The Twilight of American Culture Quotes

“We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotional/commercial bullshit, that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.”
― Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture

“For a zoned-out, stupefied populace, “democracy” will be nothing more than the right to shop, or to choose between Wendy’s and Burger King, or to stare at CNN and think that this managed infotainment is actually the news. Corporate hegemony, the triumph of global democracy/consumerism based on an American model, is the collapse of American civilization. So a large-scale transformation is indeed going on, but it is one that makes triumph indistinguishable from disintegration.”
― Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture

“All-out nuclear war, of course, is just a literary device here; it is not a prerequisite for contemporary cultural disintegration, and indeed, one could argue that corporate consumer culture is tantamount to a kind of nuclear attack on the mind.”
― Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture

“Department stores, hotels, and amusement parks began to dot the landscape, and by World War I, buying was seen as the road to happiness. Money became the measure of everything, friendship and religion included.”
― Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture

“There is an old joke that asks, “What do you get when you cross a deconstructionist with a mafioso? Answer: someone who makes you an offer you cannot understand.”
― Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture

“populist fantasies. And the truth is that real change is historical, and if one is going to point to, say,”
― Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture