What Lurks Beneath II

Caught Dennis Hopper cajoling his fellow post-rebellion boomers (actually he aint; he’s 71) to buy Ameriprise retirement services?

It isn’t that Hopper has “sold out.” He did that years ago, and the very notion of “selling out” is itself the puerile notion of just the kind of foolish people who might be influenced by Hopper’s cynical performance.

It isn’t that Hopper himself – in, say, Easy Rider – once represented any kind of coherent or useful political philosophy or social vision, or that now, in helping to advertise a financial service, he performs any kind of opprobrious act.

It’s that Hopper, with Ameriprise, is pandering to what they conceive as the vanity of silly and superficial, aging boomers whom they believe want to continue to imagine themselves as special and iconoclastic even as they long ago made their concessions to the fiscal imperatives of middle-class family life and now want to ensure they have adequate supplies of Flomax as they cruise the Caribbean.

That’s what it is.

AJA