The self and capitalism - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

pai mei · 03-27-2007, 05:21 PM

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...uration%3Along

This is a video everybody should see. It's about how people try to find their self, and at the same time the system tries to sort them, even the most independent fit in some category about what they buy and who do they vote.
Does this (some item for sale) help you express yourself ?
This is a trick question : it implies that you seek ways to express yourself , and with that , no matter how you express yourself you fit into the system
Expressing one's self is in fact self searching. Using products that help you "express your freedom" means that you are still inside the system
Another question :
Do you consciously try to "express yourself" with things you own/buy ?
All this "expressing" stuff is the reason for the world we see. People are taught to buy to express who they are, not to buy becouse they really need something.
It's a sad world where people think they are what they want to be if they own the product wich that "self" would own for sure.
Also people are tought how it's best to be like. Be independent ! Be strong ! Buy my new "independent and strong" toothpick, look it has "independent and strong" written on it, what more do you want ?

cj2112 · 03-27-2007, 06:16 PM

I don't the attention span to watch an hour long video on the internet, however I will say that I do not ever remember trying to "express myself" through the products that I buy. Of course I'm not trying to find myself either. i don't think I've bought something to try to fit in with any certain group since I was a sophomore in high school. I buy what I like, not because it means I'm cool, or it expresses any certain emotion, but because I like it, or because it fulfills a certain function well.

I agree it is sad when people define themselves by what they own, rather than what they do. (When I say what they do, I'm not talking about their job, I'm speaking about their behavior, the way they treat themselves and those around them).

Having said all that, I am a firm believer in capitalism.

pai mei · 03-28-2007, 12:17 AM

I am not against capitalism, I am against our culture in which people are taught to buy the new stuff even if the old one is still good, and things are build to last only a limited time
And of course those commercials : "be strong buy my paperclip" !

The_Jazz · 03-28-2007, 04:32 AM

Designed obsolescence isn't a sin. It can be annoying, but it also creates the drive to create better products. If I embrace your theory, technological advance slows to a crawl. I'm much happier with the status quo.

lurkette · 03-28-2007, 10:10 AM

Fuck, I crafted a very well-worded answer to this and accidentally hit the "back" button. I don't have time to recreate it. This'll teach me to be concise.

Bottom line: humans are inherently symbol-using creatures. It is in our nature to imbue objects with symbolic value beyond their use value. This has gotten way out of hand, IMHO (for example, that godawful ugly $45K Louis Vuitton purse), but I don't think there's any way to completely opt out. The interpretation of expression happens on the other side of the conversation, so whether you're intending to express yourself through your possessions or not, they are seen as expressions of yourself by some (most) people. To some extent, irony is an effective way to shift the conversation incrementally: using the cast off symbols of past value to create new value, thereby commenting on the absurdity of the process. Unfortunately, some people don't get the joke and take it seriously. This is why people wear stupid trucker hats.

Even if we were to revert (evolve?) to a completely agrarian, egalitarian socialist society, our penchant for symbol use would almost certainly mean that some items would be seen as expressions of the self. Look at some tribes where fetishes or totems were first used to identify roles but gradually evolved into status symbols. Or someone finds a pretty rock, everyone wants the pretty rock. Suddenly it's not a "rock" anymore, it's a commodity, and possession of the rock is suddenly a symbol of something beyond having a hard piece of silica with which to bash things.

Buying things exclusively for their use value is a good start to ending the unsustainable consumerism that's depleting our natural resources, but you're never going to eradicate commodity fetishism, particularly when people have leisure time and disposable income. Unless someone has some good ideas. You might try pointing out the negative environmental and economic consequences of overconsumption and hope that the use value of an imagined sustainable future is greater than the symbolic value of whatever commodity a person is considering purchasing, but instant gratification packs a wallop over that bird in the bush.

