Rant and Rave:
The World
by Dileep Rao

Rant—The State of the Union
—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.

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