It's like this: You're born, you watch TV, and pretty soon you want so bad it's eating you up alive. Like so many other members of the TV generation, I do battle not just with the ubiquitous and occasionally endearing externalized supplications of the ad world, but with my own internal, infernal need to consume.You can't escape the imagery of your own weakness, you hum jingles, you refer to incidents in last night's wacky sit-com, you eat greasy chips by the handful until your stomach bloats and your saliva tastes like the ocean. Suddenly, you're an adult, and you find that the better part of your mind is filled with trash -- snippets of movies, trivia about the medicinal properties of the marshmallow, and a yearning for canned soup whenever it rains.

And yet, despite having every comfort attended to, you, the over-educated, over-privileged individual that you are, seem to be depressed about the very things that have always taken care of you so nicely. Add to this our latent discomfort for ardent anti-consumerism. We're not the kind to protest or earnestly work for change. We see irony in everything, and, as a result, we laugh off our own inability to actually make meaningful sacrifices like, say, giving up smoking. To rationalize all this, we decide that chronic consumption and the religion of capitalism aren't themselves evil. After all, what would we, the self-deprecating, angst-ridden junior members of post-industrial society, do without mass production, without pop culture and junk food and a series of rusted-out vehicles that we excuse for their smog belching capacity by giving them cute names like Betsy? And so, we slough off the question of actually changing our behavior, by deciding that what needs to be changed is the perception people have about the consumption complex. If everyone could be as sardonic and compromised as we are, things would certainly appear much improved. Listen, I'm not kidding here. From Arkansas to Athabasca, aging hipsters are struggling to come to terms with something much more complicated and obscure than how to live life. What's at issue for me and for millions of people around the world, is how to perceive consumptive culture, how to make it sorta, kinda, almost not so bad. We are the foot soldiers in an image battle that can't be won. Welcome to the culture wars, Nineties style.

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