Wait a minute......I'd rather visit my local Museum for free than waste
20plus dollars a month for the mindless trash the media dishes out. The
real problem is we've been conditioned to prefer a somnolent state over
a state of awareness. Since I quit watching TV four years ago I feel more
alert and alive -- also more capable of enjoying solitude. I feel I have
become more of the sort of person that would enjoy a trip to the museum.
I wonder if this is a soon to be extinct species, like philanthropists
and heros?

On Tue, 16 Jan 1996 [log in to unmask] wrote:

> At least part of what we all do is what I call "civic
> fetishism"--whatever else we may think we are doing, we are helping
> our particular culture to commodify the Past, the Beautiful, etc.
> When other, money-making means of commodification (e.g., the media)
> have sufficiently permeated the culture that it no longer has to pay
> for this service, it's not too surprising that the pay of
> cultural-perpetuation professionals falls through the floor, or may
> be dispensed with altogether. They never really wanted to pay for
> our critical talents in the first place, and the full-blown,
> perpetual-motion commodification machine dispenses with those
> inconveniences.
>
> Pat Galloway
> MS Dept. of Archives and History
>