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Wednesday, November 22, 2000
Lapham, Utopia
A virtuouso lambast of consumption culture from Lewis Lapham.
If I have trouble drawing the blueprint of a credible utopia, possibly it's because I've seen too many television commercials, heard too many banquet speeches, swallowed too much propaganda about how the free market is another name for democracy. The market, of course, isn't democratic; nor is it interested in the public good. The market speaks only to money -- politely to people with a lot of it, rudely to those without -- and the merchants of bliss address their sales pitches to the private good, targeting the demographics, dividing communities into postal codes and telephone exchanges, breaking down the family members into profitable fragments of will and appetite, wish and dream. Incapable of making moral or aesthetic judgments,the market happily commissions the building of St. Paul's Cathedral and the furnaces of Treblinka. The customer is always right.
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