The gizmo that could save...

print, the auto industry, television, the government, advertising.

Now that the iTampon has been revealed, extolled and otherwise heralded as the savior of printed media, I started thinking about what would really save print. Thinking along those lines I quickly extrapolated my thoughts to other areas.

The gizmo that could save print, I concluded, is the human brain. Here's an example of what I mean. For 30 years or so I read the advertising column in The New York Times. It was my "first read" of the morning, because it "imparted useful information in an engaging way." Of late, Stuart Elliot has been writing about the prevalence of wedding rings on the fingers of actors in commercials. Meanwhile our industry is in the middle of a tsunami of changes.

So, I find Elliot irrelevant. It has nothing to do if he's paper or digital. It's that he's been pandering to the dumb. Not digging. Reporting pablum.

The same has happened in most every other industry and sphere. The filth on television and the movies that passes as drama, comedy or action. The lack of historical reference, the lack of acting, the lack of intelligence are appalling. So, when my wife says, "do you wanna go to the movies?" I think of how rotten the whole experience is--how I can't easily get a reserved seat, how the theatres are small and noisy, how the movies themselves are often nothing but a string of curses interrupted by a string of special effects and I reply, "No. I have a Rene Clair movie on dvd that I'd rather watch."

What's happened in the world, and accelerated over the last 30 years, is the acceleration of idiocy. Idiots rule. We cater to them. Their opinion matters. So the fattest nation in the history of the world gobbles up the intellectual equivalent of a double-cheese four cheeses pizza with cheese baked into the crust.

Idiots rule. Those with active brains feel left out. So things get dumber. And idiots rise higher.

Dum de dum dum.