|
Commodification
By Al Burian
1. Millenial Anxiety
The twentieth century is over, and if the human narrative contained
within that century were being screened for a test-market audience,
you’d now be asked to fill out a questionnaire. Are the
protagonists appealing? Should the ending have been more upbeat?
Similarly, if the twentieth century were a Wendy’s superbar,
there’d be postage pre-paid cards inviting you to give
customer feedback. Were the employees courteous? Is the lettuce
fresh enough, the condiment area well-stocked, here at the moment
of millennial transition?
There are no post-paid cards with boxes to check off. And, although
the history of the twentieth century is, in many important ways,
very analogous to the Wendy’s super-bar (the prevailing
right wing historical analysis of the twentieth century, in
fact, sort of depressingly boils down to "it turns out
that people really want a good selection of condiments")
there is no corporation or main office running history. It’s
not even a government agency. The force which has defined and
shaped life for a hundred years is industry, and industry as
an entity is not Democratic. You vote for the guy who decides
how much of your money is spent on highways, but you don’t
vote on the existence of highways or, for that matter, light
bulbs, printing presses, fax machines, or any of the other advances
which have fundamentally changed what existence on this planet
is all about. Industry is just kind of there, like weather.
2.
The Problem With America
The main problem we seem to have going on here in America right
now is the lack of a coherent dominant ideology. (Yeah, I know,
that sounds ludicrous, like an atavistic appeal to some mythical
Norman Rockwell time which never existed, when we all looked,
acted and spoke the same; like the legislators in Iowa who recently
went so far as to declare English the "official language"
there in Iowa, you know, just so the six or seven Iowans of
questionable ethnicity don’t get too far out of hand with
their siestas and burritos and shit.) In place of the standard
American statistically validated cookie-cutter existence, two-point-five
kids and cars and all that, we’ve developed a sort of cable-TV-like
endless-option culture composed of these sub-cultural blips
which form the great network of a patchy, disjointed national
non-identity. None of these various sub-sectors seem to be too
sharply in conflict with one another in terms of having claim
to cultural dominance, and none of them can, as a flip side
to that coin, stake a claim to being culturally subversive,
seeing as they are part and parcel of the culture they’d
be trying to subvert. Besides, if your goal is subversion, how
would you formulate such an attack? And what are you attacking,
if there is no coherent value system to usurp?
Things were a lot more crassly laid out, and a lot easier to
navigate, in the 1950’s. America really had it’s dominant
ideology in full gear back then, and not only was normality
and citizenship very unambiguously defined, it was pretty much
the case that if you espoused living in any way outside of or
in opposition to this norm, be it political, sexual, or facial-hair-oriented,
it was generally considered a good idea to lock you up. There
were political consequences to acts of social subversion, because
the social and political were intimately linked, the whole thing
fitting together neatly in a joint package. This package was
produced and propagated by the little twittering chickadee of
an infant culture industry, ham-fistedly broadcasting grainy
black-and-white images of Wally and the Beav into the populace’s
homes, sending issues of Better Homes and Gardens to the suburbs,
or pounding us into the ground with garishly winking honkies,
who, grinning grotesquely, thrust bottles at us and spewed slogans
like "Coke! It adds life!!!"
My dad was on the debate team in Iowa in high school in the
1950’s. I’ve never been involved in any sort of formal-type
debate, and unless some epic, psychologically devastating disaster
occurs I never will be, but as I understand it, debate basically
works itself out through a system wherein opposing debate teams
read over and attempt to memorize a set of cue cards on which
they’ve written out both points and counterpoints, for
their own and the opposing view. The contest itself is thus
scripted and ritualized, as one team fires off a point and the
other team wracks their collective cranium for the photographic
memory image of the card which explains, "if team B says.....
Team A must respond by saying...." (This makes debate the
second-most pointless endeavor into which children are routinely
forced to participate; the number one being spelling bees: a
bizarre form of competition in which strange, chromosomally-uptight
parents parade out their vitamin-deficient albinos and set them
off and running in pursuit of the prize for most autistic.)
