The Monkey's Uncle

Hello, InterNet! I’m not feeling too great tonight, so this is going to be a short post (yeah right).

First of all, let’s get our facts straight. Disneyland in Anaheim, CA is “The Happiest Place on Earth”, not WDW in Florida. And it’s not Disney World, contrary to popular belief. It’s WALT Disney World. The name was changed when it opened, a couple years after Uncle Wally’s death. Gosh Golly!

OK, so tonight’s post is about what Gitlin is saying about the mounds of rhetoric Amerika exports.

Amerika, for all it’s inability to “make stuff” (ie make cars, make electronics, make cellphones, make food, etc.) is a great content machine. What is content, you ask? Content is intellectual. This blog is content. Slogans are content. Logos are content. Music is content. Movies are content. tShirts are not, but whatever is on the tShirt is content (this makes sense, then, that Americans order more custom tShirts per capita, yet almost none of the tShirts people order are physically made here in Amerika.

How can I say this in the least amount of words? Thinking… Got it!

Remember, way back when, in the fall of 2001? Something momentous happened that rocked the world to the core. That’s right. I’m talking about the release of the iPod®. What was the iPod®? Nothing too new. PMPs (portable music players– try and keep up with the acronyms) existed before this. The iPod® was just a really good one (with a poopbucket of money to advertise it and over thirty years of company credibility behind it).

Now look where we are. There are– literally– hundreds of MP3 and WMA pocket players out there right now. And the vast majority of them are iPod® knock-offs. Everyone wants to have an iPod®, and owning a ZUNE (what some consider to be the worst iPod® knockoff) is taboo among “geeky people”. Is the iPod really that great? Does your music sound better on an Apple, Inc. product? No. An iPod® is a ZUNE in a white painters suit.¹

So… wait. What does this have to do with the Gitlin dude? Well, imagine that we’re not talking about iPods. We’re talking about culture. Everyone wants to be part of the Amerikan culture. Why is our culture “better”? Here in Amerika you can be entertained. You can have fun. America offers no better (in fact quite worse) cars than the rest of the world, but these aren’t just any cars. They’re fun, Amerikan cars. They have silly SuperBowl ads. They have catchy theme songs. They’re entertaining.

Wow, I went way over my word limit again. So, to finish, Amerika produces and exports content, everyone wants to have fun and be like us, and I’m tired. Good night!

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¹Except for the iPod Touch®/iPhone®, which is a crazy kickass product that no one, not even the Palm Pre, can approach in coolness.