Watch and Learn
"It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
posted by Monkey at 12:53 PM
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
"It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
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- World on Fire - Sarah McLachlan
- Genius
For thousands of years, human beings have screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expects me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.
I see the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact.
Picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course. You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. We'll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what's left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against the bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.
Imagine stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you'll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.
You're not your lame job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your new Guess wallet. You're not your fucking Gap khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. Get used to it.
We're all stupid consumers. We are all by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some random guy's name on my ugly mother fucking department store underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra, Xanax.
Like everyone else, I became a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct. If I saw something like a clever coffee table in the shape of a yin and yang, I had to have it. I flipped through numerous catalogs and wondered, "What kind of dining set defines me as a person?" We used to read pornography. Now it's the Horchow Collection. I had it all. Even the glass dishes with the little tiny bubbles and fantastic imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working and dirt poor indigenous peoples of wherever.
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
It used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn't toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my house or detail my Volvo. Someday I'd be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice house and car. Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer... maybe self-destruction is the answer.
When deep space exploration ramps up, it will be corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks. Planet Denny's. Every planet will take on the corporate identity of whoever rapes it first. Jesus, Budweiser World.
If you wake up at a different time and in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?
Written by Chuck Palahniuk, snatched and tweaked by Monkey.
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