Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Dreams Incorporated: Living the delayed life with Amway

Dreams Incorporated: Living the delayed life with Amway FROM THE ARCHIVE | The Baffler no. 10 (1997) Dreams Incorporated Living the delayed life with Amway demanded a booming voice. The ballroom went dark and the audience settled in for a fifteen-minute video catalog of the stuff dreams are made of: a blur of luxury cars, sprawling mansions, frolicking children, pristine beaches, hot-dogging jet-skiers, private helipads, and zooming jets—all set to caffeinated, John Tesh-y instrumental music. The voice returned: “It’s about family!” (A shot of kids collapsing on an oceanic lawn, love-tackled by Dad.) “It’s about security!” (A shot of a palatial house.) “It’s about you!” (A close-up of toes, gently lapped by the incoming tide, wriggling in white sand.) This was Dream Night, and it was about Amway. There are some 1.25 million Amway members in the United States, roughly one for every two hundred of the rest of us, all of them eager to spread the gospel of salvation-through-sellingAmway-products. Considering Amwayers’ penchant for compiling long lists of names, accosting strangers, and generally striving to collapse the degrees of separation between them and other humans, the chances of an American being asked 14 1 The Baffler [no.25] What is your dream? to an Amway meeting are http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Baffler MIT Press

Dreams Incorporated: Living the delayed life with Amway

Roth, Matt
The Baffler – Mar 1, 2014
Download PDF
2 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/mit-press/dreams-incorporated-living-the-delayed-life-with-amway-FPIC5vKiLY

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2014 Matt Roth
ISSN
1059-9789
eISSN
2164-926X
DOI
10.1162/BFLR_a_00238
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

FROM THE ARCHIVE | The Baffler no. 10 (1997) Dreams Incorporated Living the delayed life with Amway demanded a booming voice. The ballroom went dark and the audience settled in for a fifteen-minute video catalog of the stuff dreams are made of: a blur of luxury cars, sprawling mansions, frolicking children, pristine beaches, hot-dogging jet-skiers, private helipads, and zooming jets—all set to caffeinated, John Tesh-y instrumental music. The voice returned: “It’s about family!” (A shot of kids collapsing on an oceanic lawn, love-tackled by Dad.) “It’s about security!” (A shot of a palatial house.) “It’s about you!” (A close-up of toes, gently lapped by the incoming tide, wriggling in white sand.) This was Dream Night, and it was about Amway. There are some 1.25 million Amway members in the United States, roughly one for every two hundred of the rest of us, all of them eager to spread the gospel of salvation-through-sellingAmway-products. Considering Amwayers’ penchant for compiling long lists of names, accosting strangers, and generally striving to collapse the degrees of separation between them and other humans, the chances of an American being asked 14 1 The Baffler [no.25] What is your dream? to an Amway meeting are

Journal

The Baffler – MIT Press

Published: Mar 1, 2014

There are no references for this article.