The debate topic probably centered on whether Iowa should be
an English-speaking territory or a full-serve state or something,
but my dad, in any case, tiring of the role as impotent ambassador
of some index cards’ argumentation whims, decided to go
for the frontal assault and abandon the cue card tactic altogether
in favor of espousing Marxist-Leninism as the optimal mode for
getting things done in Iowa. They didn’t have any cue cards
for arguing against Bolsheviks in Iowa in the 1950’s, and
so the opposing debate squad was effectively stumped and just
sort of stood there when it was their turn to rebut, shifting
their walrus-like teenage bulk about nervously and staring at
the floor. Which is, technically, what it looks like when you
"win" a debate, and, in fact, my dad’s team had
clearly whupped quad cities (or whatever) team, until the judges
of the competition, who had immediately retreated to a far corner
to huddle parentally and cast concerned glances back at the
room, returned to their table and declared that, although technically,
they had "won" the debate, they had, in actual real
terms, "lost" the debate because, basically, they
said something that you can’t say (i.e., even though they
had argued most effectively, they had come to a conclusion which
was objectively wrong), and an educational institution can’t
reward kids for being wrong.
That’s just one micro-cosmic example of a culture that
defined truth in such a narrow way as to risk obliteration of
the species, destroy it’s own citizens’ lives, and
keep complex structures of race and gender inequality in place,
all to further the hegemonic cultural construct of Norman Rockwellism.
Because of the generally oppressive and square nature of those
times, one tends to view the occasional crotchety cultural conservative
who laments the passing of these simpler times (see Allan Bloom’s
The Closing of the American Mind, or just listen to anything
Ronald Reagan ever said about anything) with contemptuous dismissal.
The vast bulk of people who don’t fit into the pipe-smoking,
faux-British-accent world of the William F. Buckleys tend to
think smugly that we sort of "won" the debate, world-historically,
with the squares, when in fact we "lost" and "lost"
really badly. As fucked up as the 1950’s might have been,
socially and politically, things are ten times more fucked up
now.
3. Commodifying Culture
21st century Capitalism posits itself as the economic system
which produces the most good for the most people in terms of
creating the widest variety and proliferation of goods and services,
including culture and its associated artifacts- these artifacts
being the physical language which transmits the culture.
This argument might seem plausible in the short term scheme
of things, but the general tendency of capitalist economies
seems to be, in the end, to move towards homogeneity, because
the raison d’etre of any industry is to consolidate as
much wealth and economic power as possible, which leads to monopolies,
and this results in the proliferation of less cultural expression
and more Wal-Marts. It makes sense: industry by nature has to
keep producing to expand and replicate itself. Thus, there is
a drive to continually create new technologies and services
which people can use to communicate, maximize comfort and convenience,
and entertain themselves. The apparent democratic and populist
nature of industry and specifically mass media is created by
a constant creative void in the core of this industry that is
always in need of filling, the one thing the machines cannot
produce: the human factor, i.e., emotional or intellectual expressiveness,
i.e., "art." So, initially you get a culture industry
which seems noble enough in its endeavor to document, disseminate,
or, at least at some level, reflect the history of human struggle
for inclusion and representation, which seems to express the
parameters of thought and interaction in increasingly complex
and multi-faceted ways.
The problem is, though, that the free market ends up delivering
infinite variations on the PBS syndrome: everyone knows that
documentaries and operas are the most culturally edifying thing
on TV, but somehow people would rather watch Married with Children
anyway, and since that’s just consumers casting ballots
with their remote controls, and that’s how the free market
works, how can we argue with the premise of the historically
proven nine-out-of-ten-taste-test-winning economic model? Al
Bundy is a more accurate and imagination-capturing text than
a Shakespeare play, this has been proven by popular consensus.
The options for PBS and related institutions become: a) survival
based on state funding, which means consumer tax dollars are
going to TV shows with potentially little or no cleavage (although,
have you checked out some of those operas? Another slant on
the argument might be that the world-historical cultural triumph
of Married with Children over opera is, in fact, just American
culture coming up with more efficient and direct artistic forms
for presenting cleavage), and that is exactly the kind of inefficient
response to consumer needs which make planned economies such
a drag; b) trying to compete as a legitimate television network,
i.e.; finding corporate sponsors and generating revenue to create
programs by selling off advertising space on the network. This
has already happened to an extent and, let me just say, if you
want a mind-meltingly succinct articulation of just how boring
and homogeneous the "post-historical age" is going
to be, tune into any number of Texaco-funded "Forbes Business
Round-Up" or "Macneil-Lehrer stock-market massage
circle" programs for an experience more unnerving than
the most amateur, methodically mechanical pornography. It’s
like the powers that be at Texaco were just so excited about
destroying one more organ of non-corporate information-dissemination
that they didn’t even have time to come up with any shows.
