David Seaton's News Links
For me, the most sinister thing about America is how it tames, absorbs, trivializes and somehow manages to package and market absolutely everything in true, Milo Minderbinder fashion. "Big Brother meets the cash nexus".
Every insight into the workings of the human mind that science stumbles onto is used to "optimize" the population, mold its thoughts and especially its choices, and most especially its spending "decisions". We and our minds are here to be processed as efficiently and as thoroughly as if we were battery chickens... Ever feather, every bone.
That is what I fled from, but it promises to follow me to the ends of the earth.
I think before we go on, you should read an excerpt from Thomas Frank's must-read classic, "Conquest of Cool". After reading this, I think you'll understand me and my Obamamania-phobia, and perhaps even understand your own self, a little better:
For me, the most sinister thing about America is how it tames, absorbs, trivializes and somehow manages to package and market absolutely everything in true, Milo Minderbinder fashion. "Big Brother meets the cash nexus".
Every insight into the workings of the human mind that science stumbles onto is used to "optimize" the population, mold its thoughts and especially its choices, and most especially its spending "decisions". We and our minds are here to be processed as efficiently and as thoroughly as if we were battery chickens... Ever feather, every bone.
That is what I fled from, but it promises to follow me to the ends of the earth.
I think before we go on, you should read an excerpt from Thomas Frank's must-read classic, "Conquest of Cool". After reading this, I think you'll understand me and my Obamamania-phobia, and perhaps even understand your own self, a little better:
Regardless of the tastes of Republican leaders, rebel youth culture remains the cultural mode of the corporate moment, used to promote not only specific products but the general idea of life in the cyber-revolution. Commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright "revolution" against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming. For some, Ken Kesey's parti-colored bus may be a hideous reminder of national unraveling, but for Coca-Cola it seemed a perfect promotional instrument for its "Fruitopia" line, and the company has proceeded to send replicas of the bus around the country to generate interest in the counterculturally themed beverage. Nike shoes are sold to the accompaniment of words delivered by William S. Burroughs and songs by The Beatles, Iggy Pop, and Gil Scott Heron ("the revolution will not be televised"); peace symbols decorate a line of cigarettes manufactured by R. J. Reynolds and the walls and windows of Starbucks coffee shops nationwide; the products of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft are touted as devices of liberation; and advertising across the product category sprectrum calls upon consumers to break rules and find themselves. The music industry continues to rejuvenate itself with the periodic discovery of new and evermore subversive youth movements and our televisual marketplace is a 24-hour carnival, a showplace of transgression and inversion of values, of humiliated patriarchs and shocked puritans, of screaming guitars and concupiscent youth, of fashions that are uniformly defiant, of cars that violate convention and shoes that let us be us.
What I am pointing out here, is that what was a historically unrepeatable, "before and after", period, one that truly brought "change" both good and bad, a period that was genuinely subversive, painful, destructive-creative, revolutionary, fresh, startling and real has been repackaged and recycled until now it is tame, stale and manageable.
Most of this has been done by my own generation (now 60+) who took over decades ago from bemused, older marketing executives who didn't understand "our" new culture. They don't want the same thing to happen to them so they have decided to freeze time and sterilize young people's minds by continually rewinding and replaying their own youth. We are living in a classic-decadent period.
So by now, decades later, what passes for America's perception of reality has been manipulated and packaged by elderly former hippies or wannabes and their apprentices. Sophisticated (hip) and cynical to the point of nihilism, they have been pimping their youth (and mine) ever since. Barack Obama is the first, chemically pure, slickly packaged, political expression of Thomas Frank's observations.
To compare Obama with Martin Luther King, the talk of "change" and "yes we can", is no deeper than Nike's slogan, "just do it!" I am saddened by how Obama's emptiness is taken for value. As if the voters were confusing Starbucks with Vienna's Café Sperl... But then, they already do that almost every day of their lives. DS
Most of this has been done by my own generation (now 60+) who took over decades ago from bemused, older marketing executives who didn't understand "our" new culture. They don't want the same thing to happen to them so they have decided to freeze time and sterilize young people's minds by continually rewinding and replaying their own youth. We are living in a classic-decadent period.
So by now, decades later, what passes for America's perception of reality has been manipulated and packaged by elderly former hippies or wannabes and their apprentices. Sophisticated (hip) and cynical to the point of nihilism, they have been pimping their youth (and mine) ever since. Barack Obama is the first, chemically pure, slickly packaged, political expression of Thomas Frank's observations.
To compare Obama with Martin Luther King, the talk of "change" and "yes we can", is no deeper than Nike's slogan, "just do it!" I am saddened by how Obama's emptiness is taken for value. As if the voters were confusing Starbucks with Vienna's Café Sperl... But then, they already do that almost every day of their lives. DS
