Saturday, January 03, 2004
Anna Bloviation's 2004 crystal ball...
Holistic/Organic dog food?? I'm sure my friends out on the west coast have probably had such a product on their shelves for some time now but I hadn't seen it here on the east coast (or maybe I just hadn't noticed) until yesterday (at Trader Joe's). Now you know a trend has taken off when you start seeing it transferred to the pet aisle (or junk food aisle e.g. organic Cheetoh's...). So heed the advice I gave you last year and keep buying stock in companies which have a good foot-hold in the certified organic market and pray that some whacko terrorist doesn't muck things up by poisoning the water supply.
I predict that one of the big restaurant chains will start offering a holistic/organic menu to its customers. My bet would be Starbuck's. In my crystal ball I can see an 'Organucks' opening up first in Seattle and then San Francisco. I see the walls decorated with glossy, wall-sized posters featuring happy tomato plants and free-range chickens thriving in their pesticide/hormone/antibiotic/genetic-modification-free environment. A sun-bronzed farmer in overalls stands looking out upon his pristine wheat fields -- a happy, holistically-fed border collie nipping at the free range grass-grazing sheep in the distance. Perhaps one section of the store has a sit-down cafe. And due to 'Organucks' savvy marketing campaign, customers sit imagining that every savory bite of greenbean and almond-sliver salad coursing through their veins is delivering sun-kissed goodness to every cell in their bodies. On the other side of the store I see aisles of nicely-packaged organic food products proclaiming the end to ever a consumer having to put anything harmful into his/her body (or pet's body) again. Outside sits a parking lot full of SUV's -- their corpulent rear ends being stuffed with bags of groceries touting to be 'yucky stuff' free. Meanwhile, not five smooth-paved miles away, the Mexican gardener is spraying pesticides on these Organuck customers' McMansion-green-lawns not two feet away from their McMansion front doors.... But that's OK because these consumers also buy cases of bottled water from certifiably pure-and-pristine sources -- the 24-pack of little plastic bottles all neatly wrapped in shrink-wrap plastic. 'Pure-and-pristine' -- shrink-wrapped and yours for the right price.
Rear-projection TV's. According to the NY Times (Dec.24), the hot-ticket item to put under the tree this year was a rear-projection television set. Lord knows how you explain to the kids how Santa got one of those suckers down the chimney but where there's a will, there's a way I guess. The price tag for one of these televisions is between $2000-$5000 -- a lot more than most people's George-W-tax-refund. A CNN poll yesterday found that about 30% of the population says it will need at least six months to repay their holiday debt. The good news for the administration is that all of these up-to-their-ears-in-debt folks will no doubt be camping out in front of their new mammoth-sized rear-projection televisions listening to the networks telling them how wonderful their lives are -- news, I'm afraid, as fake as the turkey President Bush served up to the troops in Iraq on Thanksgiving. Thus will a good chunk of the American public remain as comatosely apathetic and disinterested as the administration wants it to be at least until June. The bad news is that come June 2004, the administration is going to need the next big choreographed ka-pow whopper story to make sure America doesn't come out of its Fox-News stupor long enough to realize that Bush's fiscal and foreign policies are based on a dead-end vision for the future i.e. dependence on oil is most certainly not a sustainable long-term one.
Year of De-Enlightenment. Not that humanity has ever seemed particularly enlightened to me but what little there was of it is at risk thanks to the one prevailing 24/7-broadcasted message to come out of 2003: Diplomacy has been rendered a farce. At the end of the day, the guy with the biggest stick (and willing to use it) wins. Period. As my conservative friend who came for dinner last night said, "Anna, it's what the world understands and respects." Seems to me that buying into this notion pretty much puts mankind right back where it started 50,000 years ago, doesn't it? You know -- the Neanderthal guy whacking the other guy over the head with a club for the last remaining firewood.... Of course as my other friend, the Polish Physics Professor, once aptly pointed out, "It is naive to think that the passage of TIME should necessarily denote PROGRESS."
