Just say no to corporations

Monday, February 19, 2007

Gilmore Girls and Class Issues

Gilmore Girls is based primarily on two characters, Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter Rory. Lorelai's parents are wealthy elites, and in an act of rebellion, Lorelai left home after giving birth to Rory and moved to a small town in Connecticut. She cut off all ties with her parents and with Christopher, Rory's father, who also was born into a life of privilege. This provides an excellent framework for commentary on issues of class, however, this is rarely taken advantage of, and when it is, it is used to further a disturbingly classist ideology.

Rory grows up alongside normal, middle-class people, however, from the beginning, it is clear that she possesses some innate qualities which distinguish her. When she reunites with her grandparents, they agree to pay for her to attend a prestigious college prep school for children the rich. The essential point of this is to say that because Rory was born from the elite class, regardless of the fact that she was raised as a commoner, she retains the innate qualities of the wealthy. These qualities entitle her to a life of privilege, attending the college prep school, and eventually the Ivy League school of her choice, while the friends that she grew up with stay behind in the small town in Connecticut and are eventually forgotten by the show.

Aside from the broad thematic elements, the show is filled with small insults to every member of the lower class, commonly disguised as comic relief. For example, there is a running joke about how Emily Gilmore (Lorelai's mother) constantly harasses, yells at, and fires her maids, cooks, and housekeepers for what the show deems as incompetence, while the other characters sit idly by, sometimes laughing at it. Another example of this is how Rory can't learn the names of the countless people who serve her, so she simply refers to them by their function, such as "gas station boy" or "cafeteria worker boy," etc. This implies that members of the lower class have no real identity of their own, and they are worth nothing other than their value as servants.

I can not recall a single example of a character who was born from the lower class who is considered to be on the same level intellectually with the Gilmores.

The show even manages to insult liberal intellectualism, when a popular student at Rory's prep school tries to bully the idealistic Rory into implementing policies in student government. According to the student, "If you have a problem, tell it to Noam Chomsky. I live in the real world." The student is not a positive character, but even so, this line represents blatant anti-intellectualism. In a sense, Rory is accused of being so idealistic that she lives in the dream world of well-know liberal intellectuals. Because the character is a bully, her statements do not represent the intended ideology of the show, however what is in question is only whether or not Rory lives in the real world. There is no question that Noam Chomsky still does not.

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Monday, February 05, 2007

Wal-Mart Uber Alles

The captain of this blog is usually the one bashing on Wal-Mart; I thought I'd get into the action myself today. Wal-mart has gotten into (even more) trouble for selling t-shirts that appear to have the Nazi SS Totenkopf (Death's Head) insignia printed on them. They were notified of this 11 weeks ago and still have yet to fully remove the t-shirts from store shelves. For some bizarre reason, some of the t-shirts say "Since 1978". More like "Since 1935".

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Touch and Squirt

To celebrate the release of Microsoft's latest attempt at an operating system, Vista, I've decided to dedicate a post to the Dick Cheney of Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer. Well known as a champion chair thrower, Steve also has a wonderful way with words. Here are a few choice quotes from an interview he gave to Business Week back in October last year:

Business Week: Who are Microsoft's top competitors?
Ballmer: Guys who can touch us in multiple places probably matter more than guys who can touch us in any one place. And actually we don't really have our big competition from any one company. Any one company, we know how to compete with... there are cases where software gets monetized through hardware. That's what an iPod is. iPod is a software thing. You just happen to collect the money on the hardware.

BW: Does Zune fit into the hardware piece of this?
Ballmer: Sure it does. Because the value of Zune, if we're successful, is all in the software. It's in community [the ability to share music and pictures with other Zune users]. I want to squirt you a picture of my kids. You want to squirt me back a video of your vacation. That's a software experience. The truth is, though, if it makes money, it will be built into the gross margin on the hardware. We'll figure out how to make money on the community perhaps later though advertising or other means.


Here's squirting at you, Steve.