smash it up

Last night I watched nihilism turn violently against western consumerism on a video where several kids from Canada waited for 55 hours to buy an XBox360, only to bash it with a sledge hammer outside of the store. This same group did the same thing to a new video iPod several months ago, posting the video on their site, where donations earned enough money for them to buy the doomed XBox.

Is this sort of thing the product of modernism's failings, or just a rebel/anarchist fringe that would exist in any society playing itself out in a modern context?

Probably a little bit of both. Regardless of your social creed and cultural values, there will always be upstarts, instigators, rebels - people who refuse to live peacefully because they need attention and have found they can get it by shocking others into noticing them. At the same time, this particular events appeal is in the "stick-it-to-the-man" attitude they represent - the attitude that gives the finger to wall street and madison avenue, and says, "We don't need your products, your marketing, or your approval to be complete. Your advertising, your hype, and your vigorous attempts to tell us we're not cool without your s#$t were a waste of time; we cannot be bought, and we refuse to be brainwashed." We can all identify with this feeling - this sense of rebelious independence and desire to assert our freedom over the commercial soma that saturates so many aspects of our culture. This particular rebellion isn't against the community or humanity - it's not defacing public property or causing anyone bodily harm. It's a healthy expression of destructive frustration against modernism's darkside; a harmless way to publically rage against the machine, quite literally.

So smash on.

If you need some entertainment this morning, go check out this book, written to help youngsters understand the vile and contemptable tactics of the liberals in this world who'd like nothing more than to tax away all profit and regulate away all innovation. Rush Limbaugh loved it, I guess.