In the beginning was the logo.
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Answer a fool according to his folly, so you can sell him something
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The Hollywood conglamourate.
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We grew up watching television. Little did we know that it was watching us.
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Lacrimae rerun.
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Jerry Springer, Reality Television.—To produce and consume mediocrity in a solipsistic cycle, like those primitive microorganisms that feed on their own feces, reduces us to trash watching trash talking trash to trash.
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One Jerry Springer Show Guest Insults Another.—A noise annoys a noise.
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Reality imitates Reality TV.
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In Ireland, said Joyce, the sow eats her farrow; here the farrow eat the sow.
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In this country, life imitates kitsch.
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Kitsch kills.
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We turn to kitsch in order to evade the authentic, that is, the painful complexity and sorrow of things (which extends into ourselves, making the cant of the self-righteous a form of inner kitsch). It is a rigid reaction formation against cognitive dissonance, wearing the face of Snow White.
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Snow White was Hitler’s favorite movie. Walt Disney was an anti-semite.
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Kitsch is the symptom of a failed encounter with otherness. The ultimate reduction of otherness is the primordial dichotomy of friend and enemy (Carl Schmitt); it leads down to the binary “us-them” logic of macrophages and the immune system.
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Kitsch begins with garden gnomes and ends in the camps.
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Carl Schmitt: Hobbes on steroids. Captain of Nazism’s intellectual goon squad.
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Landfill, oil refinery, nuclear power plant… Mall after strip mall, a lurid red glow in the night… Not scenery, obscenery.
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Perhaps nothing can be pre-empted that is not in some sense pre-empty.
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American optimism will be the death of us all.
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The ambiguous promise of happiness this country has extended to its citizens since its founding document is responsible for some of our worst pathologies. The right to “the pursuit of happiness” can be willfully misread as “the right to happiness.” On this reading my unhappiness is an outrage against the intent of the Founding Fathers. There are fateful corollaries to this wish-fulfilling reductiveness: If I am not happy, it must be because someone has stolen my happiness; that person must be punished (the mass murderer at the shopping mall, college campus, office). Whatever makes me happy belongs to me by right; or simply: Whatever I want is mine, because I want it (the stalker, whose stalking is a perverted pursuit of happiness). Finally, the synthesis of avenger and stalker: the serial killer.
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Shopping.—The object is to extract as large a percentage as possible of the total volume of merchandise available in the world outside and place it in your house so as to reproduce a simulacrum of the total Shopping Mall of the World.
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Fleurs du mall.
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Shopaholics.—For those who shop too much, pharmaceutical companies have devised a special drug. The sales volume puts extra money in the pockets of drug company shareholders, thus increasing their purchasing power.
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The cure for consumerism is another product. The system of making money knows how to make money off the breakdowns that occur in the money-making system.
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Wall Street investment bankers and others of their kind are essentially addicted to money, as others are addicted to drugs. It as if they snorted not only cocaine through those hundred dollar bills, but the bills themselves. Those caught possessing over a certain amount should have to enter rehab or face jail time.
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If the “invisible hand” is so impartial, why does it keep giving poor people the invisible finger and wealthy people an invisible hand job?
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Henry James wrote that the two most beautiful words in the English language were “summer afternoon.” That was before global warming.
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Vestibulocracy: government by lobbyists.
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Narcocracy: government by cartels of drug lords and/or pharmaceutical companies.
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Kallocracy: government by spokesmodels. Fascist dictatorship of the Melrose Place master race.
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Mediacracy: government by television executives. Interchangeable with mediocracy, government by hyper-hyped nonentities elected by focus groups.
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Troglodocracy: Government by yahoos.
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Proctocracy: Government by assholes.
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Without rednecks how would a plaid sofa get from the showroom floor to the side of a road?
Arthur Chapin