"Fuck it, man!" I imagine some dickhead in a suit
at some board meeting, frothing at the mouth, "We’ll
have a show! Just, like, us, wearing our suits, talking about
what’s really on our minds: stocks, bonds, the Dow Jones,
stuff like that. It’ll be great, right?" And of course
the entire room is filled with other guys in suits, all slightly
aroused by the prospect being laid before them, and they all
agree heartily, and, the sad thing is that, unlike me and all
of my friends who come up with about ten stunningly entertaining
ideas for TV shows a second, these people actually have the
money to then go buy just such a television show and force it
upon the general population, who, I think quite sensibly, are
so repulsed and beaten into bored submission that they disavow
PBS forever and try to drown their sorrows in the sweet narcotic
elixir of sexually titillating sit-coms and random footage of
automobiles crashing. Or, c) PBS could just throw in the towel
and concede defeat. Really, who watches nature shows? Besides,
even when you do, the best ones are "When Animals Attack"
or any Disney-produced nature show where you might get extra
little animated birds or they’ll hire people to stand off-camera
and actually hurl the lemmings off the cliff, so that you get
a nice, dramatic camera angle to mass suicide.
4. Commodifying Counter-Culture
The plus side to having a coherently articulated dominant ideology
is that it provides the opportunity to formulate a counter-argument,
which is, on various levels, what began to happen in the 50’s
and exploded into a multitude of "counter-cultural"
value systems in the 1960’s. This bothered the humans who
still clung to the established value system, and thus created
a fair amount of societal friction. Institutionally, however,
things remained pretty unaffected, because the industrial infra-structure
that had been built up in World War II to build tanks under
the ideological blanket of war-time ("Beat the Axis!")
and that had then shifted seamlessly into production of dishwashers
and televisions under new the blanket ideology of the American
utopia ("Buy a house in the suburbs! We won! You deserve
it!"), continued to expand its markets as new sub-cultural
markets appeared. People were uptight in the 50’s because
they erroneously assumed that the American "way of life"
somehow intimately intertwined economic prosperity with ideological
cohesiveness, but the ideology, it turned out, was actually
completely secondary.
Capitalism, after all, isn’t a value system, it’s
an economic system, and one of its main features, in fact, is
that it seems endlessly capable of adopting almost any cultural
value system as a sub-set of its larger framework. As long as
product is generated and commodities moved, anything else goes.
You can vehemently condemn the status quo, articulate the sentiment
as brashly and confrontationally as you can possibly conceive,
but these modes of articulation inevitably express themselves
in the form of commodities-if I want to join your anti-establishment
cliqúe, what books do I need? What foods should I buy?
What uniform designates me a member? Where do I get my ID card
laminated? Do you guys have an LP out yet?
A neat little trick: this commodification neutralizes any potentially
social-subversive content from the dialogue, because the exact
way in which dissent is framed and articulated supports the
core principle of industry, which is to produce accoutrements.
If you have a movement based on rejecting the knick-knacks associated
with a movement, that’s a pretty motionless movement. It’s
like trying to construct a philosophy of life without using
words. You’ll probably end up grunting and gesturing a
lot, probably pee and fight, maybe climb a tree or something.
That’s cool and all, but see, that’s not a philosophy,
that’s just acting like a monkey.
So, we have this weird situation now where, on the surface,
the "counter-cultural" idea has won this apparent
victory, in that it’s increasingly more acceptable to define
yourself according to whatever niche you like, and the Montana
survivalists make fun of the hippie communitarians who look
down on the suit-and-tie Wall Street people, who are mildly
annoyed by the skateboarders, who are going to rumble later
this afternoon with the pot heads, who are trying to avoid the
cops, who are way more busy fucking with the hip-hop kids, who
grudgingly accept the lesbian couple down the street now because
they watched that episode of "Ellen." Everyone, in
fact, has their own culturally validating sit-com, or at least
a glossy trade magazine, or, better yet, a web site, and the
Norman Rockwell people are just one more sub-set of that. We
make fun of them at the mall buying their Norman Rockwell prints
since we’re there to get an Andy Warhol poster (one of
those big soup cans- industry as art! Get it?), and that’s
a lot cooler, but hey, don’t worry, the print shop at the
mall has both, so everyone’s happy, essentially.
