Welcome to the club, Joanna. Tarnishing idols always provokes witch hunting, regardless of ideological or religious preferences of the hunters. Is not it special that attacking commercial culture and its idols provokes so much controversy on lbo, while the informative postings about economic and political development outside the US (such as those by Ulhas Joglekar) go virtually unnoticed?
Reminds me of an experience I had while in the grad school. After a demo organized by CISPES, the organizers threw a party for the participants. At the party, one of the CISPES characters, having learned than I am from Eastern Europe, started telling me the story of his visit to the x-USSR. The story belonged to the popular genre of ridiculing the quality or choice of consumer goods available outside the US. What boggled the mind of that particular rising star of the US left was the soft drink dispensing machines - the Soviet models dispensed drinks in glasses that were rinsed and used by the next customer, instead of throw-away paper cups used in the US models.
I opined that seeing the soda dispensing machines was not much bang for the buck he paid to visit that big and diverse country. He got pissed and stopped talking to me. Challenging stereotypes, left or right, almost invariably provokes angry reaction.
Wojtek