Blind consumer rats. That’s the inevitable joke into which we Americans are slowing evolving. The indebted, overweight, under-educated, unhealthy, arrogant end users of the various products and services of a global corporate machine that is eating away at our natural resources, our identity and our freedom. In fact, our identities are largely made up of which corporate labels we wear, which products we use, which video games we spend countless hours playing, which cars we drive and which empty, branded corporate art we waste our time watching. Our celebrities are no longer the talented and the unique. They are the insipid and the rich. Paris Hilton is a celebrity because she is more of a consumer than any of us could ever be and she hasn’t had to work a single day of her life in order to do so. It’s like she’s playing a big joke on the system and getting away with it. She can have the Prada bag, the Gucci shoes, the penthouse, the caviar, the 300-dollar bottle of wine and have it all on someone else’s tab. Paris is a woman so free to consume without the responsibility to give back to society that her very existence is nothing more than consummate consumption. But she is not playing a joke on anyone. She’s the joke. A worthless mirage of humanity that we all long to be. She is the face of New Gatsby. A numb and oblivious slave to shit that simply does not matter. In fact, we are all Paris Hilton. We are preservatives in the apple pie.

And all of this behavior is perpetuated by the engine that drives us: our corporations. Perhaps we shouldn’t whine. Our corporations are made up of hard-working, stressed-out overachievers from small towns that rise above the odds with caffeinated, bloodshot eyes, and arm in arm with other blue-collar dreamers. They long to better the quality of life with their long hours of endless work. They replace the monarchies, the military dictatorships, the despots the even less perfect government models of history. In fact, they rule so passively, with their back alley checks cut to New Gatsby politicians ever eager to take the money and promote the brand and the jobs the brand provides, that we may say they don’t even rule at all. They simply influence…like their commercials. One could certainly do a lot worse than America. Our companies are not even American anymore, they’re global. They are funded or bailed out (owned) by Middle Eastern, oil-drenched royals or foreign private equity funds with a host of anonymous shareholders, the products are designed by the Koreans and Japanese, assembled in China and Vietnam, shipped by the Europeans, marketed by London with an LA face and consumed by Peoria. Of course, if there is ever trouble with any of these products, we call India. And all of these companies have a New York address with a bar code swiped across an American counter, paid for with Singapore financed debt from the credit card of an outstretched fat American hand: the consumer. So really what are our corporations but masses of nobodies with all-star legal teams ready to do battle with any poor schmuck that threatens to stand in the way of others’ consumption? They are not evil. They are not even entities. They are just like Paris…part of the machine.

Our corporations have become celebrities as well. Like the Rockefellers and Carnegies, we have Schultz and Gates, Zuckerberg and Cuban. Even they pale in comparison to the way we gawk and salivate at the mention of their brands: Google, Facebook, Cisco, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, need I cause more heart palpitations? Oh, if we could just have enough money to consume a little stock in these giants, think of how much consumption we could engage in with the dividends?

Let’s not overstate the Kafka in all of this. This cyclical worship of the rich, of industry, of consumption…it’s just that: cyclical. This isn’t the first or last time, we’ll cheapen ourselves like this. Soon, the party will end. The last time, in the first Gatsby era, it ended with the Great Depression. And then we found our character.

Hopefully, this time it won’t take a Great Depression to help America find it’s character. Hopefully, this time we will wake up and take control of our consumption. We will turn our backs to the Paris Hilton burning inside of us. We will save our money. We will pay off our credit cards. We will end the slide into a mindless consumer state. We will make our corporations make sacrifices to help the state, not the other way around. We will re-direct our ambitions to accrue capital wealth toward our ambitions to refine our lives and our environment. In doing so, we will re-capture the progressive spirit that made America great.

With this, we unroll our brand: New Gatsby. A mirror to the downward spiral in hopes of stopping it. The Millennial Generation Juggernaut. We are young and we are smart and we are powerful. A new generation about to inherit a fucking mess of debt and bankruptcy, resulting from years of blind neglect and rabid consumption. But like the mess, the world is ours. And we are free to do with it what we want. No corporation, no CEO, no legal tank, no sovereign nation and no other generation can mandate a goddamn thing on us. And we don’t owe anyone anything. We are not responsible, we are not accountable, we are the walking, talking superstars of the cul-de-sac. We are New Gatsby.