It’s an odd juxtaposition to be sure. Karl Marx and Walt Disney. Both probably are able some posit some form of historical progressivism but is it possible the Disney Corporation and Marx are somehow complicit in our current state when one considers the cycle of hip consumerism that made the Bug attain iconic status. The workers own the means of production, but what is produced is immaterial, intangible, a quasi human form. Could Marx have foreseen the cultural industries and its capacity to take for example Weimar Berlin and turn it into a sentimental, schmaltzy Cabaret?
Jonathan Goldstein:On the train ride back from New York, I pass the time reading. Lately, I’ve been in the habit of purchasing used books that are less than a dollar. I look at it as adopting “rescue books.” So far, this has meant buying a copy of The Communist Manifesto that, based on the amount of underlinings within, appears to have been previously read by a lunatic, and the novelization of Herbie Goes Bananas, a movie I greatly enjoyed as a child. It is far more complex than the film, as it affords the reader greater depth of insight into the titular automobile’s inner thoughts. On the cover is a still from the movie in which the lovable Volkswagen, a cape covering his front fender, is playing toreador to a bull.
---It was a momentous battle between campaigners for freedom of speech and a censuring state, determined to ban a novel branded "obscene" for its sexual portrayal of a love affair. Now, for the first time, it can be revealed how the country's most eminent writers leapt to the defence of Lady Chatterley's Lover, as the Government attempted to ban D.H. Lawrence's infamous work depicting an adulterous affair between Constance Chatterley and her husband's gamekeeper, Mellors. --- Read More:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/8098568/What-Britains-greatest-writers-really-thought-of-Lady-Chatterleys-Lover.html
As I pore over Herbie, the looks of my fellow travellers begin to make me uncomfortable, so I switch to the Manifesto. With the growing ubiquity of e-readers, judging people based on the cover of their book will become a lost art. Call me sentimental, but I find that sad. The judgment of strangers has the power to bring out our noblest selves…. Read More:http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/Herbie+love+Karl+Marx/6137227/story.htmla
---After the Bug was put into production in the postwar years, it had to find some way to surmount its tarnished past. Patton reminds us that the first two salesmen that Volkswagen hired to sell it in the U.S. failed utterly. People were just not interested in a funny little German car that You Know Who had dreamed up. In fact, it was only about a decade after World War II had ended and people had settled back into their lives that the little car began to catch the American public's fancy. At first it began to be "discovered by word of mouth, like a good restaurant" but, seeing the growing interest and growing sales, then-VW boss Carl Hahn decided to try to goose sales by hiring an upstart Jewish public relations firm by the name of Doyle Dane Bernach (DDB). While their ethnicity was no doubt a factor in VW's choosing them—Patton argues that hiring "Jews to sell Hitler's car ...Read More:http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2002/septemberweb-only/9-16-11.0.html
Goldstein’s point of e-readers and the like not affording the older style voyeurism of “reading” the sitter based on their tastes is dual edged affair. We can pass judgment, engage in some form of invidious comparison based on other criteria, but are no more likely to engage the passenger than before. Its still face to face but without the face.
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