All generalizations are false including this one..

With the suasion of such as Kissinger and the pundulum between Hobbes and Berlin: we pompously preach to the world a very great deal we hardly comprehend locally.. (while remaining determinedly unclueful even about "what We are like" !!) witness this excerpt -

Dennis Judd, an
urban-affairs expert at the University
of Missouri at St. Louis, told me
recently, "It's nonsense to think that
Americans are individualists. Deep
down we are a nation of herd
animals: micelike conformists who
will lay at our doorstep many of our
rights if someone tells us that we
won't have to worry about crime and
our property values are secure. We
have always put up with restrictions
inside a corporation which we would
never put up with in the public
sphere. But what many do not
realize is that life within some sort of
corporation is what the future will
increasingly be about."

Indeed, a number of American cities
are re-emerging as Singapores, with
corporate enclaves that are
dedicated to global business and
defended by private security firms
adjacent to heavily zoned suburbs.
For instance, in my travels I have
looked for St. Louis and Atlanta and
not found them. I found only hotels
and corporate offices with generic
architecture, "nostalgic" tourist
bubbles, zoned suburbs, and bleak
urban wastelands; there was nothing
distinctive that I could label "St.
Louis" or "Atlanta." Last year's
Olympics in Atlanta will most likely
be judged by future historians as the
first of the postmodern era, because
of the use of social fa\ufffdades to
obscure fragmentation. Peace and
racial harmony were continually
proclaimed to be Olympic themes --
even though whites and blacks in
Atlanta live in separate enclaves and
the downtown is a fortress of office
blocks whose streets empty at dusk.
During the games a virtual army was
required to protect visitors from
terrorism, as at previous Olympics,
and also from random crime. All this
seems normal. It is both wonderful
and frightening how well we adapt.

Perhaps it is the bathos of our mindless entertainment and the smugness of our jingoism - by those not even aware of what our 'traditions' once meant! - that doom us to live out the predictions one may infer in between the lines of this full essay.

The sterile Atlantas.. etc. perfectly suit suits of the world: country-less, ethics-less and homogenized - for personal aggrandizement in an environment of vacuous architecture and character. Even Corporate-allegiance is an oxymoron: all are expendable; only the $ is now sacred.

I am most grateful that I shall not see the fruition of the Corp-monster world we are ovinely slouching towards >>>

Good luck to any unfortunate enough to, comprehend what is occurring.. as it occurs.


Ashton