Ourcrazymodern? · 03-28-2007, 10:29 AM

thankyou, lurkette! If your original post was any more well-worded I might have had a stroke.

pai mei · 03-28-2007, 02:30 PM

The problem is beyond socialism and capitalism. Even in socialism, nobody says that people will be smart enough to see that they are not what they own and wear and buy.
We-humans have been doing this for thousands of years, now we can look at such behaviour as we look at child's play and laugh (I hope)
Here are some quotes from "Fight Club" :

Quote:

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

Quote:

...you're not how much money you've got in the bank. You're not your job. You're not your family, and you're not who you tell yourself.... You're not your name.... You're not your problems.... You're not your age.... You are not your hopes

CptAJ · 03-28-2007, 04:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Jazz

Designed obsolescence isn't a sin. It can be annoying, but it also creates the drive to create better products. If I embrace your theory, technological advance slows to a crawl. I'm much happier with the status quo.

Technological progress slowing down to a crawl is a popular pro-planned obsolescence argument. However, I very *much* doubt its correlation to reality. There will always be demand to buy a new product, there will always be new individuals to buy the new product and older products will break or become unintentionally obsolete in turn. I think its a profoundly naive belief to think that honest design will slow progress in any way. Heck, honest design *itself* is progress, don't you think? I would sure as hell like our engineers to invent things to last as much as possible, such devices would be inherently superior to any "status quo" alternative.

The only thing that *might* slow down is commerce. But contrary to what you've been brought up to believe, that is not an invariably bad thing. If anything, engineers would be hard pressed to dramatically improve products in order for people to adopt them since their 30 year old blender still blends the same way.

So you see, once you pierce through the clever economist rhetoric we've all been spoon-fed, you actually realize that banning planned obsolescence is actually an incentive to technological progress. (ie: the opposite of what the defending premise tried to pass for a fact)

Having a profound love for technology, engineering and the sciences in general; I do, in fact, consider planned obsolescence a sin. A sin, a lie and an insult to our intelligence. And all of this without even *touching* the issue of wasted natural resources.

You're not your fucking khakis.
We'll wear leather clothes to last us the rest of our lives.

Tyler was on to something

roachboy · 03-29-2007, 06:45 AM

i was considering avoiding this thread, but no.

1. um...planned obsolesence was more or less a structural requirement under the fordist mode of production because it was predicated on long production runs of standardized items. within that context, it is a device for creating turnover. this is not rocket science.

there is no general correlation between it and "technological progress"--not if you have a look at the actually existing history of capitalism--the universe of neoliberal vagueness would posit such a correlation--but neoliberalism posits all kinds of ridiculous relationships on this order--and if you want a measure of how well they play out in real time, just have a look at the litany of disaster that is the history of the imf/world bank/structural adjustment programs since the collapse of the bretton woods arrangement.

2. i liked lurkette's post above in general, but it does a strange thing: it conflates human propensities to create and use symbols with commodity fetishism and in doing that conflates modes of interaction particular to capitalism with some basic features of this fiction they call "human nature" with the result that capitalism becomes identical with human sociability in general. the notion of commodity fetishism comes from marx, who was clear--CLEAR--that it is an expression of the social and economic conditions particular to capitalism. it presupposes alienation. alienation is a device for talking about the consequences of the capitalist re-organization of production: the fragmentation of tasks, the dekilling of work, the reduction of workers to on the one hand "bearers of abstract quanta of labor power" and on the other to appendages of the machines. the logic behind commodity fetishism presupposes the effects of alienation as marx outlined it--subjected to the fragmentation that capitalism imposes, workers (well folk in general) recognize something of themselves in commodities because, for marx, they recognize something of the "condensed labor power" that constitues the core of the commodity's value as he understood it--that is they recognize a trace of being-human in the commodity, in its being-worked and this functions as a kind of solace or compensation for what capitalism does to workers in particular: it tends to reduce them to things. to objects.

so all of this presupposes the capitalist mode of production. it is a historical creation of capitalism, not an expression in some endless series of anything fundamental about human nature, whatever that is.

one result of this blurring is the disable any sense of the historical nature of capitalism as a social form. another is to erase any sense of alternatives. a third is a fundamental, basic error: it conflates the uses of commodities within the capitalist mode of production with human capacities to generate symbols in general. which makes capitalism an expression of "human nature" which makes capitalism appear far more rational than it is--and worse, makes it appear inevitable.

