GM, pre-class 11/5: Seinfeld’s Kramer and the American Revolution

Adorno’s statement that “Countless people use words and expressions which they either have ceased to understand at all or use only…as trademarks” (70) reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when Kramer was trying to explain to Jerry that the United States Post Office would just “write-off” merchandise that was damaged by the post office during shipment.. Kramer was referring to a stereo system, if I recall that Jerry had purchased which wouldn’t work. There was no warranty on the stereo system and Kramer was attempting to come up with different ways to get it repaired for Jerry; hence, the post office scheme.
Kramer kept telling Jerry that they, the post office, would just “write-it-off” and finally Jerry asked Kramer “you have no idea what a ‘write-off’ is do you,” he asked, which Kramer responded to “no, do you?” to which Jerry responded “no I don’t.”
When I think about Adorno’s statement again “The defrauded masses today cling to the myth of success still more ardently than the successful” (50) this leads me to think about Adorno, Marx, and Althusser, “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (44) and the American War for Independence from Great Britain and King George III in correlating terms. If you believe in the Bible and more particularly the quote from the book of Ecclesiastes 1:9 “and there is no new thing under the sun” and if you believe, as I do, that the dominant ideology of world is and has always been based upon wealth, for example, in the United States the top ten percent of the country’s most wealthiest pay the least in proportion of percentage of taxes, yet control a majority of the nations wealth. Marx, Althusser, and Adorno could just as easily been written about the elitists who didn’t want to pay their taxes to King George III. These elitists, therefore, subtly began a revolution.
I find Marx’s statement “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being which determines their consciousness (37) interesting here. Once the Brits and royal power was booted from the continent, it was free-reign for the elitists who had the capital to further acquire and control wealth. The cause of the American Revolution would be a perfect guise, a shift in ideology to complete this, according to Marx, “Within this class cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, but whenever a practical collision occurs in which the class itself is endangered they automatically vanish” (38).
It’s of further interest to note that nearly of all the United States’ Industrialists amassed their great wealth during the time frame from after the American Revolution, up through the American Civil War, and beyond. This industrial wealth would come in handy some “four score and seven years later” (Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) when it was used to support yet another shift, or furtherance, in ideology to invade, concur, and subjugate the American South.