March 26, 2008 at 10:01 pm
(Culture)
I found something out about myself this morning. I discovered that I would probably not be very happy in a town that erected a 45-foot tall rabbit in honor of a product that a large corporation produced there.
But something else occurred to me at the same time. While that rampant commercialization is simply not something I respond to positively (in fact, it’s something that disgusts me to the point that my stomach churns when I hear the hyper-commercial way a commercial radio station calls out its call letters,) it doesn’t, at its root, bother me that much. I mean, I can deal with the existence of plastic corporate cities just as long as I don’t see them. By contrast, I’m sure most of us would prefer to live in a world without, for example, torture, even if we could conceivable ignore it.
And its evident to me that many people are quite happy in a corporate world (as evidenced by the lifers I work with who are happy to skip around the world under the corporate umbrella and live in any number of cities that, well, churn my stomach.) But (and maybe I’m being optimistic) I feel that the alternative is still there and that, in fact, plenty of people take advantage of non-corporate opportunities, from non-comm radio to small companies, and are likewise happy about it.
And because of this, despite the occasional twinge of fear I get that every aspect of our lives is being homogenized, alt. isn’t on it’s way out anytime soon.
So, bring on the rabbit.
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March 11, 2008 at 10:40 pm
(Political)
*sigh*. Sometimes, you wish your future presidential candidates had a little more sense. Seeing Eliot Spitzer’s resigned, remorseful face on the front page of nytimes.com yesterday was a shock. After all, at one point about three years ago, I was quite enamored with Spitzer. It’s hard to believe the worst about our heros, and at times it’s easy to forget that they’re human. Usually the people we admire are colorful as a byproduct of the same qualities that make them successful. Yet we could be forgiven for wishing that the color of some of our modern heros were more like that of, for example, John C. Fremont.
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March 11, 2008 at 10:18 pm
(Political)
The British appear perhaps a little insecure. A plan to require children in schools to recite an “oath of allegiance” is going over like a lead balloon in Wales and Northern Ireland. But it’s interesting that someone in that government even believes such a requirement is likely to promote a “national awareness” in the first place. Of course, we’re already doing this here.
People are going to find different ways to express their national identity regardless. In the U.S., there are plenty of people who associate more strongly with the South, yet they express “pride” for the U.S. as well. Requiring people to recite something is a little silly. But perhaps even sillier is the idea that one must use a particular word to express that pride, as one L.A. Times columnist suggested (via the Carpetbagger Report). It seems to me that the columnist, Jonah Goldberg, trips over himself to differentiate patriotism from nationalism. If one fears that one can be mistaken for the other, perhaps they can understand why someone might be cautious in appealing to that particular sense.
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