Dmitrovitch gives her a foul look. “It’s like that whole thing about ‘resistance’ or ‘dissent,’” he says. “Back in the 1960s there was something actually to resist, there was an actual, you know, war on, people were actually getting killed, kids were running down the street with like napalm burning their bodies and stuff. Resistance nowadays is just this pathetic shadow. People don’t know what to resist. Because there’s nothing to resist. There’s no ‘enemy.’ There’s no ‘system.’ There’s no ‘man’ anymore. Say ‘stick it to the man’ nowadays and some kid’s going to go shoot his school’s vice-principal. Talk about ‘resistance’ and you’re talking about a bunch of kids picketing a McDonald’s because they missed all the fun back in the 60s. You get punks making stickers that say ‘Boycott Corporate Coffee.’ What’s the fucking point anymore? A government that drops like ten tons of unofficial bombs on noncombatant villagers, has got a little more ideological charge, enemy-wise, than the local Starbucks.”
“There’s a new one going up, you know.”
“And I should care about this precisely why?”
“Oh, let me see. Homogenization? Everyplace everywhere becoming more and more the same? The death of quirky local things that make each town different? The world becoming corporatized, increasingly becoming a collage of recognizable brands, a self-sustaining mesh of money and power woven so tightly that no new visionary can mark it in any way? Eventually individuality will die; the world will become a hive; the people will become mindless drones serving out tiny pointless roles for some, some swollen eminence that’s behind it all, and you can lie there and honestly say you don’t care?”
“I didn’t say I don’t care, I asked you why you thought I should care.”
“Interesting distinction.”