taste
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Junk food, once suite only to the undiscriminating palates and iron stomachs of the young, is now common fare for adults. It has already been forgotten that adults are supposed to have more developed taste in food than children. McDonald’s and Burger King commercials show us that this distinction is no longer relevant.
Neil Postman -
To kill time before my train left, I went into the only little theater there. The pure vulgarity of that burlesque show, stripped of aesthetic, plebeian, was fit for immigrant workers camps of the last century; even apes would have understood copulative movements of the girls on stage. A diversion for lonely males. But in the bar across the street lonely were deprived even of the consolation of stammering their confession to the bartender, for all eyes were riveted on the television screen. Was this the highest that l’homme sensuel moel could reach when left to himself, undismayed by the cyclones of history? The inside of the train, which I boarded a while later, was decorated with large reproductions of French Impressionists.
Czesław Miłosz -
I would develop the idea that it is we ourselves who are undermining our own identity - by the terrible way we speak, the appaling architecture we put up, our lack of respect for the landscape and historical buildings, our dubious urbanization, the way we’ve given up on the plurality of trades and small businesses, the depopulation of the countryside, the construction of ever greater monuments to consumption without increasing the productivity and efficiency of our own industries or making a sophisticated attempts to market our own products… We are becoming just another globalized country.
Václav Havel