Theos-Talk Archives (December 1997 Message tl00027)

According to theos-l@vnet.net:
> For instance I have seen on TV-news that in America they made a market
> research test about the peoples dreams and found out that they dream of a
> godness. So the hired an author writing books about the test results, started
> to sell these books (I am almost sure that t-shirts and cups etc. follow) and
> are at the time beeing founding travel agencies because the books say in
> the year 2000 Jesa (the name of the godness) shall appear in the desert
> Gobi. I am "getting birds" when I hear of something like this!

This is all news to me.  But commercialism is not an American
invention.
>
> Are they not aware in America that the year 2000 already was in 1997?

Beg pardon?  If you're talking about 2000 years after Jesus's
birth, that'll be something like 2004 according to virtually
unanimous consensus among scholars.

> What kind of a personality structure do salesmen have when there is
> nothing else left to sell than other peoples dreams? (It reminds me of
> the German movie "der Tod eines Handelsreisenden"). Why do some
> Americans so badly need retching-sweat-pink Holywood-facotries?

Having been hanging out on soc.culture.usa, rec.travel.europe
and some related ngs, I realized that some Europeans seem to devote
a hell of a lot of attention to looking down on Americans.  A
German, a GERMAN for Chrissakes, had the nerve to announce that
Americans had killed more people than any other country.  I did
some research and found the 20th century death totals for Germany and
Russia to be in the 30-50 million range, for America 3-5.
Russians, too, can be found on the newsgroups insisting that
our 20th century history has been as bloody as their own!  And
some idiotic Americans are agreeing with them to boot.

That's all irrelevant to your question, Nicole, but I would
suggest to you that divining people's dreams and figuring out
ways to cash in on them is what advertising is all about, and I
don't think Europeans are any less manipulated by advertising
than we are.

Don't know what you mean by retching-sweat-pink Hollywood
factories.  But the *world* "needs" the crap that Hollywood
cranks out; America exports culture all over the world, and
Europeans are the biggest consumers of it.  I think
Dallas and Dynasty were more popular over there than they were
here, and we're talking bottom of the entertainment barrel.
Europeans resent the hell out of the fact that they are avid
consumers of American pop culture, but it surely is not *our*
fault that they are.  And unlike even a few years ago, Europe
is not exporting much culture to speak of in this direction;
wish it were otherwise.

PJ