So I finally saw Supersize Me (well, about half of it... had to turn it off when I started to feel ill). This is the kind of movie that makes one wonder about the general stupidity of the American populace. I'm often startled by my non-liberal reactions to things like this, but at some point you just have to stop blaming corporations for how ignorant, reactionary, and downright disgusting Americans have become. And you know what? This isn't one of those "America used to be a better place before all the jews and liberals and darkies" bullshit revisionist-history rants. I mean, did you see the winners of last night's People's Choice Awards? If those are the people's choices, the people have lost their fucking minds. We're getting fatter, our tastes are degrading, we're reverting to a political climate that is quickly destroying the advances of science and secular humanism, and reality television is actually starting to inform our perception of reality.
We're totally fucked.
BUT we've heard this all before, haven't we?
The philosopher Hannah Arendt developed this brilliant notion of "crisis," referring to the manner in which the political discourse of each epoch or generation tends to consider itself as existing in a time of genuine crisis. In other words, from a sociopolitical standpoint, mankind is always viewing the present as a major turning point in human affairs; as the time in which the advances of modernity and the disintegration of culture are finally coming to a head. But that alarmism is a universal condition (historically speaking), and its very universality belies the central claim. The World Wars certainly gave rise to this kind of thinking (for obvious reasons), but so did the global revolutions of the 1960s, the nuclear war fears of the Reagan era, the Internet, etc. If every era is characterized by the claim that this time the shit is really gonna hit the fan, then why do we keep making (and believing) the same claim?
Anyway, I bring this up because, as we ushered out another year, I've been reading so much about the end of this and the death of that. Anthony Lane's new article in the New Yorker makes the (utterly defensible and yet totally fucking useless) claim that American movies are shot; *bitter defeat*'s intrepid Legal Counsel sent an article about the "death" of independent record stores (an article whose central thesis he then pointedly kicked the crap out of); I frequently bitch about iTunes and the "death" of the music geek and the mix tape; documetaries have McDonald's and Wal*Mart blindly tearing the fabric of Middle America asunder; Iran and North Korea are nuclear pressure-cookers; global warming is giving rise to an era of super storms; and so on.
In other words, we're all totally fucked.
But we were all totally fucked last year. And the year before that. And in 1984. And in 1945.
The moral? It's hard to argue against these claims. They all seem incontrovertible. But think about this: if all the doom and cultural erosion and tastelessness and stupidity and depravity we've been forcasting for centuries was accurate, we'd all be living under a mushroom-cloud sky beating the shit out of each other with clubs and Monster In Law would win Best Picture this year. And we're not there. Yet.
So have a beer, supersize that Big Mac, tune in to Celebrity Skating, and stop worrying. The end is nigh. Long live the end.
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