Wealth perceptions

I don’t know why when I ask everyone what they did for Thanksgiving break, they always seem reluctant to say they just lounged around their parents’ house.

It’s certainly not shameful for me to say I spent my entire break just relaxing. College kids need that.

If it weren’t for Thanksgiving, when would we be able to fit in watching those guilty pleasure movies and shows? You know, those programs where you can just turn on and tune out (and if your sister does find you drooling on yourself while watching “Legally Blonde” you can just say the turkey made you and the dog both salivate).
Thanksgiving is perfect for relaxing.

Like I said, I’m not bashful to say that I vegged out for a couple days. It even got me to do some appropriate introspection about the American tradition.

After catching myself up on all the old “Entourage” episodes I missed while being at school, I got a chance that I haven’t had since this semester started: to make some ground on that ever-growing book list. In particular, I was looking forward to a “Freakonomics”-esque book by Democratic strategist Mark Penn called “Microtrends.”

One of the interesting little peculiarities Penn found in American culture was a huge miscalculation of the number of millionaires believed to be in the United States. It seems most people believe that about 40 percent of people in the United States are millionaires (in fact, the actual figure is closer to 4 percent). So why this miscalculation? Penn didn’t hypothesize, so it got me wondering ... during the commercial breaks, of course.

Surfing around for an hour or so – mesmerized by the vanity of “My Super Sweet 16” and re-runs of the “Fabulous Life of the Rich and the Famous” – was enough to make me feel like an old person when I say, maybe it’s the TV.

Well, it is the goal of TV and film to show us something that doesn’t normally happen. After all, the author has chosen to pick this story, this character, over an infinite number of others because supposedly this one is different. We can learn something important from that difference.

But what happens when every channel you encounter has a story about an exception, especially a rich exception? It seems to normalize the marginal, so that eventually, in an attempt to show us something that our ordinary lives miss, these marginal lifestyles become over-represented.

If MTV is any representation of the average teenager’s lifestyle, we should’ve all gotten Caddies or Beamers for our 16th, right? And we all certainly can afford to go on thousand-dollar shopping sprees once in a while.

So could so much wealth being constantly displayed on TV affect our perceptions of the number of millionaires in America? I don’t know, and to be honest, I didn’t really care. I was going to finish watching “Ocean’s Thirteen” and go to bed early, so I could wake up Friday at 4:30 a.m. and buy, buy, buy.