As the kids say, OMFG!
Spent an hour in my apartment exercise room watching HGTV on the idiot box above the gym machines. It would be impossible to make a better documentary on the profound mental illness of the quasi-privileged sector of the American population at this ripe moment in our imperial history. Every second and every image — the appalling commercials very distinctly included — transmitted by HGTV is both an encouragement and a reflection of the stunning narcissism, vapidity, and ultra-petty acquisitiveness that pervades our greatly flattered and over-counted middle class. If you want to diagnose the cultural train wreck that un-checked corporate capitalism has made in its #1 citadel, this truly is must-see-TV.
This amazing TV channel is also powerful evidence of the inflexibility of our money-first social order. Thanks to Peak Oil and imperial decline, the logic of “home ownership” is now radically different than what middle-classers have been taught for the past 60+ years. Will paying a mortgage on a suburban casita ever again be a smart economic move? Perhaps, but this rote “dream” is now very far from being the no-brainer it’s been.
Nevertheless, just as the car corporations continue to advertise their rolling boondoggles as if it were 1987, so do the realtors, financiers, and house-equippers evidently lack any ability to deal with a future in which long-denied ecological limits are coming home to roost. HGTV trundling its way along the same old road confirms the Ceauşescuan bankruptcy of our played-out overclass. Their well is running very dry indeed…