in Bentonville, Arkansas, crap runs squat and vice versa.

There are those who say this is chaos, but chaos theory is predicated on the model of deterministic non-linearity, where there is a constant and dynamic change in life. Chaos says a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and the weather changes in New York. Crap theory, on the other hand, operates under the assumption that everything, no matter how beautiful and unique, can eventually be turned into crap. Kill the butterfly, encase it in plastic, and sell it for $2.99, Aisle Six, next to the talking Jesus dolls that say, “Your blood shall boil and your eyes will melt, non-believer. Let’s play a game!”