I'VE SEEN THE FUTURE & IT'S FOR SALE!

Urinals too...?

Fans of the Emmy Award winning series MAD MEN will have to wait until January 2012 for it to resume. But fear not, there will be no intervening let-up in our culture's 24/7 advertising. Television, newspapers, magazines, Internet, billboards, inside your cabs and, yes, right there above your urinals.

With more to come as marketers start enlisting online avatars to talk you into panting for their products. Imagine commercials in which you watch Spartacus doing battle in Hane's underwear and the Holy Grail pouring Coke at the Last Supper.

Not to laugh, friends, for you and I are already ego-deep in this zeitgeist. Engulfed in a swamp of piqued desires to have and to hold what these products can provide us. Desire...? Greed...? Capitalism...? Pick whatever word works for you, but we exist in a constant state of wanting. This despite the ancient warning: Be careful of what you want, because you just might get it.

FREEDOM author Jonathan Franzen: "Our marketers have become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of erotic relationships in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything. Instantly so as to make us feel all powerful..." Think your latest iPhone!

Franzen adds: "The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes -- a world of hurricanes and hardships -- with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be a mere extension of the self..." Think your next grade of iPhone!

The naturalists among us need not fear, however. The natural world has this way of brutishly reminding us and our technology that it not us is in final command. The wide wake of human sorrow left behind nature's tsnamies, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and floods makes this brutishly clear. But in our sorrow we might take comfort in Ralph Waldo Emerson 150 years before our iPhone: "Sorrow make us all children again. It destroys all differences of intellect. Now the wisest know nothing."