imagined-community

Bumper sticker courtesy Cafepress.com

Oh no, one of those nights when I have absolutely nothing coherent to say. Or, more truthfully, I don’t have the vim & vigor to say what I want to say with something approximating passionate conviction. I knew I should have pre-written a few blog posts for evenings like this! Well, if I keep blathering on a bit more I will have written three sentences. Three sentences counts as a post, right? No?

Since I am too tired to actually activate my brain, I have spent the last hour that I should be writing trolling the web and looking at bumper stickers. Don’t ask me why. I just get on these strange-focused weird obsessions. And since you are reading my blog post…here are a few of the stops I made. First, a quick quiz about bumper stickers called “what bumper sticker should be on your car?” Next, catch a chuckle from Patrick Haven’s list of best bumper stickers. And lastly, ponder Paul Wick’s claim that email signatures are the new bumper sticker. Now does this count as a real blog post?

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Is there anything Jack Bauer can’t survive? Is there any person that Jack Bauer can’t convince with his earnest eyes and sincere words …or his deadly accuracy with a weapon? I used to love 24, but lately Jack has become so invincible that 24 has become more humorous than suspenseful (although the take over of CTU almost reminded me of the urgency I felt during season one). And then there is the torture earlier in the season. I had some serious issues with how heavily 24 leaned on the long torture scenes to keep the audience – what – afraid, disgusted, and anxious? For me, my TV watching line is drawn at gratuitous torture. (I actually stopped watching 24 for a while — ditto for Lost — because I find graphic torture scenes repugnant, especially when torture is used as a vehicle for entertainment.) And I do believe that people become habituated — their fear of a thing is reduced — the more they are exposed to it. Quite frankly I don’t think we should desensitize ourselves to the act, or even the idea, of torture. We should be afraid of torture, of what it is and of what it means to be a torturer.

Along these lines, I found the GOP candidates response to the torture question at the University of South Carolina illuminating. Not surprisingly, McCain was the only one who was anti-torture. Sometimes it nice to know that experience — not just some lame ass ideology spun out in a life buffered from contact with poverty, violence, and war — really does help shape ideas – and sometimes for the good. Mitt Romney did his usual slight of the hand words trick, “not torture but enhanced interrogation techniques.” WTF?! Oh, you mean like torture, but not quite as gruesome as the stuff our Fox super hero Jack Bauer does on 24?

So is Jack Bauer really a hero after all? Ready yourself for a snippet of a serious over the top rant. This from Station Charon :

Here is an ugly little secret for the deep-seated television addicts in our attention deficit democracy - Jack Bauer is also an ultra violent latter day Nazi with a savage psychopathic mean streak and a king-sized hard-on for torture. Torture has become one of a growing number of previously unthinkable and utterly abominable acts that can now be wrapped in an American flag as some type of a sick endorsement of what constitutes super patriotism under the pathologically amoral regime that is the Bushreich…

When we peer into that flickering glass Jack Bauer is us and our voyeuristic Pavlov’s Dogs type of involuntary salivating at depictions of wanton cruelty that appropriately belong in a Schutzstaffel training manual is a damning condemnation of a rotting society that has through our decadent ignorance, callous indifference and general meanness become a pox on the rest of the planet.

Like I said, I draw the line at torture. Still, I am just about to download the season finale. Aargh…

So which superhero are you? (It turns out I am Wonder Woman, not surprising. At least that is when I am not busy being my super villain alter ego Mystique.)

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When the whole Hello Kitty fad took off in the United States in the late 1990s, I was more than a little bewildered. Why were so many adult women gaga over a mouthless little white cat doll created for kids by Sanrio? Then a petite friend of mine went to Tokyo and came back with Hello Kitty paraphernalia. Since my friend was herself small and cute (and now more than a little dazzled by kawaii culture ), I started to consider the idea that Hello Kitty was riding a wave of local pop culture mixed with global girl-power/consumerism. As Coury Turczyn writes:

Some commentators think that Hello Kitty, at the symbolic level at least, represents a sort of weird girl power movement focused on whimsy and consumption. Cultural conservatives think this is rather dangerous and that such values contribute to submissive women who purposely act clueless and never want to grow up. Feminists also deplore Hello Kitty and the values she represents. Whatever side of the debate you fall on in Japan, though, you have to admit this is one deep cat.

Not only does Kitty blend naivety & with the power of shopping, Kitty also embodies an innocent and culturally non-threatening global market. Jennilee Tuazon writes:

The rise of Hello Kitty in the global consumer market, like other successful pop cultural imports, may be attributed to the process of removing traces of Japanese origin. Iwabuchi has coined the expression “culturally odorless products” to describe the ways in which Japanese products erase their “Japaneseness” in order to be more successfully marketed overseas (Allison, 2000:70). Moreover, “effacing the identity—the Japaneseness—of Japanese products appears to be even more prominent in the US Market” (Allison, 2000:70). Making a product “culturally odorless” somehow reduces resistance to a product through its reduction of difference. “Relating” or “understanding” a product becomes easier through this process.

How fitting then that the reigning queen of American girl-power/consumerism, Paris Hilton, has been morphed into a Hello Kitty doll. And if a Paris Hilton Kitty doesn’t do it for you, you could always get yourself a Hello Kitty Mp3 player.

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that the Hello Kitty photo on this blog is not of an actual Hello Kitty. (A real Hello Kitty is completely mouthless.) Two years ago I was at the Tokyo airport when I saw this bobblehead Hello Kitty. Enchanted, I immediately bought the bobblehead and finally became a woman who owned something Hello Kitty! Imagine my surprise when I returned to the States only to discover that I had bought an imitation Hello Kitty item (at an airport no less ; ), not a genuine Sanrio product. Yes, perhaps cuteness is something you can’t buy, and like all things has its season (the kids running through a fountain today were awfully cute). Yes, I am still bewitched by my overpriced faux Hello Kitty, but when I start to get that “must buy cuteness feeling,” I just click on Asia Pundit to remind myself what the evil mouthless one is really up to ; ).

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