The ‘bling’ syndrome

Bling is an important facet of a subculture that reveres designer clothes, shiny rims, expensive liquor and gaudy jewellery. This innovation of American hip-hop culture has even found its way into the dictionary.

Merriam Webster defines bling (also “bling-bling”) as flashy jewellery worn especially as an indication of wealth; or expensive and ostentatious possessions.

Like so many other things, the phenomenon has jumped out of the music videos of MTV and BET and into our everyday existence here in Trinidad and Tobago.

This conspicuous consumption seems to be a trait of the nouveau riche as well as those pretending to belong to a higher socio-economic class.

Sadly it is often the most deprived and marginalised in our society who are most vulnerable to this syndrome.

Teachers in our secondary schools can tell stories of parents who claim not to be able to afford textbooks, yet are somehow able to provide their children with shoes that cost two thousand dollars.

Men adorn their teeth with gold when the money would perhaps be better spent on proper dental care.

Unemployed persons annoy the general public with obnoxious ring tones from cellphones that I could never afford.

Those who have adopted middle class values, who save and send their children to school, heap scorn on the “blingers” as the makers of their own unfortunate destinies.

Yet ironically, just as in the United States, this state of being has found its way into our middle class as this generation seems to be spending the fruits of their parents’ labour on brands and “pimping their rides”.

How are we to make sense of this? The answer often offered up is cable television; that preferred tool of Satan and the crafters of the new world order.

I suppose that few can deny cable has played at least some part in the creation of an entire generation of materialists.

If in the United States misguided parents spend half a million dollars to give their snivelling child a “super sweet sixteen” party, in Trinidad they spend their CEPEP wages on brand name sneakers for a baby who will outgrow them in two months.

And what else but cable television can account for the fact that the girls of Valsayn and Gulf View talk and dress exactly like the cast of Laguna Beach and The Hills? And if Armani coats and Cristal are ridiculous and anachronous in the ghettoes of New York and Washington DC; try explaining their presence in a land of coconut trees and villages, where 39 percent of the people earn less than two US dollars a day.

Still the roots of this syndrome run much deeper. American cultural imperialism, as some would call it, is a new twist on an old game.

Paradoxically, we are a country of innovators and creators, yet we remain emulators.

Anything that is distinctly native is assigned less value, be it music, costume or philosophy. We have always copied the dress and mannerisms of the masters. In the old days we donned coattails and top hats; today we wear platinum chains and drink Moet.

All of the outward trappings help to sustain an illusion. So effective are they that we even fool ourselves into forgetting our true class and status in society. In reality though, we are merely caricatures of those who have the bulk of the wealth and the highest status.

An analysis of our development plans as a nation reveals that the bling syndrome is affecting our society on a very macro scale. Our Government sees fit to spend millions of oil dollars on fancy “crime-fighting” blimps, new stadiums and shiny buildings; when education, health and agriculture are all in desperate need of resources.

So we may not be able to eat or read, but at least we will have all the external trappings of a developed nation.

And when the oil and gas run out, well… This path of development is as economically short sighted as a rapper with his first record deal.

There are grave consequences that come with succumbing to the bling syndrome.

For one thing, any individual or nation that focuses its spending on conspicuous consumption will of course have less left to save.

An interesting study of American spending patterns in 2006 showed that on average, African Americans of all socio-economic brackets tended to spend more and save less than their white counterparts.

Those who are unable to save will be less likely to be upwardly socially mobile or, in the case of a nation, developed.

As long as the hunger for the material accessories of wealth continues, it is only those who design the clothes, manufacture the cars and extract the oil and gas that benefit.

Who might those be again? It’s almost enough to make you think this is the way things were designed.