Saturday, November 26, 2011

Morons.


I just caught a slice or two of Kurt Andersen's wildly-heralded radio show "Studio 360." He featured a writer and MacArthur Genius named Colson Whitehead who, of course, has written yet another best-seller about Zombies. Whitehead read a portion of his novel that told of a wife eating her husband's intestines and face. He then told of his childhood where he had no parental controls in which he was allowed to watch Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" at the age of ten.

I feel my brains slowly turning into marshmallows.

I jump to "The New York Times" online. The lead story is "Waffles, with a Side of Drama." It is about a restaurant chain called The Waffle House where weird happens. This from the greatest newspaper in the nation.

My head is spinning off my neck.

Maybe, it's likely actually, some inflected pundit will write a PhD. Thesis on the whys of the Zombie craze. We live in a frightening world so we find a comfortable terror--a nostalgic fear to soothe us.

And the people at the Times, the Waffle House people, probably contend that today, Black Saturday or Puerto Rican Thursday or Serbo-Croatian Tuesday or whatever it is, is a slow news day.

No, the fact of the matter is that the world--our disgusting, inclusive, big-tent, "everyone has genius" world, is infested, infected, inundated with morons.

And there are so many of these morons entire industries cater to them.

We can no longer distinguish between important and trivial. Between good and bad. Between culture and, ugh, pop culture.

It's all stupidity.

5 comments:

dave trott said...

George,
On the subject of the vastly over-rated, here's a related essay I think you'll enjoy:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/HNS/Indians/offense.html

george tannenbaum said...

Dave, it's funny that so many of your references are American and so many of mine are English.

Dave Trott said...

True George, I prefer the way Americans write, they use language as a tool, they are less frightened of it, less worried about being correct, consequently more creative IMHO.

dave trott said...

Having said that George, one of my favourite writers is English, and I think you'll agree with his views: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

george tannenbaum said...

I've often cited "Politics and the English Language" in Ad Aged. And when I ran creative departments I used to give it to everyone. Love Mr. Blair.