The brand that didn't deliver

[Canadian Socialist]

>by Heather Mallick
September 11, 2005

The grand illusion is gone now. That sheen the United States once had for people around the world who were vulnerable to sheen has gone off. If Brand America were a soft drink and not a country, it would be funny, but it's not. It's the painful result of the monstrous egotism and stupidity of George W. Bush and his advisers combined with days of watching the news on-line or on TV with utter disbelief.

I saw, as you did, a row of elderly poor people in the New Orleans Superdome waiting to die. They were left to sit for days, defecating in their wheelchairs, thirsty, unfed and unwashed. They were surrounded by thousands of other poor people weeping with incomprehension. “Why won't they help us?” one woman sobbed.

The reporter, the BBC's Matt Frei, used the technique of juxtaposition, something American media don't because it wouldn't be “objective,” showing us the corpse of an old woman in a wheelchair, her feet rotting wetly in the heat. And then Mr. Frei gestured down the street where healthy, armed National Guardsmen in Jeeps prowled the streets for looters.

I've always been puzzled why intelligent people, particularly intelligent Brits, bought the American brand. Perhaps that sheen was so dazzling it hid the filth and degradation and racism beneath. It contrasted brilliantly with the drabness of the watchers' own lands.
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http://rabble.ca/columnists_full.shtml?x=41686

Heather writes much better than me...

[silverweb]

1. Another ouch!

Well written and too true.

How far the mighty have fallen....

[dmkinsey]

2. Yow! She's good

[silverweb]

3. Recommended.

:kick:

[buddysmellgood]

4. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe

free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

[lonestarnot]

5. yearning to breathe the smell of death! The statute is rolling her eyes

Bloodshot eyes!:yoiks:

[Stinky The Clown]

6. Another failing brand .....

[confludemocrat]

7. On target. It goes on:still bodies out there in the muck 15d after

makes me ill.

[SheWhoMustBeObeyed]

8. A very apt analysis, because marketing is America's premier export

and branding is its crowning jewel.

American business no longer sells products and services. It sells lifestyles and personalities. The dissection of the American consumer - indeed, our very reduction from 'citizen' to 'consumer' - is itself the product. Now it is consumers who are branded, and that sad, sick development, many decades in its perfecting, is emulated by business around the world.

But do not mourn for Brand America. Marketers have already identified the Anti-American Brand, and are ready to press their clients' white-hot irons against those consumers' pale flanks.

All Hail The Brand.

[Karenina]

9. All hail the brand...

here's the image to match: