“Every rock anthem, every fashion statement, every protest gesture, every novel about rebellious youth—starting with The Catcher in the Rye and On the Road—carried the same cultural message: It’s better to be a nonconformist than a conformist, a creative individualist than a member of a group, a rebel than a traditionalist, a daring adventurer than …
The Bedlam of the Elites
“There is no one single elite in America. Hence, there is no definable establishment to be oppressed by and to rebel against. Everybody can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus. You can be an X Games celebrity and appear on ESPN2, or an atonal jazz demigod and be celebrated in obscure music magazines. You …
If One’s Good, Two Must Be Better
“Though Realtor Mom likes Wal-Mart, it’s the price club that really gets her heart racing, because price clubs are Wal-mart on acid. Here you can get laundry detergent in 41-pound tubs, 30-pound bags of frozen Tater Tots, frozen waffles in 60-serving boxes, and packages of 1,500 Q-tips, which is 3,000 actual swabs since there’s cotton …
Cloth Ratios
“[In] America today the average square yardage of boyswear grows and grows, while the square inches in the girls’ outfits shrinks and shrinks. The boys carry so much fabric they look like skateboarding Bedouins, and the girls look like preppy prostitutes.” [David Brooks, On Paradise Drive (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 56]
Foods of the World
“The rule in these pedestrian-friendly town centers is ‘Fight a way, gain a restaurant.’ You’ll find Afghan eateries, Vietnamese restaurants, Lebanese diners, Japanese sushi bars alongside dining options from Haiti, Cambodia, India, Mongolia, and Moscow. And this is not to even mention the Cosi-style casual dining spots offering shiitake mushroom panini sandwiches or the gourmet …
A Bag of Cardboard Chips
“The folks at Trader Joe’s also confront higher moral problems, such as snacks. Everyone knows that snack food is morally suspect, since it contributes to t he obesity of the American public, but the clientele still seems to want it. So the folks behind this enterprise have managed to come up with globally concerned stomach …
AmeriCool
“We sort of take coolness for granted because it is so much around us. However, coolness is one of those pervasive and revolutionary constructs that America exports around the globe. Coolness is a magical state of grace, and as we take our drive through America, we will see that people congregate into communities not so …
Suburban Supernova
“It’s as if Zeus came down and started plopping vast towns in the middle of the farmland and the desert overnight. Boom! A master planned community! Boom! A big-box mall! Boom! A rec center, pool, and four thousand soccer fields! The food courts come first, and the people follow. How many times in human history …
All the Western World’s An Ad
“The forces that affect it [our modern secular culture] are in the West the great commercialized amusement industries and in the East the forces of political propaganda. And I do not think that Christianity can ever compete with these forms of mass culture on their own ground. If it does so, it runs the danger …
Fruit In Its Season
“A Christian civilization is certainly not a perfect civilization, but it is a civilization that accepts the Christian way of life as normal and frames its institutions as the organs of a Christian order. Such a civilization actually existed for a thousand years more or less. It was a living and growing organism—a great tree …