The Canadian social critic Andrew Potter takes aim at Oprah with his bookThe Authenticity Hoax "How we get lost finding ourselves."

He points to the word being used in advertisement when it is obviously false...

for example the jeans advertised as "authentic" and shown in scenes of the old west were not worn by railway workers in the 18th century,

they were made in china

and he says the authenticity of art has been questioned

he shows how authenticity has been turned into a status symbol with the hyper rich living on mud floors or at least in mud houses...

he uses northern Ontario and the gulf island as examples

As Thomas De Zengotita says in the liner Potter takes a wide range of high brow ideas-

and he makes them accessible with out reducing them to cartoons

A SNL skit

a self help book is sent to a country in the middle of a famine...
via video the white female author tells the black hungry dude positive thoughts will solve his hunger problem,

he eats the book.

The Hungry

have yet to be included in the food supply line...
the needy by definition do not have money...

Food Business Poem

we have the technology
not the will
to end the hunger problem...

The Liberals

whom chomsky has noted,
over and over again,
are merely a division

the intellectuals have stood by in america
without raising a whimper

re: an unjust war where hundred of thousands have been murdered...


collateral murder...

as seen on wikileaks...

authentic?...real?...

you just witnessed murder...
those people will not breathe again


Liberal again


now the authenticity hoax
is not that there is
not a concept of authentic

------
it has has been branded
and thus limited
in it's usefulness...

$$$$$$$$$$$

that which supports
the system
is accepted by it...

capitalism's beauty

and as we get
more streamlined
the corporations
(slowly?) take over


Free Country

i live in a corporate
centrally controlled
government state

with unprecedented freedoms

in urban areas
i am under
almost constant
surveillance



Canadian Letters: Re: Andrew Potter


"gossip is for children
surveillance is for criminals"

the government has
little faith
in it's citizens