Lewis Lapham Quote on the American Consumeristic Religion Function
May 2003 issue of Harper's

"...material objects serve as testimonials to the desired states of immateriality--not what the money buys but what the money says about our rank and standing in the company of the saved. Eager to behold visions in the wilderness and the promise of transcendence, we're suckers for any sales promotion designed to rescue us from the wreck of time. Our fondness for the immaterial and invisible, for the name of the thing instead of the thing itself, is what sells the sports utility vehicle or the soap; entire vocabularies of meaningless jargon--temporal as well as spiritual, literary, scientific, political, and economic--describe entire kingdoms of nonexistent thought. The most successful profits of sexual happiness and social transformation discover that the less they know about the subject in question, the more easily they can escape the mortal coil of inconvenient fact and so float effortlessly upward into the spheres of radiant abstraction."