What actually happens, though, when you reach the conversational
margins of what is discussible within the new elastic paradigm,
is not that you lose your job or that some authority figure
decrees your statement "wrong;" what happens now is
that people treat you like you have a speech impediment. Your
tongue is suddenly two or three times its normal size and you
are convulsively trying to gurgle out something coherent, nervous
stutter setting in as you note the condescending, confused looks
you’re receiving, the squinty little half-smiles which
signify that the listeners really, really, want to know what
the fuck you’re talking about, they’d like to nod
and go, "yeah, man, totally right on, dude," but they
just can’t, because they can’t understand your garbled
and incomprehensible syllabic spasms. By speaking in opposition
to "the culture" you are clearly, by definition, being
"counter-cultural," and people really want to be into
that, they want to be "extreme," they want to "triple-size
it" they want their life with "wild sauce" and
all that, but since the values of counter-cultural transgression
and multi-consumer-culturalism are pretty much the dominant
ones in our society, that act of rebellion makes no sense. It’s
like the people who co-opted the Nike logo to use as a revolutionary
symbol, printing T-shirts that said something like "Class
War: Just Do It." But it’s too late: Nike already
stole the "Just Do It" concept from you in the first
place, indelibly associating free will and spontaneity with
overpriced footwear produced by malnourished children in sweatshops.
The counter-cultural ideal, articulated in opposition to the
square culture of post-war America, whatever its particular
manifestations, boiled down to an overall package of personal
liberation that anyone should be able to do, and by extension,
"be" anything they wanted to. The conglomeration of
beatniks, Black Panthers, Maoists, Trotskyists, Anarchists,
Feminists, free-lovers, junkies, etc., etc., all espoused, in
their proliferation as a free-form amoeba of general "subversive
thought," the general counter-cultural ideal of "more
options," each with their own specific shock-value addendums
to prove what radical thinkers they really were. "More
options," it turns out, is perfectly in line with capitalism,
obviously, and the counter-cultural argument, it turns out,
boils down to "ABC and NBC are not enough. They do not
express my totality. I need cable." The counter-culture
won; it is now the culture. We now all have cable. Hey, the
more channels, the more chances of catching some "subversive
shit," right?
The question, then, clearly becomes how you react to this, if,
in fact, you are uncool with the way things seem to be going
at this point in human history, which is that self-determination
of our lives has been replaced by self-determination of lifestyle,
and meanwhile, increasingly complex technological-industrial
complexes harvest resources in ever-increasingly inefficient
ways in order to continue frenziedly pumping out lifestyle-accessorizing
products that allow you, at best, to express your "individuality"
only in the most general and herd-like ways, like being into
"South Park" and thinking that people who like "The
Simpsons" are so two seasons ago. How do you express being
against the world-historical victory of "more options?"
5. Commodifying People
Every person is, to a greater or lesser extent, involved in
the assertion of their own cultural prerogatives, be it through
painting a beautiful painting, speaking eloquently, wearing
a lamp shade on your head and pulling your pants down at a party,
swearing like a sailor- whatever your preferred mode of expression
is, your "statement" of self, once you’ve expressed
it recognizably, immediately a little © appears next to
the image of you with that lamp shade on your head and people
go, "Ah, yes! Wearing a lamp shade on your head: ©
al burian, 1999." This expression of attention from others
in relation to your statement of self can take various forms,
but as a general rule it befuddles the espouser, who stands
in the headlight-glare of his or her new-found brand-recognizability
and goes "Huh huh huh," sort of retardedly, unsure
of how to deal with the spotlight. The light feels warm though,
it feels good. Because it feels good the person in question
will tend to forget the initial statement of self entirely,
concentrating attention instead on repetition of the name brand.
Thus, even if wearing the lamp shade was initially intended
as an angry and subversive social commentary on people’s
passive dousing of their own internal light bulbs in the face
of fascism’s steady encroachment on their lives, once everyone
applauds and says, "bitchin’!" the whole scenario
changes. All of a sudden, you’re showing up every week
at some party, pulling the same old lamp shade gag.
This works out well for a while, and everyone is amped when
the "lamp shade guy" turns up, but the joke gets old
fast, and, craving that warm feeling, you continue more and
more desperately to wear bigger and bigger lamp shades, or try
wearing a toaster on your head or something, anything; anything
to keep milking the formula, which has boiled itself down to
a gross crack-cocaine-like substance, the naked urge to keep
attention focused on yourself by any means you can contrive.
