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Monday, January 13, 2003 |
Eat Your Vegetables? Only at a Few Schools. School lunches have become a central issue in the national debate over why Americans are growing obese. By Elizabeth Becker and Marian Burros. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
The really scary and insidious side to this entire story is how children are further being trained brand consumers. Less money for schools. Lower taxes. And to pay for all the basics, schools have to rely on corporate sponsors and vending machines, further reinforcing the disintegration of our world into a market state. I just finished reading "The Dream of Scipio" which deals with civilized collapse over three epochs - the collapse of the Roman empire in Gaul, the Plague in Europe and WWII, all located, roughly, in Vaisson and Avignon. The choices each of the protagonists makes are informed by classical education and the instinct of the heart, loyalty to friends, loyalty to the permanency of ideals, and how brutal those choices can be. Today, the very institutions, like government and the church, that were once keepers of the flame, our core values, are leading the dismantling of what makes us human. Marshall Berman, in All That is Solid Melts into Air, expresses his optimism in humans' continued ability to define individuality in an increasingly reflexive society, telling a first-hand account about a poor young black girl proudly showing off her new pants. I think of that essay often, and how, when it was written fifteen or so years ago, there wasn't the level of commercialism that exists today. The choices people make about constructing identity are so limited, so superficial, with mainstream evangelical Christian traditions, the mega-Churches, enforcing those consumer values, rather than challenging them. Their Mickey Mouse Christianity is itself emblematic of a lack of reasoned commitment, and their messages of prosperity being a sign of God's grace a rallying cry for insipid consumer-values based lifestyles. What then, in today's world, to create community? Are pockets of anarchists throughout the globe the monks of this Dark Ages? And how to define, in this age of cultural pluralism, what mores, what societal artefacts we put in the ark? Two by two. The covenants, the still burning embers, to take until civilization encamps again. Julien, one of Pears' characters in The Dream of Scipio makes the impassioned argument that Nazism wasn't a failed ideology, a losing side, but a demonstration of civilization at its most effective, in this case the end result the brutal efficiency of genocide. I don't believe that, that the ultimate result of civilization is simply more efficient destruction, barbarism under law, but a world where laws and civil society paradoxically support my belief that people are more important than ideas. And especially brands.
9:31:16 AM ![]() |