3. if you want to play this game, we can: the court of louis 14 at versailles was built around a culture of display. superficially, it resembles the conspicuous consumption that veblen critiqued at the end of the 19th century: but the system of production within which this culture of display operated was fundamentally other than that of capitalism. so one could say that the display is about the performance of identity through the assemblage of symbol collages--but you cannot say that commodity fetishism was the driver for it.

any attempt to naturalize patterns of socialization turns on basic errors.
while you can argue that human beings are defined around the need to make meaning, it is wrong to go from there to arguing that therefore all patterns of meaning generation are somehow equivalent. that you can make comparisons does not mean that the comparisons are accurate.

lurkette · 03-29-2007, 07:30 AM

Ack! I'm a good socialist, I swear! Don't take away my credentials!

I certainly didn't mean to defend capitalism as the logical and "natural" product of human nature. I can see how you'd get there. I'm 10 years out of grad school so my Marx is rusty and I was showing off my big words. So sue me.

I do, however, stand by my assertion that symbol use is inherent to human nature - quibble with the term if you like, but show me any humans who don't automatically imbue objects with symbolic value beyond their use value.

I didn't mean this to suggest that capitalism is the natural consequence; simply that this propensity makes consumerism all the more insidious for exactly the reasons you state:

Quote:

one result of this blurring is the disable any sense of the historical nature of capitalism as a social form. another is to erase any sense of alternatives. a third is a fundamental, basic error: it conflates the uses of commodities within the capitalist mode of production with human capacities to generate symbols in general. which makes capitalism an expression of "human nature" which makes capitalism appear far more rational than it is--and worse, makes it appear inevitable.

Maybe I'm a victim of this process, hence the capitalist tautology in my argument.

Anyhow, roachboy (or whoever else wants to chime in), what do you (or Marx or Veblen or Foucault or whoever you can dredge up that I was supposed to remember from grad school but don't) suggest as an alternative? What are alternative means of expression that accommodate the human need? propensity? to express the self through objects? Am I just flat wrong that this is a basic human behavior?

Unobscure the alternatives for us. (Really, I'm not being snarky. I wanna know, because as my post would suggest, I feel pretty trapped inside The System.)

roachboy · 03-29-2007, 08:27 AM

lurkette:

yikes....i would be the last person to revoke anyone's socialist credentials: if i did, you wouldnt be able to attend our secret cocktail parties, and the guest list is already short enough, particularly amongst americans.
and besides, i'm not in charge.

i'll post something when i have more time to devote to it in response to it.
the main reason i had considered staying out of the thread is that the questions it raises are complicated--and they are close enough to what i do in my day gig that i can go on about them At Length...

Dilbert1234567 · 03-29-2007, 08:56 AM

where as i usually disagree with you pai mei, i do agree with you somewhat here. the biggest problem is that we don't think like we used to, one big cause is the decrease in reading and increase of TV, our attention span's have dropped significantly in the last century. this is not to say i am against all this progress, i am against the laziness this progress has imparted to our civilization. our society has stopped thinking objectively. we no longer think critically about our choices or the world around us at large, we are influenced by things that don't really matter, we have scantily clad women hawking products, they have nothing to do with dish soap, all i care about is does it cut the grease and will it not upset my psoriasis. i have to consistently ask my self, what ulterior motives are behind this, obviously advertisements want me to buy, but these ulterior motives have spanned over into places i once thought were safe; websites i thought were unbiased and i could get a fair product review are now inundated with propaganda; a good example is Digg, they were once a great site, with unbiased articles, now, we have so much crap and spam on it, the level of knowledge has dropped to a level i truly fear, post that have no merit are promoted to the front page. a few months ago, some idiot posted that AVG free was no longer going to be free, a quick look on the web page showed that the old version 7.1 was no longer going to be free, it was being replaced with 7.5, which was to be free, it was clear as day in the article, however it was dugg to the front page, a clearly inaccurate statement, but people jumped on it, thinking it was true.

if any of you have never taken a critical thinking class in college, i encourage you to take one, find the time for an evening class, it is one of the most useful classes you will ever take in your life.

flstf · 03-29-2007, 10:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lurkette

Even if we were to revert (evolve?) to a completely agrarian, egalitarian socialist society, our penchant for symbol use would almost certainly mean that some items would be seen as expressions of the self. Look at some tribes where fetishes or totems were first used to identify roles but gradually evolved into status symbols. Or someone finds a pretty rock, everyone wants the pretty rock. Suddenly it's not a "rock" anymore, it's a commodity, and possession of the rock is suddenly a symbol of something beyond having a hard piece of silica with which to bash things.

