Archive for December, 2007
Friday, December 28th, 2007
Manslaughter in Boston: Tragedy or Typical?
A Boston man was using his cellular phone for text messages when he drove his Ford Explorer over a 13-year-old boy. The boy was killed.
According to the Boston Globe, the texting driver, who didn’t stop at the scene, didn’t even know he’d run over a human being:
The man accused of killing a 13-year-old boy in a hit-and-run in Taunton told police he was behind the wheel typing a text message on his cellphone when he lost control of the sport utility vehicle and hit what he thought was a mailbox, a prosecutor said today in court.
Craig P. Bigos, 31, told investigators that he did not realize the SUV had struck the boy on the bicycle until he drove back down Poole Street hours later on his way to work at a restaurant, said Bristol County prosecutor Aaron T. Strojny.
Predictably, the Globe quotes a police detective as describing this equally predictable (and certainly not one-time) consequence of the commonplace co-employment of two of corporate capitalism’s core products as “a tragedy.”
It is no such thing. Tragedies strike unexpectedly out of the blue. People running kids over while texting in their SUVs is simply part-and-parcel of our way of life.
The only tragedy involved is how we have been trained to accept the waste and manslaughter involved in this typical event as normal, natural, invisible, unquestionable, just part of the background.
And, of course, one doesn’t have to wonder what the super-urgent texts were about: “Should I get tacos or pizza?” “Should we watch ‘American Idol’ or ‘Dancing With the Stars’ tonight?” “Wazzup!!!!????”
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007
Schudson Shouldn’t (Have His Job)
Now, he writes a book review that:
1. blames the general public not just for the Iraq War, but for the profoundly sick Orwellian corporate capitalist pseudo-journalism that stoked it. He “favors” this explanation for all that:
“the strong inclination of citizens to mold perception of facts (did we find WMDs in Iraq? did Osama bin Laden conspire with Saddam on the 9/11 attacks?) to their political preference”;
and
2. blames the extremely sorry and still-worsening state of official (Democratic Party) liberalism on political polarity, rather than political cravenness. The lack of an alternative on any major issue is due, he says, to:
“the polarization of party politics so that a conservative evangelical base is all but unwavering in support of a conservative born-again President while independents and moderates are confused and divided.”
This guy, a tenured full professor, is living proof of how the system is set up to implant the most amazing kinds of counter-factual Jabberwocky in the key spots where realism is most dangerous to power. Ugh.
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007
TV Comedy
Saturday, December 22nd, 2007
2009 Corolla: Product Degradation in Action
Not living in one of the two or three U.S. cities where car ownership is plausibly optional, I have a 1998 Toyota Corolla. For American road conditions, where you have to confront a sea of huge trucks and SUVs and travel a high percentage of miles on curvy, undivided high-speed suburban and rural roadways, I consider this to be the most rational auto. It has 120 horse-power and an EPA miles-per-gallon rating of 32 city and 41 highway. The only time it is ever even arguably under-powered is on the steepest final approaches to mountain-pass ski areas. Even then it’s fine, really.
I say all this to give you a base for judging corporate capitalists’ familiar claim that they use big business marketing to understand buyers’ needs and improve products. This lie is exposed yet again by Toyota’s forthcoming release of the 2009 Corolla.
The 2009 Corolla will be a substantially INFERIOR product to my 1998 version. As we listen to Al Gore accept the Nobel Peace Prize for his tepid movie about climate change, all signs suggest that we live directly atop the peak of the long-predicted Peak Oil curve. By the time the 2009 Corolla get released, gas may very well be selling for $4.00 a gallon in the United States. By the time the warranty on the 2009 Corolla expires, it may be $10.00.
So, with full knowledge of this impending reality, what has the seller of the Prius done to the engine of the 2009 Corolla? The standard horse-power will now be 132, and the miles-per-gallon will DROP BY ALMOST A QUARTER to 27 city and 35 highway!
This shocking degradation of the product and egregious dismissal of the most important need of prospective buyers is the opposite of an accident. It is marketing-era corporate capitalism in normal action.
Since small cars mean small profits, even the green-flag waving Toyota Corporation hates and resents them. Like all other car-makers, it uses it marketing operations to discover new ways to sell its customers “more car.” This is partly done by exploiting people’s irrational admiration of superfluous horse-power and acceleration. Ergo, the worsening of the Corolla’s fuel-efficiency.
It is also done by the newly “e-accelerated” gambit of promoting of ever-expanding lists of junk “equipment” on the interiors of the ever-more insane gas guzzlers that remain the compulsory core mode of mobility in this, the land of the “free market.”
If we let it run its course, such is the detritus with which this decrepit system will carry humanity over the precipice.
Monday, December 17th, 2007
A Remarkable Quotation
Other than its deep connections to the stunning triumph of television and its inherently infantilizing content over the American mindscape, the plague of fundamentalist Christianity isn’t really directly connected to big business marketing.
Nevertheless, I have to do my part to preserve this one:
In reporting on the surge of the Presidential campaign of Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (are we stuck in a Sinclair Lewis novel or what?), The New York Times interviewed Huckabee supporter Christine Hurley, an Iowa mother of ten (yes, ten!) home-”schooled” children. Hurley provided this succinct statement of the “pillars” of her “faith” and life:
We are about the pillar issues of our faith — family, marriage and abortion. Home schooling is just part of it. (www.nytimes.com, December 17, 2007)
Such are the depths of the implanted unreason to which the tele-vange-Christian third of our population has sunk, under the downward centrifugal forces generated by our super-decrepit ruling class’s Orwellian-Huxleyan style of governance. Somebody to whom a book about an itinerant single man who never formed a nuclear family and whose cardinal task was encouraging resistance of the Roman Empire and its money-grubbing local allies is supposed to be the one and only lodestar in life literally can’t think about anything outside the walls of her own over-crowded abode.
This ongoing shriveling of both ordinary people’s humanity and the good parts of American culture is simply heartbreaking. This Xmas, it’s way beyond time for some tables to get tipped over in the temples of power and convention.
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
Gallery of a Sick World
$6,400 mp3-player earbuds. You can’t make this stuff up. Tax the rich anybody?
