Handcrafted and artisan

I was walking around the quaint and upcoming neighborhood of South Park in San Diego today when I noticed a growing fad on the shopfronts. I noticed how a lot of them had started using generic healthy sounding words like 'artisan' and 'handcrafted' to describe their fares which included stuff from chocolate to beer to clothes and more. Terms like these were all over the place and although generally they can be dismissed as merely a quaint amusement, it is also worthwhile to prod the topic a little because to me they belie a demographic which is as gullible and, might I say thick, as the one which it looks down upon so much. And America, being the fascinating place that it is, with all its freedoms and its tolerance, harbors them all and listens to them with patience. I hear people from outside the country coming here and feeling dissatisfied, even angry, with certain facets of America - and I do too sometimes - but I am eternally amazed by the fact that in this country you can always find a chunk of people whom you don't like very much, who have very different values than you do, and it's all a testament to the country's incredible diversity and tolerance.

And, therefore, you can find here wide swathes of land inhabited by those whose lives revolve around hard religion and conservative ideologies and numerous coastal pockets of population who are their complete opposites. I am intellectually fascinated by all this variety but I also cannot help but be cognizant of the existence of follies in any form of 'belief system'. I am not sure if I have a belief system but I am sure that if I have one then it's both flawed and inconsistent. I am also aware that it is okay because finally the only important thing is the color of life and all these badly constructed systems add to the humor of life and to its botched iridescence. So on the one hand we have the far right of America with its heavy insistence on the final word of the Bible, and on the other we have the far left with its own superstitions in pseudosciences such as homeopathy, astrology and other new age claptrap. They both look askance at each other whereas people like me, who think of themselves as being in the middle, are allowed to feel smug!

I was struck, then, by the repeated usage of terms like handcrafted and artisan on the shop windows because these terms don't really mean much. They do however intend to make the buyer believe that the things which these shops are selling are somehow superior to those which come from huge factories. Whenever I come across such words I cannot help but think that there is a sly effort to sell me vague associations of green pastures, clear streams, and old grandmotherly knowledge. To me the intent is so incredibly devious that I am instantly repulsed by it and am rather inclined put my trust in the red bottle of coke with its honest description of high fructose corn syrup and 150 calories.