The American Replacement of Nature: Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life
From Publishers Weekly In a devastating yet hope-giving visionary critique, Thompson ( At the Edge of History ) wryly looks at America's "ever teenage culture," the "electronic spectator sport" of U.S. presidential campaigns, and Disneyism, our "civic religion" of family fun and "life as entertainment." These provocative if at times portentous essays leap easily from the political to the metaphysical. Thompson interprets the Great Depression as a shift from hierarchy to "chaos dynamics." He explains why he was "unable to be a dove" in the war against Saddam Hussein, he defines America's esoteric destiny as breaking down all the world's cultures in preparation for a new global culture. In one controversial piece the New Age guru defends Palestinian Arab rights, rebukes Israel and calls for the creation of "Earth's first planetary city"--a multireligious zone to be governed by the U.N. -in Jerusalem and the entire West Bank. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Classified as a business/philosophy monograph, this volume is more accurately a compilation of essays that critique the consumption culture of the United States. Using the metaphor of commands for a VCR as his chapter titles--after all, America is a very technology-driven society--Thompson reviews some of the pitfalls of rampant materialism. Exploring themes such as the substitution of grand amusement parks (like Disney World) for travel, and entertainment (* a la CNN) for news, the author laments the debasement of American culture. Thompson seems to imply in his fourth essay that the U.S. gadget culture will get its comeuppance when cyborgs become the successors to the human race. This book is not for everyone, but in the tradition of social critics like Thorstein Veblen, it makes some telling points. - Gene R. Laczniak, Mar quette Univ., Milwaukee Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews Thompson (Imaginary Landscape, 1989; Pacific Shift, 1986, etc.) levels his futurist's gaze on the technology of fantasy and illusion, which, he says, is transforming nearly all spheres of life. With wry wit, Thompson delivers a scary vision of an increasingly dehumanized world in which America--``an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology''--is busy conquering all the world's cultures with its anticultural religion of Disney. The natural world, including the human, the author predicts, will give way to the new creation of new businesses: biospheres that capture the genetic capital of medicinal plants; electronic advances that make flesh obsolete; virtual-reality suits that manufacture experiences for those who sit within them. In his riveting tour through Disney's EPCOT Center, his description of the ``electropeasantry'' that votes on the basis of like and dislike, and his discussion of whether the coming world is an incarnation of the demon Ahriman, Thompson offers a range of disturbing material on the dark side of so-called progress. Also notable is his analysis of why the Gulf War, even if engineered, had to occur to prevent a splintering of the world into ethnic rivalries. Sobering and powerful when diagnosing the ills technology is ushering in; less convincing when searching for a positive ``evolutionary'' purpose for such transformations. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.