The Business of America: How Consumers Have Replaced Citizens and how We Can Reverse the TrendWhen President Bush promoted shopping as a patriotic duty, the American culture of consumption hit a new low. But a quiet revolution is growing in the developing world and in a new generation of Americans, fighting the advance of the shopping malls and the desolation they leave behind. Written by one of the most insightful critics of American commercialism, The Business of America probes the forces that have transformed citizens into consumers eager to take as much as they can from the planet. From on-line shopping to spectator sports to the cash-and-carry ethos of political campaigns, Saul Landau decodes the subtle ways in which advertising images tell us to correct our inadequacies with more things: SUVs, credit cards, air conditioning, video games. The winds of change are blowing, Landau shows, from resurgent student protests for underpaid janitors to the Group of 21, the developing countries that stopped the World Trade Organization dead in its tracks in 2003. Eschewing nostalgia for a simpler time--a less-interconnected world that can never return-The Business of America shows how we as citizens can regain our identities, stripping away the plastic overlay of consumerism. |
Contents
The Culture of Naked Power | 11 |
The Enron System Works Well for Some People | 18 |
Sex and the Enron Scam | 24 |
A Dialogue about Sex Violence and the Budget | 26 |
Its the Budget Stupid Bushs Lucky Duckies | 30 |
Classify This National Security Culture Sets the Norm | 35 |
The Intelligence Culture in the National Security Age | 37 |
Our Aging Faust | 41 |
Will the Next War Be Against Smog? | 100 |
A Global Warming Sermon in Dialogue | 103 |
An Anza Borrego Odyssey | 106 |
Mount Whitney Towers over Death Valley but Death Valley Doesnt Look Up to Whitney | 108 |
Diseased Meat? Could Be Wurst | 112 |
Exporting the Best Chemicals the Stomach Can Absorb | 114 |
Bushs America | 118 |
Scenes from a Late Summer Havana Wedding | 121 |
A Panglossian Conversation | 46 |
History? Whats That? | 50 |
Sheep Dont Need Whipping Media in the TwentyFirst Century | 55 |
World News in Shotgun Pellets of Anxiety from the Media | 57 |
Religious Diversion from the Issues in the Age of Reason and Hi Tech | 62 |
Review of Pollock | 65 |
Advertising Can Make You Personally and Politically Crazy | 67 |
Commercial Messages Produce Advanced Scatteration | 71 |
Democracy at Its Ugliest | 75 |
Clear Channel Fogs the Airwaves | 79 |
Business and Ideology | 83 |
Ahab Can Beat the Whale | 87 |
At Two with Nature | 89 |
Commuting in Los Angeles | 95 |
Privatize The Key to Public Culture | 96 |
The Iraq Conundrum | 127 |
Bush and King Henry Similar Birds of Different Feathers | 129 |
Dont Get Distracted by Cameron Diazs Acne or Talk of War | 134 |
How 911 Events Helped Democracy to Evolve toward Perfection | 139 |
Different Worlds | 145 |
Shiite Happens | 149 |
The Quiet American Returns on Film | 153 |
Part I | 160 |
Part II | 164 |
Closing Remarks | 169 |
There Is Life after Shopping and It Feels Good | 171 |
Notes | 175 |
181 | |
183 | |
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