The Fascism of Madagascar 3

Champagne plays a large role in our pop-culture psyche. From movies to  elite soiree’s, to a quick way to get drunk. Champagne is an important object in the world of prestige and social ladders – it is the one object that separates and divides – even when we’re not aware of it. In the magazine The Atlantic, writer Emily Temple says this: Successful marketing during the Industrial Revolution helped to firmly establish Champagne’s reputation among the middle class and affluent elite of the time. The wine came to symbolize the “good life” to which all people could aspire. It also brought charges of decadence and indulgence. As the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once commented, “Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.” Here we have the claim that gluttony is a form of social value. That the over-consumption of almost anything could be a good thing. That balance is much too spiritual of a concept and that the ‘good life’ relies upon a literal excess. That the aesthetics were simple a bunch of schizophrenic penny-pinchers who relied upon a void. Create. Innovate. Push. Pull. Demand. Demand. Demand. Is this not the ultimately perverse credo of capitalistic thought today? That happiness is simply the inverted excess of unhappiness and to live a life of fulfillment, one must consume.