“We pasteurized,
we processed,
we manipulated this cheese until it suited our purposes,this was engineered cheese...”
This is an excerpt from the poem we read this week, “ America, its gotta be the cheese” by slam poet Aton Kadosh.In the poem he makes the unique observation that American culture is similar to pasturized American cheese. And, as odd as the comparison is, I agree with him, we as Americans believe that our “cheese” which is our culture, is the best in the world, even though many of us have never ventured to expose themselves to another culture. This specific quote speaks to the fact that we have engineered our culture to broadcast to the world what we want them to see American culture as. American Culture has been manipulated by the corporations to suit its purposes, which is something that was spoken about in Culture Jam as well. Kale Lasn talks specifically about how corporations in America have taken over our lives as citizens and dictated what we are supposed to like and dislike. I agree with him to a point about this, I think that there are many Americans out there who focus only on what mainstream media tells them they should and should not consume. However, there are some people, like myself and my friends and others in our country, that do no care about mainstream media and what some corporate hot shot says we should be wearing this week.
The part that I found most interesting in Culture Jam was the chapter titled “your corporate connection,” that Lasn uses to talk about the influence of corporate America on young, and even older, American's views of themselves. He talks about how “objectification distorts a person's sense of worth (p.74).” This quote and chapter goes back to the idea that both Lasn and Kadosh are trying to get across in through both prose and poetry: that corporate America has been slowly taking over American's lives and dictating what they should eat, wear, watch, listen to and act like.
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