When did 'aspiration' become a dirty word? When they sprayed it gold…

[muriel_volestrangler]

Two encounters on the streets of London: the gold Ferrari said: 'I have more money than you.' The begging mother said: 'I have none'

When I was a kid aspirations were ladders that indicated and accessed better things. The things tended to be abstract, such as compassion, bravery, knowledge, curiosity and faith in a variety of finer worlds. I was given exemplary books about people who invented anaesthetics or cures for diseases or handy devices such as the telephone. I was taught about people who risked torture or death for concepts such as justice. (There was no suggestion that being a torturer or executioner would be effective or acceptable.)
...
Then something happened to aspirations. At around the time when TV shows about healthcare and effective policing replaced actual healthcare and effective policing, aspirations began to be replaced with aspirational stuff. Aspirational magazines, displaying aspirational things and TV shows about aspirational lifestyles appeared. As proper journalism became impossibly expensive and the recycling of PR handouts and pandering to advertisers became an easy option, what had been a marginal feature in our media landscape became a central mountain of cheap coverage about aspirational stuff.

Today, we are immersed in information about aspirational objects: aspirational shoes, aspirational hats, hair, tummies, faces and relationships, all embodying perfections that are both required and unattainable. Even cautionary tales of failed marriages and unhappy skin tone are rendered distant by glamour, as are the extensive depictions of royals breathing in and out, or wearing clothes with staggeringly impressive proficiency.
...
Last week in London, I walked past that gold Ferrari. I wasn't surprised by this because London is an aspirational city, fast becoming a socially cleansed, semi-toxic wasteland of billionaire frittering, all balanced on a bubble of misery and pyrrhic debt. So last week on another London street I was stopped by a woman asking for money. She wanted to give me either a pair of unaspirational shoes or an unaspirational hat in return for my money, because she didn't want to beg. She said she was nursing a baby and showed me her breast, the milk, as proof – because we now inhabit a world where poverty must apologise and reassure.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/07/aspirational-gold-ferrari-society-wealth-ethics

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Yup. That's the theme of the age.

Gilded obscenities supported by obscenities of uncaring. The weight of wealth cripples the capacity for compassion.

[valerief]

2. I think it's the Packaging Age. Tangible merchandise is packaged in petrol-based plastic.

Branding is packaging an abstraction in plastic words.

We're the Packaging Age, and that's how oil stays king.

[GeorgeGist]

3. No one says it better ...