S: My gut response after reading that is something like: Is this argument disingenuous, idiotic, or merely bizarre? I'd say to them: I am a copyright holder who pays his rent with the intellectual property he generates, and I'd suggest you re-focus your puerile antipathies towards these 'conglomerates' in a way that goes to the heart of the malaise that bred you (i.e.: the brutal dumbing down of 'culture' to facilitate the selling of it). The problem has nothing to do with copyrighting...copyrighting is a necessary protection of creatives like me against imagination-free parasites like YOU. Stop whining and create something OF YOUR OWN. If you think creativity lies in appropriating chunks of works or even whole works created not by you but by others...that's your problem right there.

By the way, I'd like to appropriate your FLAT for use during a brief vacation in your city and your CAR for a bit of sightseeing around town and I invoke my right to do so as a citizen of the PLANET who opposes all bourgeois, restrictive and ultimately DEMEANING concepts of Private Property, especially if it's property I WANT.

I mean, who are these people?

A: Exactly. More importantly, who are they not?

S: Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Here I am in Berlin chatting with you (in Portland), and what I'm thinking is that whereas in Germany one of the most popular masks to wear is that of the Pseudointellectual, the fashion in The States right now is the opposite: the Pseudosimpleton. I think to myself, no way those people can be as stupid as they're pretending to be. What's behind it? What can they all be up to, subconsciously or not…what can they all be gearing up for?

A: To what extent do you think so-called 'Political Correctness' fits in with all this?

S: Funnily enough. This morning I read something in The New Yorker by the usually sane Louis Menad. Wrapping up the article, Menad posited a hypothetical to illustrate a Martian's attempt to parse Earth culture, writing, "The Martian sees only that human beings attach high value to some of these otherwise identical and interchangeable objects and low value to others, and he/she attempts, by analyzing the system in which the objects are produced, circulated, and consumed, to figure out how this happens."