"Extreme Makeover - Disaster Edition!"
Oh, how it turns my stomach, even as it manages to bring tears to my eyes, not that I try to watch. Sometimes, though, on a Sunday night after a football game, as I kill time before Dexter comes on, I’ll flip through Extreme Makeover - Home Edition and marvel at the perfect firestorm of maudlin Hallmark America, rampant consumerism and disaster capitalism. Or, I can just wait until something terrible happens to a large number of people and turn on CNN.
Go to PR Newswire and click on Today’s News. You’ll be treated to stories about plenty of compassionate Corps reaching out to folks who are suffering dislocations and loss due to the wildfires in CA, including cookie companies, pharmacies, wireless users and even the predatory lender Countrywide.
Oh, am I being too cynical? Let alone that every newsbreak repeats the name of a cell-phone provider and an NFL franchise, but increasingly we’re sold during disasters the idea that volunteers and public-minded companies are the go-to providers of aid when the world is afire, or drowned.
Firefighting helicopters refill in a small lake as they work to
protect homes during a wildfire burning in
Malibu, California October 21, 2007. - REUTERS/Phil Mccarten
A society demonstrates its values by what it funds publicly. During this disaster, with it’s pictures of primarily middle-class and wealthy refugees, we’re sold the consumer products industries as saviors. During Katrina, we were sold security contractors, militarism and fear. What products are packaged with a given disaster is driven by the victims of that disaster, so during the current trials we’re told about cell phones and cookies and how diligently we compassionate Americans take care of pets and other animals. During Katrina, with all those black faces (and as people in the fashion and magazine industry will tell you, black faces don’t sell), we were sold fear and Blackwater. The products are taylored to the pictures provided by newsmodels between ads for SUVs and non-habit forming sleep aids (because you’ll need the help after the endless diet of fearmongering and stress from an increasingly ruthless job market).
The company stores are back, and the owners will dig their hooks into us deeper and deeper, every chance they get, even over the dead floating bodies and burned-down American dreams.
So nice to see you up and writing Madman! I’m off on business but hope to post when I get back.
Posted by on 10/25 at 08:01 PMGood to see you back online. Hope you and the rest of the crew here are doing good despite the steady flow of atrocities.
Posted by Man Eegee on 10/29 at 12:02 PM
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