The Sainsbury's Advertisment

It's a bit Herbert Marcuse,

A bit One Dimensional Man:

A unification of opposites,

A harmonisation of contradictions,

Where liberal-democratic capitalism

Gives that tantalising illusion of freedom,

Whilst simultaneously appropriating opposition.

It's Gramsci's cultural hegemony,

It's Sainsbury's Christmas advertisement:

A celebration of an unofficial truce,

With unauthorised fraternisation,

And near mutiny,

Held up as a paragon of virtue,

In a sanitised World War One

(Where is that queer, sardonic rat?),

With the fetishisation of confection and money,

And where disobedience and mutinous self-expression

Have been gently press ganged into the national service

Of conformism, consumerism, capitalism and consumption.

Not so much 1914 - 2014, as 1984:

Orwellian double-speak,

Post-modernist history,

21st century store wars.