The State of the Union

The State of the Union
by Dileep Rao

Each year that I get older, I guess my brain and being age into that continuum where you regard with greater and greater perplexity what is springing up in your wake. This, as much as anything to do with telomere shortening, is what makes you old. The minute you are aware of youth, you have lost it. I am beyond stunned at the ‘breathtaking inanity’ of our culture (to quote a recent judicial opinion—one of the few bright spots this year). I think I may have officially entered my codger/curmudgeon phase of life. So be it. I can not stand what we have become.

The nation is more and more a place where we consume others' lives rather than live our own. The celebrification of everything and the endless vacuum of the media to show us everything in its rawest, most shocking format has pervaded nearly every detail of modern life. Really what we like is to watch the rich embarrass, awe and dupe us. Whether it’s in the form of journalistic vivisection we call tabloidism or the pornography of wealth that most of television has become, we are now a vicarious people. We gossip more freely than ever; indeed, our entertainment isn’t television, music, the movies or books: it’s the people who do those things and what they do with their lives that we are addicted to watching. It’s a nationwide restoration comedy and we are the butt of the joke.

We are more ready to watch humiliation on the tube than we are any drama that is more demanding than a knock-knock joke. It's true that the tabloid celebrity-fodder TV shows, wherein anything and everything to do with celebrities is reported on, display a grotesque level of excess. Even more disgusting is the fact that these shows are the only journalism that many Americans care to peruse. Who are these morons that we, the greater idiots, want to watch?

They are the banal, over-preened, deeply indulged power skanks. These are the idiots who, without benefit of neutral study or education, offer opinions on everything from monoclonal antibodies and neurotransmission-based therapeutic psychiatry to the economic models that the poor and disadvantaged should espouse (rapperdom, apparently, is a career choice) to whether or not the President is a ‘gangsta’. Make no mistake he is, but more of a Capone-style thug than a flavorful, antic-graced, self-promotional poet of the modern stage.

But that is neither here nor there. The truth is, we live in an age of mind numbing stupidity, a nadir in public discourse and education. Never have so few had so much power over so many and the capacity for conducting mind control through so effective a means. The media (if that is even the word) has become the culture, the latter subsumed by the rapidity of the former. There is no more deliberation; there is knee jerk reaction and intuitive idiocy. Thought is a luxury now and consumption is our occupation. I am most reminded of this during the holiday season when people shop like mad to extricate themselves of the obligation they will feel at the gift exchange, which results, hopefully in a balanced titration of relief, not the joy of gathering.

Our government, the real apparatus of our exercise? Oh, don’t ask. They are despotic morons who are the most cynical, corrupt and idiotic bunch that ever assembled in L’Enfant’s city. They would trade your future and your rights at the drop of a hat for their greater power or even just for the status quo to rattle forward for another month. Vision? Selflessness? The issues of the American People? Forget it. Seriously, absolutely forget it. The government is made up of legislative thugs and executive branch Stalins.

So, do I sound like a pessimistic boor? A grouchy, crotchety fuck? What is there to live for then?

Well, much of this country’s goodness does lie in the heart of its people, despite their hypnotic drooling reaction to the metaculture that now has a hold on the nation. We are capable of decency at times. We might even try to tackle a few of our problems more by sheer goodwill than by intelligent deliberation. Maybe. But, to be honest, it doesn’t look good. After all, when a theory about creation is revived from its dismissal at the Enlightenment, we may have lost three hundred years in the blink of an eye.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.