"Devine, James" wrote: > > > By JEFF MADRICK > > THE booming economy of the 1990's spawned many a spurious piece of > conventional wisdom. One is that Americans' materialism has run amok. > > Americans from all walks of life, the story goes, are spending with > abandon on fancy and unnecessary products.
I never thought much of Lionel Trillin (literary critic and author of _The Liberal Imagination_), but there are half a dozen or so of shrewd observations scattered through his work. One of them was that the so-called "materialism" of american consumers was an idealism, a spiritual urge, insofar as the goal was wealth for its own sake or the mere display of it. This would include "spending with abandon on fancy and unnecessary products." (Of course there is a large gray zone of objects which seem of real material use to their purchasers but may seem empty, even a delusion, to some onlookers.) This observation, of course, is tangential to the thrust of the article Jim fwds. Carrol
