We're exploding prices on our 2011 SUV line!
We're terrorizing high prices!
Osama may still be on the loose, but you can catch our 9/11 end-of-summer sale and beat the terrorism of high prices!You get the idea.
In addition, of course, the criminal empire that is BushCo. is inventing new levels of ghoulishness by parading the animated corpse of Dick Cheney onto "Meet the Press" and ordering Condi Rice to repeat her mantra, "No one could have imagined [fill in your fuckup here]." In all this masturbation, politicking, and ass-covering, the people who deserve to be able to reflect on their own and actual experiences are having their memories blighted or obliterated by the media onslaught, to wit, "Your experience is meaningless unless it is filtered through OUR lens."
It's the ultimate tyranny--now you can't even experience your own tragedy, unless Auntie Katie or Uncle Bryan read it to you over the teleprompter. Those who died and those who loved them are still under attack by an engine of commerce that knows no limit to avarice and has no inkling of shame or reflection. By turning this event into the carnival of thumbsucking that it has become--just another means to sell toilet bowl cleaner and skin care products--the greed that drives everything ultimately triumphs any pure opportunity for uncovering truth, because it just might cause the traffic in goods and services to stumble for a moment and notice the gaping chasm that our culture is hurrying toward, arms clasped full of worthless shit heads full of simplistic answers.
4 comments:
You know, it occurs to me that one of the funny things about this country is its weird split between the theatrical and being puritanical. On one level, yeah, we're likely to see ad tags like the one you listed. This is an unfortunate by-product of what I mean. In the virtually constructed world of the media and Hollywood, the theatrical is encouraged. In the day to day lives of us "free" folk, the puritanical survives. Cut your hair in a mohawk and wear a bone through your nose--get stared at. Be gay--get stared at (or worse). Say that lowriders are a symbol of Chicano culture--you're stereotyping, no, no, no...Get a ticket for jaywalking. DOn't parj their, it's reserved for teacher of the century 24 fucking 7 and don't forget it. Talk quietly in the checkout line and stare at the latest Brad/Angelina/Jennifer/Vince drama (ah, now there's some theatre; there's where my real impulses lie. If only the world could see that in me). Who gives a shit? The theatre of the absurd, the world of monkeys, the need to sound brilliant in a never ending conversation of the inane. And what do we have to show for it? A country of bobble-headed beauties, digesting this trumped up, screened reality like the monkeys they are...
You're right--we sublimate our own legitimate urge for expression to worshipping legitimized media versions of "free" expression that can be commoditized to sell crap.
If we are freer than other peoples, it is only in the pursuit of material wealth, and even then insofar as it benefits commerce that supports entrenched power.
On a much more modest scale, I was struck recently how in Berlin I could drink a bottle of beer on the street without fear of harrassment by police for "open container" violations, or that the general cultural attitude there is that so long as you harm no one else, what you do is your own business. It's weird how even in essentially social democracies, a libertarian view of privacy holds more strongly than in this country.
We need to start an informed discourse/debate about the realities of "freedom" in this country. What do we mean by it? What do we expect when we use this word?
Our society is slipping further and further into complete surveilance. Soon, we will only view our lives through the scanner, representing some semblance of an idea of people acting like they are free...
The further we get from actual freedom, the less likely we are to remember what actual freedom is, and the more likely we are to let it slip past us in the night... like the Constitution drifting off the desk and into the Oval Office garbage can...
Wannabe tyrants know that sudden moves can spook the people, so the erosion of freedoms must be done incrementally and always to subaltern or alienated groups first. As cliched as it has become, Pastor Niemoeller's "First they came for the Jews," is the most concise expression of totalitarian creep that I know. Of course, what he doesn't include is the shift in labels, so that "enemy combatant" can be expanded to include an environmental activist protesting the cutting of old-growth redwoods.
If the people don't quit rationalizing these little corrosive changes to our constitution, it won't be very long before everyone's ass is up for grabs, and only the right price in loyalty or cash will save you.
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