Shake your ass around my casket
Lenin's Tomb has a great post about the widening life-expectancy gap in America (along class and race lines, of course):
Of course, the idea that biological processes are partially at the mercy of sociological processes has some disadvantages. It disrupts the heroic ideologies of capitalism, which seem to oscillate between the master race doctrines in which a small number of human beings are hardwired for supremacy and the protean doctrines in which one can with sufficient will endlessly remake oneself, boundlessly improve oneself, exuberantly adapting to the dynamic conditions of the market place through sheer strength of will. You get a lot of the latter in quasi-scientific business doctrines such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming. For them, as much as for a certain specious version of 'postmodernism', the body is a discursive fiction, not in the sense that our conception of the body is itself textual, but in the sense that one can just override bodily limitations through exhortation. Thus, one can work twelve hour shifts, eating miniature sub-standard meals at one's desk, without suffering a nervous breakdown or a heart attack or ageing ten years in one month, because of one's positive attitude to work and achievement.





1 comments:
This post reminds me of a commercial that played when I was a kid: it was when Americans were just starting to try yogurt -- and so Dannon was pretty exotic. It featured a real old guy and then his mother -- all eating yogurt in their little Ukrainian village.
Take that fruit-at-the-bottom and smoke it!
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