well...

as i was doing my obligatory debate reading for the day, i came across this passage by william t. cavanaugh that i thought was incredible:

"An ephemeral particularity is therefore merely the flipside of a dominant universality. Mexican food is popularized in places like Minnesota, but its dominant form is the fast-food chain Taco Bell, which serves up a hot sauce that a native Minnesotan could mistake for ketchup. Nevertheless, just as the food must be universalized and made bland enough to appeal potentially to anyone anywhere, to compete there must be a simultaneous emphasis on its unique qualities; advertised images must be rooted in a particular location, for example, the traditional Mexican culture of the abuelita before the clay oven, sipping pulque and shaping tortillas in the palm of her hand. Anyone who has stood at a Taco Bell counter and watched a surly white teenager inject burritos with a sour cream gun knows how absurd these images are, not just because Taco Bell does not conform to the Mexican reality, but because the abuelita herself is a manufactured image. Today's Mexican woman is more likely to wash down her tortillas with a can of Diet Coke, while sitting before dubbed reruns of "Dynasty." The more "muy autentico" a place claims to be, the more it exposes itself as a simulacrum, a copy of a copy for which there exists no original."

from The Eucharist as Resistance to Globalization.