Monday Trash

We are waiting for the garbage truck; Ivo, Burl and I. It's a pretty nice day out. Our tatamis are drying in the garden after a coffee spill.

I get the US edition of Vanity Fair every month. I have it on standing order at Caves. The VF website is good too. This month they've published their annual essay contest winners. The topic was "to define our national reality." Here are a few of my favorite bits from the winning essay.

So today, nearly 200 years later, America continues to boast about its "exceptionalism" while Europe continues to resent hearing lectures about freedom and justice from a country founded on slavery and genocide.

This sort of contrast between one's self-image and one's public image has always been the stuff of comedy, but it's getting harder and harder to laugh about the gap between appearance and reality in America. The gap has widened into a chasm of make-believe that approaches schizophrenia. Hypocrisy is only part of the story. Ignorance plays an important role, too, as does sheer brutality. Together with greed and complacency, they feed our truly astounding capacity for denial. In fact denial, more than Christianity, is probably the true American religion. You need nothing short of religious faith—untainted by godless fact and logic—to slap a no blood for oil sticker on the bumper of your S.U.V. and fail to see the irony.

Meanwhile, the terminology has changed in step with our increasing greed, which even Mrs. Trollope, who considered us money-grubbing, would find shocking. The American people, once deemed citizens, are now "consumers," consuming the lion's share of the world's resources. Old-fashioned imperialism operates under euphemisms such as "globalization," "outsourcing," and (my favorite) "spreading democracy," justifying situations in which Asian and Latin American slaves who are not called "slaves" sew our clothes and assemble the television sets that transmit the American Dream, a vision of universal prosperity that somehow always excludes images of the ubiquitous sweatshop.

I really like the updated Orwellian doublespeak; globalization, outsourcing and spreading democracy all standing for a kinder gentler 21st century imperialism. I'm gonna be working this into as many conversations as possible this week, like with the Scandinavians and their lactose.