Anyone who develops a success formula is sad to see, because
you just watch them repeat it with decreasing success for the
rest of their life.
When you produce an artifact, regardless of intent or attempt
at intent, it immediately becomes subject to interpretation
by a culture which has only one interpretation. No statement
can ever overshadow the implicit statement in making a statement:
"I am a person who makes statements." There it is:
the ©. This is how individuals become commodities.
6. The Futility of Producing Counter-Cultural Commodities
I have somewhat of a personal stake in this (though, I guess,
who doesn’t), specifically because I am self-identified
as a cultural producer and member of a sub-culture which was
killed right before my eyes: the indigenous culture of suburban
disaffiliation, punk rock. I remember the moment I glimpsed
the corpse: I was driving around the beltway of Raleigh, North
Carolina, in a van, lost, beginning to feel the stirrings of
panic as the same exit I had seen a couple of times already
rumbled past in the ever-slowing molasses-interlock of congealing
rush hour artery-clogging. Five O’clock: Research Triangle
Park, proud to boast the highest per capita density of PhD’s
anywhere in the charted universe, most of whom are focusing
their monolithic cranial capacity on fine-tuning the amount
of anal leakage, oh, I’m sorry, the euphemism is "loose
stool," caused by synthetic and undigestible fat-substitutes
so that Americans can continue to deep-fry as many things as
possible without their actual internal organs coming to too
closely resemble the clogged arteries and exploding hearts that
their rush-hour beltways evoke as a result of their cholesterol-reducing
research, causing one to wonder, which is the metaphor, the
heart attack or the traffic jam?
Raleigh, North Carolina is a terrible place to need to get,
say, a speaker re-coned or something. Inevitably, somehow you
end up having to go there on some errand, consulting the maps
and diagrams in advance, swearing to yourself, I am not a hick
from a small town with two main streets, I can go to a medium-sized
city and navigate it without getting hopelessly lost for several
hours. Wishful thinking, always hopelessly over-optimistic,
and as rush hour set in that day and I found myself resigned
once again to at least another hour in the metal box of my choice,
breathing in carbon monoxide, I turned for solace to the radio.
That is Raleigh’s saving grace: as much as I think it blows
there, they do have this totally killer metal station. It is
killer both for the obvious reason, which is that you get to
hear metal, but more specifically, it is killer because, just
as when in Rome one is advised to do as the Romans, so when
in Raleigh you might as well really get into the whole ambiance
of the sprawling decentralized shopping mall wasteland by listening,
as you traverse this barren plain, to what becomes contextually
the ideal soundtrack to the modern-day river Styx known as the
440 beltway, the grating staccato blur of rednecky muscle rock.
Five O’clock, a summer day, circa 1993 or so, and the DJ
comes on the radio to announce the Five O’clock Rock Block
(hey, it rhymes) will this afternoon consist of five songs by
a punk rock band. As they proceeded to play this band on the
Raleigh metal station, a strange train-wreckage of culture confluence,
something which I had never heard or expected to hear, I was
suddenly brought face to face with the daunting and ludicrous
fact that, up until that moment, somewhere deep down I had actually
believed that music like this was somehow inherently subversive;
that, as I sat in the basement of some dorm taping the exact
records now being offered up as rush-hour pacification from
the record library of my college radio station, I convinced
myself that if ever the day came when a band like this was played
on the Raleigh metal station, all hell would break loose, motorists
would be having instantaneous brain aneurysms on the 440 beltway,
groups of people would band together and begin looting and destroying
the shopping malls, and within the span of a five-song "rock
block" a glorious people’s insurrection would coagulate,
rushing in to overthrow patriarchy and institutional oppression
and create a worker’s utopia based on fairness and free
expression of individual will. I thought that this inherent
subversion was proven de facto by the very nonexistence of such
music being played on the radio; as if it’s absence amounted
to censorship, which amounted to an admission of fear and trembling
before it’s ideological might on the part of the Powers
That Be.
Five songs later, stuck in immobile gridlock, my basic aesthetic
principle proven wrong by some Raleigh DJ sitting in an air-conditioned
studio applying wax to his curly schlong, and here I am, in
rush hour, on account of an amp speaker I’ve been driving
around trying to get re-coned so that I can begin the task of
methodically destroying this speaker again, by playing punk
rock music through it, leading in turn to future amp retubings
and speaker reconings, all of which is just part of myself maintaining
my status as consumer of audio-repair goods and services.
