{"id":10492,"date":"2021-03-19T21:28:23","date_gmt":"2021-03-20T01:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=10492"},"modified":"2021-03-19T21:28:23","modified_gmt":"2021-03-20T01:28:23","slug":"consumerism-and-communism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=10492","title":{"rendered":"Consumerism and communism"},"content":{"rendered":"

I remembered something today. A set of playing cards.<\/p>\n

I never had a card deck like this but some of my grade school classmates did. This was the (very) early 1970s in communist Hungary. It was through these cards that I first learned of the existence of luxury sports cars, supercars like Ferrari, racecars like Lotus.<\/p>\n

It was cards like these:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

These were not some imports from the decadent West. Not subtle imperialist propaganda. These cards were produced by the state-owned Playing Card Factory (yes, that was the name of the company!) and they were much coveted by many 7-year olds. Like me.<\/p>\n

But now that I think back, it makes me wonder: Exactly what were they thinking? I mean, this was a bleeping communist dictatorship (of the goulash variety, but still). What on Earth did they think they were doing, these self-appointed masters of agitprop, poisoning our young, impressionable minds with such blatant Western consumerist propaganda?<\/p>\n

Ah, the sweet irony.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I remembered something today. A set of playing cards. I never had a card deck like this but some of my grade school classmates did. This was the (very) early 1970s in communist Hungary. It was through these cards that I first learned of the existence of luxury sports cars, supercars like Ferrari, racecars like […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,25,21,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-history","category-hungary","category-personal","category-40-id","category-25-id","category-21-id","category-35-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10492"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10495,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10492\/revisions\/10495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}