Thomas Frank, "Conquest of Cool" excerpt from

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/259919.html

The counterculture has long since outlived the enthusiasm of its original
participants and become a more or less permanent part of the American scene,
a symbolic and musical language for the endless cycles of rebellion and
transgression that make up so much of our mass culture. With leisure-time
activities of consuming redefined as "rebellion," two of late capitalism's
great problems could easily be met: obsolescence found a new and more
convincing language, and citizens could symbolically resolve the
contradiction between their role as consumers and their role as producers.
The countercultural style has become a permanent fixture on the American
scene, impervious to the angriest assaults of cultural and political
conservatives, because it so conveniently and efficiently transforms the
myriad petty tyrannies of economic life—all the complaints about conformity,
oppression, bureaucracy, meaninglessness, and the disappearance of
individualism that became virtually a national obsession during the 1950s—
into rationales for consuming. No longer would Americans buy to fit in or
impress the Joneses, but to demonstrate that they were wise to the game, to
express their revulsion with the artifice and conformity of consumerism. The
enthusiastic discovery of the counterculture by the branches of American
business studied here marked the consolidation of a new species of hip
consumerism, a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the
falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be
enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.

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Review of the book: http://www.sfbg.com/lit/reviews/cool.html

"The genius of the Volkswagen campaign," Frank writes, "is that they took
[consumer] skepticism into account and made it part of their ads' discursive
apparatus." The consumer was no longer treated as an obtuse target; instead,
he or she became the fellow insider, collaborator with the ad agency and the
product. With a self-mocking wink and nudge, the hip, knowing consumer was
now invited inside, behind the facade.


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Unusual citation of Frank:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/9ta/9ta101.html

It's not surprising that religious faith marks the characters the film mocks.
The mother in the porn film sports a large crucifix on her living room wall,
and another mom sings inanely that her son is "just like Jesus, he's tender
and mild. He'd wear a smile while he wore a thorny crown!" No positive
characters are religious, but an absurdly jaded atheist child who spouts
blasphemy is a martyred hero.

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