I wonder if our ancient ancestors identified with their possessions regardless of their functional use, you know, "my clovis spear point is way cooler than yours" or "my shell necklace is the latest in design"? Maybe we are wired this way. "Let's not invite them, their cave drawings are old school".

I guess we also have some need to conform to the norm. Why else would we still wear something as useless as a tie.

The_Jazz · 03-29-2007, 10:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by flstf

I wonder if our ancient ancestors identified with their possessions regardless of their functional use, you know, "my clovis spear point is way cooler than yours" or "my shell necklace is the latest in design"? Maybe we are wired this way. "Let's not invite them, their cave drawings are old school".

I guess we also have some need to conform to the norm. Why else would we still wear something as useless as a tie.

flstf, while those exact words may have never been uttered, I'm positive that the sentiment was there. I remember reading about an archieological study of one of the first known studies and the theory that it was razed by attackers who were jealous of the goods produced by the city dwellers. After all, one of the 10 Commandments is about this very issue, so I doubt that our ancestors were any smarter than we were.

pai mei · 03-30-2007, 02:29 AM

There were plenty of ancient people who were not the slaves of their own possesions. I think the native americans were such people. Here is the story of Black Elk :
http://blackelkspeaks.unl.edu/index2.htm

The_Jazz · 03-30-2007, 04:39 AM

There may have been ancient individuals who weren't slave to fashion, but there were lots that were. Including Lakota. The Lakota traded very heavily with both the American Government and individuals throughout the 1800's. That including things like beads, which are only useful as decoration.

Show me a culture devoid of decoration and I'll accept your argument.

03-27-2007, 05:21 PM	#1 (permalink)
pai mei Insane	Self Image http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...uration%3Along This is a video everybody should see. It's about how people try to find their self, and at the same time the system tries to sort them, even the most independent fit in some category about what they buy and who do they vote. Does this (some item for sale) help you express yourself ? This is a trick question : it implies that you seek ways to express yourself , and with that , no matter how you express yourself you fit into the system Expressing one's self is in fact self searching. Using products that help you "express your freedom" means that you are still inside the system Another question : Do you consciously try to "express yourself" with things you own/buy ? All this "expressing" stuff is the reason for the world we see. People are taught to buy to express who they are, not to buy becouse they really need something. It's a sad world where people think they are what they want to be if they own the product wich that "self" would own for sure. Also people are tought how it's best to be like. Be independent ! Be strong ! Buy my new "independent and strong" toothpick, look it has "independent and strong" written on it, what more do you want ? Last edited by pai mei; 03-28-2007 at 12:24 AM..

03-28-2007, 04:32 AM	#4 (permalink)
The_Jazz Asshole Administrator Location: Chicago	Designed obsolescence isn't a sin. It can be annoying, but it also creates the drive to create better products. If I embrace your theory, technological advance slows to a crawl. I'm much happier with the status quo. __________________ "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin "There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush "We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

03-28-2007, 10:10 AM	#5 (permalink)
lurkette My future is coming on Moderator Emeritus Location: east of the sun and west of the moon	Fuck, I crafted a very well-worded answer to this and accidentally hit the "back" button. I don't have time to recreate it. This'll teach me to be concise. Bottom line: humans are inherently symbol-using creatures. It is in our nature to imbue objects with symbolic value beyond their use value. This has gotten way out of hand, IMHO (for example, that godawful ugly $45K Louis Vuitton purse), but I don't think there's any way to completely opt out. The interpretation of expression happens on the other side of the conversation, so whether you're intending to express yourself through your possessions or not, they are seen as expressions of yourself by some (most) people. To some extent, irony is an effective way to shift the conversation incrementally: using the cast off symbols of past value to create new value, thereby commenting on the absurdity of the process. Unfortunately, some people don't get the joke and take it seriously. This is why people wear stupid trucker hats. Even if we were to revert (evolve?) to a completely agrarian, egalitarian socialist society, our penchant for symbol use would almost certainly mean that some items would be seen as expressions of the self. Look at some tribes where fetishes or totems were first used to identify roles but gradually evolved into status symbols. Or someone finds a pretty rock, everyone wants the pretty rock. Suddenly it's not a "rock" anymore, it's a commodity, and possession of the rock is suddenly a symbol of something beyond having a hard piece of silica with which to bash things. Buying things exclusively for their use value is a good start to ending the unsustainable consumerism that's depleting our natural resources, but you're never going to eradicate commodity fetishism, particularly when people have leisure time and disposable income. Unless someone has some good ideas. You might try pointing out the negative environmental and economic consequences of overconsumption and hope that the use value of an imagined sustainable future is greater than the symbolic value of whatever commodity a person is considering purchasing, but instant gratification packs a wallop over that bird in the bush. __________________ "If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." - Anatole France

03-28-2007, 10:29 AM	#6 (permalink)
Ourcrazymodern? still, wondering. Location: South Minneapolis, somewhere near the gorgeous gorge	thankyou, lurkette! If your original post was any more well-worded I might have had a stroke. __________________ BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

03-29-2007, 06:45 AM	#9 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i was considering avoiding this thread, but no. 1. um...planned obsolesence was more or less a structural requirement under the fordist mode of production because it was predicated on long production runs of standardized items. within that context, it is a device for creating turnover. this is not rocket science. there is no general correlation between it and "technological progress"--not if you have a look at the actually existing history of capitalism--the universe of neoliberal vagueness would posit such a correlation--but neoliberalism posits all kinds of ridiculous relationships on this order--and if you want a measure of how well they play out in real time, just have a look at the litany of disaster that is the history of the imf/world bank/structural adjustment programs since the collapse of the bretton woods arrangement. 2. i liked lurkette's post above in general, but it does a strange thing: it conflates human propensities to create and use symbols with commodity fetishism and in doing that conflates modes of interaction particular to capitalism with some basic features of this fiction they call "human nature" with the result that capitalism becomes identical with human sociability in general. the notion of commodity fetishism comes from marx, who was clear--CLEAR--that it is an expression of the social and economic conditions particular to capitalism. it presupposes alienation. alienation is a device for talking about the consequences of the capitalist re-organization of production: the fragmentation of tasks, the dekilling of work, the reduction of workers to on the one hand "bearers of abstract quanta of labor power" and on the other to appendages of the machines. the logic behind commodity fetishism presupposes the effects of alienation as marx outlined it--subjected to the fragmentation that capitalism imposes, workers (well folk in general) recognize something of themselves in commodities because, for marx, they recognize something of the "condensed labor power" that constitues the core of the commodity's value as he understood it--that is they recognize a trace of being-human in the commodity, in its being-worked and this functions as a kind of solace or compensation for what capitalism does to workers in particular: it tends to reduce them to things. to objects. so all of this presupposes the capitalist mode of production. it is a historical creation of capitalism, not an expression in some endless series of anything fundamental about human nature, whatever that is. one result of this blurring is the disable any sense of the historical nature of capitalism as a social form. another is to erase any sense of alternatives. a third is a fundamental, basic error: it conflates the uses of commodities within the capitalist mode of production with human capacities to generate symbols in general. which makes capitalism an expression of "human nature" which makes capitalism appear far more rational than it is--and worse, makes it appear inevitable. 3. if you want to play this game, we can: the court of louis 14 at versailles was built around a culture of display. superficially, it resembles the conspicuous consumption that veblen critiqued at the end of the 19th century: but the system of production within which this culture of display operated was fundamentally other than that of capitalism. so one could say that the display is about the performance of identity through the assemblage of symbol collages--but you cannot say that commodity fetishism was the driver for it. any attempt to naturalize patterns of socialization turns on basic errors. while you can argue that human beings are defined around the need to make meaning, it is wrong to go from there to arguing that therefore all patterns of meaning generation are somehow equivalent. that you can make comparisons does not mean that the comparisons are accurate. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

