Culture Jam
The uncooling of America™
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Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters magazine, argues that America is no longer a country, but a multitrillion-dollar brand. America™ is no different from McDonald's, Marlboro or General Motors. It's an image "sold" not only to the citizens of the U.S.A., but to consumers worldwide. The American brand is associated with catchwords such as "democracy," "opportunity" and "freedom." But like cigarettes that are sold as symbols of vitality and youthful rebellion, the American reality is very different from its brand image. America™ has been subverted by corporate agendas. It's elected officials bow before corporate power as a condition of their survival in office. A collective sense of powerlessness and disillusionment has set in. A deeply felt sense of betrayal is brewing. Some quotes: Once you experience even a few of these "moments of truth," ( when you realize that the Earth can no longer support the lifestyle of the coolhunting American-style consumer.) things can never be the same again. Your life veers off in strange new directions. It's very exciting and a little scary. Ideas blossom into obsessions. The imperative to live differently keeps building until the day it breaks through the surface. - pg. xiv To find a way out of cynicism is to find a way out of the postmodern malaise. On the far side of cynicism lies freedom. And the pursuit of freedom is what revolutions - and this book - are all about. - pg. xvi The first agenda of the commercial media is, I believe, to sell fear. … Fear breeds insecurity - and then consumer culture offers us a variety of ways to buy our way back to security. - pg. 17 The great, insidious power of the spectacle lies in the fact that it is a actually a form of mental slavery that we are free to resist, only it never occurs to us to do so. Our media-saturated postmodern world, where all communication flows in one direction, from the powerful to the powerless, produces a population of lumpen spectators; "modern men and women, the citizens of the most advanced societies on earth, thrilled to watch whatever it is they're given to watch." - pg. 104 If everyone's a villain - if we are all caught in the media-consumer trance - then no one is to blame. It's hard to generate any good, focused anger in these circumstances, but it's very, very easy to get depressed. - pg. 140 More than any other product, the car stands as a symbol of the need for a true-cost marketplace, wherein the price you pay for a car reflects all the costs of production and operation. That doesn't just mean paying the manufacturing cost plus markup, plus oil, gas, and insurance. It means paying for the pollution, for building & maintaining the roads, for the medical costs of accidents and the noise and the aesthetic degradation caused by urban sprawl. It means paying for traffic policing and for military protection of oil fields and supply lines. The true cost of the car must also include the real but hard-to-estimate environmental cost to future generations of dealing with the oil- and ozone-depletion and climate-change problems the car is creating today. If we added up the best available estimates, we'd come to a startling conclusion: The fossil fuel-based automobile industry is being subsidized by unborn generations to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Why should they have to pay to clean up our mess? - pg. 180 And our children, and their children, will gaze back aghast upon our time, a period of waste and abandon on a scale so vast it knocked the planet out of whack for a thousand years. - pg. 212
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