The Arms Race Begins At Home

In the 1950s households thought worthy of description
were described in terms of their consumer durables,
the electronics, the multiples of radios, televisions
and other ready diversions that people found handy
for avoiding listening to one another.

In the Britain of  the 1980s came the mass car culture-
a state wherein children depended on their parents
to get on the road and the roads to escape their parents,
into an ever expanding empire of debt.
In that era I learned thrift through the habit of hitching lifts.

Nowadays when I think about how to measure prosperity
I think of the Muslim Middle East where a households wealth
is measured by the patriarch's ability to take offence
at government reform, distant powers,
and the immediate world around him,
and in his collection of Kalashnikov rifles.

The more the patriarch has the more he is looked up to by other (lesser) men.