03-27-2007, 06:16 PM	#2 (permalink)
cj2112 Unbelievable Location: Grants Pass OR	I don't the attention span to watch an hour long video on the internet, however I will say that I do not ever remember trying to "express myself" through the products that I buy. Of course I'm not trying to find myself either. i don't think I've bought something to try to fit in with any certain group since I was a sophomore in high school. I buy what I like, not because it means I'm cool, or it expresses any certain emotion, but because I like it, or because it fulfills a certain function well. I agree it is sad when people define themselves by what they own, rather than what they do. (When I say what they do, I'm not talking about their job, I'm speaking about their behavior, the way they treat themselves and those around them). Having said all that, I am a firm believer in capitalism.

03-28-2007, 12:17 AM	#3 (permalink)
pai mei Insane	I am not against capitalism, I am against our culture in which people are taught to buy the new stuff even if the old one is still good, and things are build to last only a limited time And of course those commercials : "be strong buy my paperclip" !

03-29-2007, 08:27 AM	#11 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	lurkette: yikes....i would be the last person to revoke anyone's socialist credentials: if i did, you wouldnt be able to attend our secret cocktail parties, and the guest list is already short enough, particularly amongst americans. and besides, i'm not in charge. i'll post something when i have more time to devote to it in response to it. the main reason i had considered staying out of the thread is that the questions it raises are complicated--and they are close enough to what i do in my day gig that i can go on about them At Length... __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

03-29-2007, 08:56 AM	#12 (permalink)
Dilbert1234567 Devils Cabana Boy Location: Central Coast CA	where as i usually disagree with you pai mei, i do agree with you somewhat here. the biggest problem is that we don't think like we used to, one big cause is the decrease in reading and increase of TV, our attention span's have dropped significantly in the last century. this is not to say i am against all this progress, i am against the laziness this progress has imparted to our civilization. our society has stopped thinking objectively. we no longer think critically about our choices or the world around us at large, we are influenced by things that don't really matter, we have scantily clad women hawking products, they have nothing to do with dish soap, all i care about is does it cut the grease and will it not upset my psoriasis. i have to consistently ask my self, what ulterior motives are behind this, obviously advertisements want me to buy, but these ulterior motives have spanned over into places i once thought were safe; websites i thought were unbiased and i could get a fair product review are now inundated with propaganda; a good example is Digg, they were once a great site, with unbiased articles, now, we have so much crap and spam on it, the level of knowledge has dropped to a level i truly fear, post that have no merit are promoted to the front page. a few months ago, some idiot posted that AVG free was no longer going to be free, a quick look on the web page showed that the old version 7.1 was no longer going to be free, it was being replaced with 7.5, which was to be free, it was clear as day in the article, however it was dugg to the front page, a clearly inaccurate statement, but people jumped on it, thinking it was true. if any of you have never taken a critical thinking class in college, i encourage you to take one, find the time for an evening class, it is one of the most useful classes you will ever take in your life. __________________ Donate Blood! "Love is not finding the perfect person, but learning to see an imperfect person perfectly." -Sam Keen

03-30-2007, 02:29 AM	#15 (permalink)
pai mei Insane	There were plenty of ancient people who were not the slaves of their own possesions. I think the native americans were such people. Here is the story of Black Elk : http://blackelkspeaks.unl.edu/index2.htm

03-30-2007, 04:39 AM	#16 (permalink)
The_Jazz Asshole Administrator Location: Chicago	There may have been ancient individuals who weren't slave to fashion, but there were lots that were. Including Lakota. The Lakota traded very heavily with both the American Government and individuals throughout the 1800's. That including things like beads, which are only useful as decoration. Show me a culture devoid of decoration and I'll accept your argument. __________________ "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin "There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush "We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo