American Identity

Well, the thing is that Americans have a strong sense of identity. Everyone has one. Everyone is a Somebody. Any other way just doesn’t process. Bums, billionaires – Doesn’t matter. Everyone’s a unique Somebody, one way or another. We raise our children that way . . . our children’s children . . .

Well, there’s the great American mythology, too: The rugged individual (though the nation was built on rugged cooperation), the trailblazer, the Great American Everyman immigrant bootstrapped himself up as far as the vision of his Great American Dream. Nice stories. There’s a ton of them in the character DNA of Americans.

Well, anyway, Americans just don’t process weak identities. It’s not enough to just be a human being. In America, there are the phantoms, the vast unrecognized, and there are the real people, the people with identities, the Somebodies.

If you don’t have an identity in America, you can buy one. If you can’t afford it, you can get it with plastic.

And you’ll spend more of your plastic with companies with strong identities. They speak to you. They speak your language.

JUST DO IT,

Ed

Image-Narcissism

OK, this is just McLuhan, but bears repeating.

Close attention to the ancient tale notes that the Greek youth, Narcissus, was hopelessly infatuated with his image. This was not an unhealthy self-love as is erroneously believed today. His toxic love narcosis was with his image.

Today, many (often self-loathing) souls are relentlessly driven on, at any cost, in their chaotic pursuit of the images of their life.

It’s ironic, too, that a lot of the attempts with self-esteem are very bungled and only exacerbate the condition (and also, too, only exacerbate the hyperizing of the uniquely AMERICAN SENSE OF IDENTITY, but that’s the grist of another post

Ed

First Post: Delmondo Translation

I have delmondo.org as a domain, and so delmondo seemed to make sense for a wordpress subdomain.

Delmondo is Italian for ‘Of the World.’ Latin would have been preferred, but the Latin for ‘World,’ ‘Mundus,’ didn’t quite have the right sound.