If I were only a person

Being Frank, by Frank Ameduri

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to be a person?

Sometimes, when I'm listening to the radio, reading a magazine or watching television, I wonder what the U.S. was like when people lived here. You know, before everyone became a demographic.

We're all connected by one or more forms of media, and if you pay only a little attention to the way the media communicate with us, you'll see they're not talking to people. They're talking to general concepts of consumers, voters, young professionals, baby boomers, blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, young white males … and on and on.

With a little sanding and hammering, you fit into at least a few of those categories, and the more categories you squeeze yourself into, the more humanity you file and pound off yourself.

The problem with demographics is that they've become the most virulent form of stereotypes. If you don't know the problem with stereotypes, you're probably a young, white, middle-class, Protestant male. This marketing form of stereotype is virulent because it has succeeded in turning many Americans into caricatures of real people.

If you want to know if you're one of those caricatures, there are a few simple ways to check.

How many of these things apply to you:

I can't have a conversation without quoting the latest popular line from television commercials. I still open e-mails and phone calls with, "Wasssssup?" When talking on my cell phone while driving in heavy traffic I like to say, "Can you hear me now?" for no reason.

I have critical discussions about television commercials with friends and co-workers. I've deconstructed beer commercials.

I salivate and grab a snack when a late night fast-food commercial comes on. The next day I'm not satisfied until I'm in the drive-through at lunch.

I still have a Noid keychain, a California Raisins CD, three stuffed Taco Bell Chihuahuas, and I think the Geico gecko is witty.

I identify with the products I use. I'm a Coke person, not a Pepsi person. I'm Nike, not Reebok. Whopper beats a Big Mac, baby. They're not jeans if they're not Levi's.

Those are signs that you've traded your humanity for a bunch of labels created in smoke-filled rooms.

We root for our favorite products the way we used to root for sports teams. Why not, our favorite products have often purchased the identities of those teams -- Coors Field, Busch Stadium, The Pepsi Center, it goes on. Our favorite players guzzle prominently labeled "sports drinks" on the sidelines and spend off hours shilling products.

This American obsession with products, images and fads has turned consumerism into the defining aspect of Americanism.

What is it to be American? It is to be a consumer, and little else. Americans used to identified themselves with being producers -- agricultural or industrial -- and by how hard we worked and what we accomplished.

Now we are identified by marketers as consumers, and define ourselves by what we have, how much of it we have, and what we still want to get. Worse, we identify ourselves by what others have.

That change has transformed wealth from a means to an end, so that people with little ambition to accomplish anything significant can simply aspire to some level of wealth -- absent any concept of what to do with the wealth once it has been achieved.

There was a time when products needed people -- when we knew which products were necessities and which were luxuries. It was a time when money was valuable, and nobody would have borrowed money to buy a new car unless the old car stopped running.

It was a time when your thoughts rarely were cluttered with artificial images intended to entice you into confusing things you wanted for things you needed. That's what it was like when people lived here. That must have been nice.

Frank Ameduri thinks it's been too long since the last Boston Tea Party.