Holistic/Organic dog food?? I'm sure my friends out on the west coast have probably had such a product on their shelves for some time now but I hadn't seen it here on the east coast (or maybe I just hadn't noticed) until yesterday (at Trader Joe's). Now you know a trend has taken off when you start seeing it transferred to the pet aisle (or junk food aisle e.g. organic Cheetoh's...). So heed the advice I gave you last year and keep buying stock in companies which have a good foot-hold in the certified organic market and pray that some whacko terrorist doesn't muck things up by poisoning the water supply.
I predict that one of the big restaurant chains will start offering a holistic/organic menu to its customers. My bet would be Starbuck's. In my crystal ball I can see an 'Organucks' opening up first in Seattle and then San Francisco. I see the walls decorated with glossy, wall-sized posters featuring happy tomato plants and free-range chickens thriving in their pesticide/hormone/antibiotic/genetic-modification-free environment. A sun-bronzed farmer in overalls stands looking out upon his pristine wheat fields -- a happy, holistically-fed border collie nipping at the free range grass-grazing sheep in the distance. Perhaps one section of the store has a sit-down cafe. And due to 'Organucks' savvy marketing campaign, customers sit imagining that every savory bite of greenbean and almond-sliver salad coursing through their veins is delivering sun-kissed goodness to every cell in their bodies. On the other side of the store I see aisles of nicely-packaged organic food products proclaiming the end to ever a consumer having to put anything harmful into his/her body (or pet's body) again. Outside sits a parking lot full of SUV's -- their corpulent rear ends being stuffed with bags of groceries touting to be 'yucky stuff' free. Meanwhile, not five smooth-paved miles away, the Mexican gardener is spraying pesticides on these Organuck customers' McMansion-green-lawns not two feet away from their McMansion front doors.... But that's OK because these consumers also buy cases of bottled water from certifiably pure-and-pristine sources -- the 24-pack of little plastic bottles all neatly wrapped in shrink-wrap plastic. 'Pure-and-pristine' -- shrink-wrapped and yours for the right price.
Rear-projection TV's. According to the NY Times (Dec.24), the hot-ticket item to put under the tree this year was a rear-projection television set. Lord knows how you explain to the kids how Santa got one of those suckers down the chimney but where there's a will, there's a way I guess. The price tag for one of these televisions is between $2000-$5000 -- a lot more than most people's George-W-tax-refund. A CNN poll yesterday found that about 30% of the population says it will need at least six months to repay their holiday debt. The good news for the administration is that all of these up-to-their-ears-in-debt folks will no doubt be camping out in front of their new mammoth-sized rear-projection televisions listening to the networks telling them how wonderful their lives are -- news, I'm afraid, as fake as the turkey President Bush served up to the troops in Iraq on Thanksgiving. Thus will a good chunk of the American public remain as comatosely apathetic and disinterested as the administration wants it to be at least until June. The bad news is that come June 2004, the administration is going to need the next big choreographed ka-pow whopper story to make sure America doesn't come out of its Fox-News stupor long enough to realize that Bush's fiscal and foreign policies are based on a dead-end vision for the future i.e. dependence on oil is most certainly not a sustainable long-term one.
Year of De-Enlightenment. Not that humanity has ever seemed particularly enlightened to me but what little there was of it is at risk thanks to the one prevailing 24/7-broadcasted message to come out of 2003: Diplomacy has been rendered a farce. At the end of the day, the guy with the biggest stick (and willing to use it) wins. Period. As my conservative friend who came for dinner last night said, "Anna, it's what the world understands and respects." Seems to me that buying into this notion pretty much puts mankind right back where it started 50,000 years ago, doesn't it? You know -- the Neanderthal guy whacking the other guy over the head with a club for the last remaining firewood.... Of course as my other friend, the Polish Physics Professor, once aptly pointed out, "It is naive to think that the passage of TIME should necessarily denote PROGRESS."
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