Think about the way everything has become a commodity, everything is for sale, even our fight against commodification!
Growing Up ...
Soon the young generation,
those reared in the shadow of the first world war, chewed gum. They smoked, wore
raccoon coats, watched football, drove automobiles, and mimicked their radio
heroes. Props and make-believe lives began to fill the empty spaces in their
new, post-Industrial world. Meanwhile, adults in the decade that roared must
have wondered how the kids of the day could be so frivolous, so oblivious to
the harsh realities of the world. “Youth is wasted by the young,” they would
have said. So they sent their kids to college to go waste theirs on campus.
By the 1960s, the decade that burned, wasted youth had
become a full-fledged consumer group. Not only did kids still chew gum, but as a
generation they had, since birth, gobbled their way through so much industrial
output that the world was finally beginning to see that it would someday run
out of fuel. The ones that marched against war in Vietnam had everything mass-produced
and mass-marketed for them, from their cars to their breakfast cereals. Even America’s singular contribution to culture was sold out for
them to buy when profiteers had exploited and sanitized Black music, stamping out
millions of records for those unwitting teens.
Ultimately the war protest itself became just one more
mass-market commodity, one more way to sell Coke. Haight-Ashbury sold out to upscale snobs; ex-Hippies became
concerned more with interest rates than Indochina, and even the great guru of the bed-in John Lennon – who begged the
world to “Give Peace a Chance” – bought a golden Rolls-Royce and moved into a
castle.
Be Your Own Boss
Here is a great resource for those of you who want to get out of the maze!
MONEY!!
This is a great song, not as great vid., but it seems to go with the theme ...