Saturday, January 07, 2006

War is Great for the Economy...or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Consumerism

Between the barrage of anxiety-ridden images, we are given commercial breaks to inform us, the passive viewer, that although these events are happening we can take comfort in the immediate gratification of consuming products. Consumerism therefore becomes a form of escapism; it is a successful distraction from the problems of social and political reality.
Digital image printed on photo paper, mounted on archival backing.

2 comments:

katherine said...

thanks for the input! thats pretty interesting...
i would like to say, that its not that consuming is a terrible thing, but that rather we are excessive, and i believe consumers don't even know why they buy the stuff they do...

arcolaura said...

"War is Great for the Economy..."
...and the economy is great for war. Without our excessive consumerism feeding markets that can be skimmed for profits and taxes, there wouldn't be much resources to make a war with.

A quote from one of my favourite bloggers:
"Many advocates ask almost rhetorically 'Why can't we just get rid of the oil wars and the military and the globalism and just do something else with our time and resources?' We can't. If we get rid of our dependency on oil, Chinese slave labor, immigrant labor, expoiting the environment, and the credit economy, we'd suddenly find ourselves living a lot smaller. If all advocates and protestors lived as smally as they would have to if their protests were successful, they wouldn't have to protest in the first place."

He's a very disturbing thinker, Eleutheros is.