de zengotita

And, by further extension, all the high-fiving and hissed-yes-pointing and thumbs-upping in the culture as a whole, in commercials, in our lives, in the continuous play of expressions and gestures that signify degrees of - what shall we call it? - triumphal intensity. The alchemy at work across this spectrum is, at bottom, the same. It precipitates a fusion of the real and represented, a culture of performance that ultimately constitutes a quality of being, a type of each person - the mediated person. And, as we shall see, this type of person doesn't have heroes. (Thomas de Zengotita, "Attack of the Superzeroes: Why Washington, Einstein, and Madonna can't compete with you," in Harper's Magazine, December 2004, p. 39)