So here we are, one more lifestyle option in a kaleidoscopic
panorama of meaningless lifestyle choices. There is a mural
in my home town which depicts what I gather is supposed to be
a cross-section of the citizens of the town, marching arm in
arm down the street, in a display of civic unity. Among the
students, shop-owners, artists, businessmen, athletes, etc.
there is a cigarette smoking punk rocker, surly snarl on his
face, sporting a mohawk and with a skull tattooed on the side
of his head. How can anyone even contemplate being a punk rocker
now? What kind of rebellion is it when the town has made a public
declaration of how quaint and cute you are?
7. The Futility of Producing Anything
I do, honestly, believe that I am surrounded by some of the
most brilliant and dynamic minds of my generation, but unfortunately
I also feel quite acutely that this fact does not amount to
shit. Brilliance and dynamism are quantifiable and I’m
not in charge of quantifying. If it turns out that the people
I know are the Vincent Van Goghs and Ernest Hemmingways of the
future, that just means that somewhere along the line someone
found a way to package them effectively, or that they have packaged
themselves effectively. If they aren’t packaged, they might
as well not exist, since no one will ever know of their brilliance
and thus the world will continue to believe that Beavis and
Butthead is actually the best possible cartoon humanity can
produce, that those guys are the funniest, most astute social
critics in existence. Many of my friends will actually end up
writing jokes for Beavis and Butthead or utilizing their vast
megatonage of artistic talent to draw pictures of Bon Jovi shaking
his greasy mane around so that other friends of mine can eventually
focus their titanic telescopically insightful brains on writing
the following profound insights into the human condition:
Beavis: Dude looks like a lady, dude.
Butthead: Shut up, Beavis.
Butthead: huh huh huh.
This is going to be a big disappointment for me personally.
I would like to see my peers evolving new subcultures which
don’t have names, which exist merely on secret handshakes.
The old names are confusing and meaningless, and that’s
fine, let them remain just so, because the moment you label
what you are doing, pin it down and define its parameters, you
kill it, because it can now have a universal product code attached
to it.
Of course, it’s a lot more likely that they’ll just
continue their current trend of increasingly justifying their
immoral whoring behavior at the hands of gigantic corporations
on the basis of those corporations giving them a lot of money.
Which is fine, it’s the world’s oldest profession,
one of the few basic economic arrangements left largely untouched
by the ultra-rapid technological expansions which have careened
us screaming to this millennial angst salad bar, but still,
I wish these people would stop acting like they’ve really
pulled one over on Them because they got paid to work. The whole
problem of conceptualizing yourself as a subversive persona
is that the only truly subversive act is not to take that money.
The money is how THEY subvert YOU. "But, Al, you dumb ass,"
they say, meaning it in the nicest possible way, "you work
for slightly more than minimum wage all the time, and there’s
these gigantic corporations literally paying out money in huge
burlap sacks and all they ask is that you do stuff which is
actually a lot more stimulating and engaging than pumping gas!"
Well, yeah. Of course corporations have a lot of money. That’s
the whole problem- they are gigantic corporations who buy out
everyone with any creativity and integrity and make them a serf
in the service of their core project, which is making everything
as homogeneous and crappy as possible. Or to paraphrase it in
religious nut terminology(in case there are any remaining religious
nuts in the audience): You think when the serpent tempted Adam
and Eve in the garden of Eden his sales pitch was, "Hey,
try this apple! It’s really mealy and bitter tasting, and
there’s just as good food right down the way which God
WON’T punish you for eating!" Not much of a temptation,
is it? If they weren’t offering you something really good
it wouldn’t be an act of resistance to refuse it. It would
be one of those feel-good displays of social conscience play-acting,
like going to the health food store and buying the vegetarian
entrée, or recycling the packaging from your TV dinner.
Satan walks amongst my peers, doling out candy bars and Pop
Tarts. If you do take their money, you better do something pretty
awe-inspiring with it. Even then, you won’t have excused
yourself, because whatever you do, you’ve already displayed
your ability to be bought, and anyway, you’ll probably
just buy a sandwich or a stereo with it. We’ll still get
along OK; I’ll talk to you at parties and such. Just don’t
tell me about all the killer subversive shit you’re going
to do, you’re planning to do, you and your friends have
been talking about doing. I find that really depressing.
|
