Do you really believe your answers to multiple choice questions play any part in who you are, that your identity, your individuality, comes from choosing what's already been chosen for you to choose by those chosen to get you to choose to use what their masters produce?
Ford. Or Chevy. Coke. Or Pepsi. Scott. Or Charmin. What's the harm in your daughter pining to be a pig like Paris, or wearing jeans sell-out movie stars and musicians push at us, or your son idolizing a vulgar, greedy glutton like The Donald, or your husband worshipping a drug-using, woman-beating sports icon, or your wife reading the rag mags from cover to cover to see which star's just impregnated and jilted his lover, or your boss admiring the wisdom of executives from Enron for their clever theft of their employees' retirement funds, or our children watching us try to imitate celebrities which gives our stamp of approval to role models like these latest idols of American material excess whose very lack of character is seen as success, whose identities we try to buy since we see these leeches as our betters and whose conduct we endorse by buying the junk they shill in an effort to define who we are - very few of us could deny it - but how unique could it be when everybody else can buy it?
Victims of an offer we can't seem to refuse buying goods planned for obsolescence and perpetual renewal while worshipping in front of big-screen color TVs eating our way to diabetes and heart disease. And the eating, the drinking, the buying, the legal drugs, the electronic diversions allow us to accept with a shrug the lop-sided economy, the devastation of education, the broken-down, red-and-blue state of our nation.
We do the frenzied, directionless, lemming-like dance of the meaningless minimal motion of a mouse-click or the swipe of a credit card and drown enthusiastically in the plastic consumer credit ocean. And in this act of conspicuous consumption we explode -
BANKRUPT
in spontaneous human/consumer combustion. Not to worry. There are always plenty more where we come from who've got holes in their souls where their SELVES ought to be that can never be filled by the engineered greed, lust and gluttony which is how we express freedom in the Land of the Free, choosing goods rather than the direction of our Democracy.
Though we're sold the "fact" that the market is consumer driven and each of us, alone, is responsible for our purchasing decisions, corporations spend billions each year to manufacture our consent, to turn citizens into consumers instead of the drivers of government. If it didn't work they wouldn't pay to arouse shame, desire and envy. They do it because they NEED a rabid consumer feeding frenzy
and our seeing our future strictly as the next thing that we buy. The irresponsibility they sponsor keeps the profit well from running dry. They want our focus on the wealth-creating surface of our outside not the road less travleled to the value we all have on the inside. They fear we might step off the material path because it threatens their very survival if we get over our lust for the vehicle and learn to love The Driver.
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