Consumer Warfare: An Introduction

My history professor mentioned taking a trip down an aisle at the Home Depot and finding a heated toilet seat. Even indoor plumbing, it seems, has embarked on a campaign to make the newest, most advanced and useless material possible. God Bless America.
The arms race is over, with the United States reigning victorious. *insert sarcasm* The evil Soviet Union has been defeated, and the position of the United States in the United Nations and NATO provides some connection to all countries of the world - if they are not our friends, at least they aren't our enemies!
The space race, it seems, has stalled. Oh, do not be fooled - all the major powers of the world and some not-so-major are working feverishly to improve the technology through which we shall colonize the galaxy. Perhaps those heated toilet seats would make space travel more comfortable...
Let us not disregard the Hubble, or the Russian space station. Advancement is coming. Still, it has long since ceased to be the focus of global attention.
Power today rests in economic prowess, or who makes the best stuff. This trend began with Nikita Khrushchev, the Economic Quicker Picker-Upper, in 1960s Soviet Russia. It is a direct product of the arms race and the stagnation it reached, along with fears of global annihilation - bombing the United States is all well and good, but of course they'll bomb back and then even the poor non-aligned Indians will suffer from the fallout...
But wait, India has the bomb too! They'll sneak attack Pakistan and China simultaneously, followed closely by a tandem response, if the arsenals of the latter have not been destroyed. This in turn will perpetuate a pattern, and all the poor souls in non-nuclear countries will go to their rest wondering, "Why couldn't we have the bomb?"
Ah, yes - that global annihilation.
Which brings me to the true focus: bread and butter socialism.

Bounty Battles: Khrushchev v. America

People think that consumer warfare is a simple fact of life, an unimportant characteristic of modern society, an inevitability in global commerce - if they notice it at all.

Next time: From power weapons to paper towels - Cold War implications in the development of the consumer front...