:: Revolutionary Gear for those who can't be bothered
Turns out Winona is not the only one deserving her own T-Shirt. Noelle Bush, Daniel Pearl, Adam Ant, and even Martha Stewart deserve saving, at least if
Y-Que Trading, the self-styled
invaluble resevoir of cultural artifiacts in the present, is any indication. Other goodies include a Che Gevarra T-shirt and one with the Enron logo wrapped in what looks like a devil tail.
Yes, yes, I know, it's humor. I can't help but see it as a feeble echo of the 70s, a trying-on of the past to re-experience Abbie Hoffman's
Steal This Book!, which will be republished Feb 9, or, darkly, the protest movements, the most recent of which are against
globalization and are quite slick and chic.
The echos are feeble, as the times, they have a changed. The unparalleled prosperity of the past ten years pales in comparison to the dwindling prosperity from the heights of the 50s to the depths of the 70s. And the young men of the 60s and 70s were still subject to the draft, a very real axe waiting its next execution.
Spiraling further, a related tangent is
defense spending as a percentage of the GDP. By the end of WW2 was at
45%. By the Korean War, defense spending was at 14% and steadily declined to the present 3%.
Not making a case for defense spending here. No. It is to remark that how leaders have used the energy represented by the GDP is mirrored, at times with distortion, in the cultural concerns of the children they brought into the world. Actio et reactio.
