Just Another Tequila Sunrise

It’s routine to dismiss these people, to sniff from the sideline about the depths to which the culture has sunk. Misses Hilton and Tequila may represent, respectively, leisure-class and working-class variants of the same feminine caricature, a real-time Betty Boop. And yet each, in her own way, has divined truths about the marketplace that academics and industry are still laboring fully to comprehend. -- The New York Times

Not this academic. Just pick up Charles Taylor's books Sources of the Self and The Ethic of Authenticity, Philip Rieff's books The Triumph of the Therapeutic and Fellow Teachers, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue and his essays on epistemological crisis and moral dilemma, and Hamlet. In a nutshell, significant numbers of young people, mainly in Los Angeles and New York, have come up in a popular culture that refines the art of self-referentiality to a razor's edge. The leisure these people have on their hands results from a post-industrial work schedule and a post-modern disinterest in and freedom from politics. Part of virtuoso self-referentiality is an emphasis on the malleability and the performance of sexual identity. A habit of mass therapy has developed where everyone is each other's -- and their own -- therapist; publicizing intimacy and sharing what used to always be private is the rule. The therapies of transgression whereby these things are disclosed are domesticated and made seemingly harmless by their integration into the market and their conversion into commodity platforms for currency and information exchange.

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Comments

[Joules]

I'm holding out for a stunning conversion experience for Miss Hilton, a Damascus Road event that changes her forever.