Amerika

One underlying facet of this site is its sense of humor. We like to laugh at the absurd.

Luckily, there’s no shortage of it. There’s also no shortage of bitterness, fatalism, narcissism, solipsism, despair and disillusionment, but these are like CO2 to the fertile plant growth of our imagination. We thrive on them.

Our symbol is the cheeseburger because it expresses all of what goes on in the modern mind:

• Quantity not quality: Statistically, most people check the box marked “like” on surveys about food that is high in fat, salt and sugar. A cheeseburger maximizes these.
• Convenience: Freedom in the modern sense is not knowing what path you want to take, but having easy paths offered to you while others are prevented from criticizing you for taking silly ones. If you are hungry in this society, you are probably walking near a fast food restaurant, vending machine or microwave oven where you can quickly prepare a cheeseburger.
• Averaging: We do not want food that requires a gourmet (weird word in another language, so it goes in italics so you know it’s not misspelled) to appreciate. Everyone from someone so retarded they can barely breathe to a degenerate genius can appreciate a cheeseburger.
• Duality: Finally, there is duality. Wal-mart is more efficient than Mom and Pop stores; fast food is quicker and often cleaner than regular restaurants. Technology could be applied to positive ends if we focused on the quality of the cheeseburger, instead of pleasing mass tastes.
• Equality: The cheeseburger is the triumph of mass tastes. It is blue jeans, Coca-Cola, sitcoms, SUVs, Apple Computers and mail-order brides. It is the worker demanding his crass tastes define what is available so that none shall rise above.

The cheeseburger, however, is not the only “modern” food:

You got me thinking about what types of food are popular in modern times. While I think canned food is emblematic of the era, I also noted that in addition to your favorite (pizza) there are sandwiches, the burrito, the salad and the wrap. These are all popular because, like modernity itself, they are the same mundane experience dressed up as variety. It’s all surface — if you put avocado on/in your pizza/salad/wrap/burrito, it’s California style; if you add chicken and peanuts, it’s Thai; if you scatter pineapple on it, it’s Hawaiian. But underneath it’s the same carb-heavy, fat-heavy sort of nutritionless stuff. This reminds me of how modern society creates anonymous hallways and gridded cities, then creates drama to distract us from the basic pointlessness of it all. – The Thinking Housewife

Modernity, like its food, is the convenient disguised as the exotic.

We take life and distill it to the mundane, then offer it aggressively as a product, and let commerce and popularity rule the day.

To make people think they still live a life worth living, we trick it out with unique, ironic, bizarre, unusual and illogical combinations of accessories.

Thus you get a hot dog with avocado on it, a burrito enclosing stuffed eggplant and barbecue sauce, Thai chicken on a pizza, and whale blubber on your cheeseburger. It’s novelty and false variation.

Future anthropologists will have a field day with our “food” when they dig up the ruins.