From: Michelle (michelle@barrymenasherealtors.com)
Date: Tue Feb 12 2002 - 09:25:14 MST
Personally, my main complaint with the modern age is not any of these
symptoms (poor farming, sweatshops and the like) but what is in my opinion
the ultimate cause: advertising. Advertising is propagandizing and
manipulation of desire, creation of need. The fact that you can't walk
around in a first-world city without seeing brand names emblazoned on buses,
buildings, people's clothing, coffee mugs, and everything else solid enough
to take a sticker or patch drives me nuts! And I know I personally could
escape it by any number of means - what really gets me is its existence and
what it does to the people saturated and buying into it. They're convinced
by the marketing, they buy buy buy - they create the demand for substandard
food at bus-fare prices, which can't support a healthy industry by any
rational explanation.
I'm all for modernity in every other sense, but what I think makes people
sad beyond rational explanation is the dissapointment in our fellow humans
for being so easily herded and brainwashed. It would be really nice if our
level of society (as false as it sometimes is) could be maintained without
all the money-grubbing crassness. So I don't think it's anything that can
be pinned down to McDonald's or Nike or any other corporation, I think it's
just repulsion that needs to be recognized as somewhat futile and
irrational. Y'all are probably just going to get in a big spat, when folks
who feel like I do, and it looks like Dylan do, need to admit it's
emotionally based and a way bigger problem than can be boiled down to a
12-step salvation of society program ("step one, kill the corporations").
It's about the nature of humans in groups, and Johnny Rotten may have spoken
it in nice sound bytes and more recently, but it does boil down to (people
like) Marx and the desire to elevate humanity above this pettiness.
OK, hit me with it. :)
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