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I am sick of this culture of constant merchandising. My latest horror has been the planned fatal obsolescence of my four-year-old Lenovo computer, sabotaged by Microsoft updates and then left unsupported by Lenovo. Typing my computer model number into the Lenovo support data base yields me an empty page. My petty revenge is writing this entry on that PC which I just managed to revive after a black screen crash the other day. Took me hours of determined DOS wrangling in BIOS, but I did it. My new Chromebox streaming PC is due any day now. Bye bye, Windows. Bye bye, Lenovo.

I grew up with this madness in the automotive business. American car manufacturers famously pushed people to trade in and trade up every few years. They provided ample incentives by making cars which fell apart or died mechanically under 100,000 miles. The killing car culture in the U.S. still thrives. I get awed stares from observers of my 17-year-old Toyota as I pass by them here in a suburb. I have had owners of slick new SUV's walk widely around me and my car in parking lots, as though I might infect them with the sensibility to run a car into the ground before buying another. 

I rented one of the new SUV's recently as part of my move. Like driving a tank buoyed up on four Pilates balls. Bouncy, bouncy, in a rather disconcerting way. Insulated like a rubber room on a mental ward. No wonder people are driving as if catatonic. A camera feed to the ass of the car with runway markers, like landing an airplane backwards. Perhaps those cameras would better serve the gravity impaired (obese) among us. The camera feed from their asses could be sent to special glasses, made available in chic designs. I would appreciate being bumped into less often by these folks in stores.

So this is the free-market capitalism of Ayn Rand's wet dreams, if she had been capable of such dreams.  I do not think that former Soviets would prefer the return of bread lines, but I do wonder if this is what they bargained for when they embraced The West. They may be good resources for figuring out a middle ground. 

Our media has even taken to merchandising new features in the facial sense. Plastic surgery, once the vanity of the rich and famous, is marketed widely to middle class consumers. Sex alteration is commonplace. Today I saw a person of one of the new 35+ genders in a suburb. That person was six-feet-five-inches and looked like a cross between Greta Garbo, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Larry Bird. Truly stunning, but wholly synthetic. 

I speculate that all this materialistic merchandising of things and body parts is a distraction. Mad humming on the overcrowded deck of Titanic Earth. Amazon-ing and eBay-ing ourselves into the abyss of environmental failure. More and better disposable diapers? Sure. Bigger and bulkier baby buggies? How cute. Bulbous careening vehicles to wrap around us like portable panic rooms? Of course. It seems the stores will be open until all the lights go out. And the suckers will be lined up to the bitter end.