The world is insane.  One of the horrible things unleashed by random killers like John Patrick Bedell, Joe Stack, or Amy Bishop is that it defines insanity in terms of “killing people.”  Of course these people have all had a psychotic breakdown, but collectively the culture is having a psychotic break , which does not get the same kind of attention.  We are bombarded with inane and subtly destructive images that over time tend to…make people stupid.  Just as damaging to the planet as greenhouse gases because it hypnotizes people into believing mindless things, and turn away from things that might matter.  Mind pollution is still pollution.

This is not a new thing – mainstream culture has always been stupid.  If you look at the top sellers in any given year vs. what has actually endured over time, it’s pretty embarrassing.  The lowest common denominator is always pretty low.  It’s just that we’re reaching a point where if people don’t actually sit up and pay attention to what matters, the system could break down.

I’ve written two books about Hollywood.  One’s about a celebrity stalker who writes letters to “the Golden Calf,” a movie star who sells superficiality to the world.  The second novel, North of Sunset, is about a similar type of movie star who starts believing so devoutly in the power of celebrity that he starts killing people, thinking he exists in a different moral universe.  I switched gears somewhat for The American Book and wrote a book about fundamentalist religion and the end of the world.  Not that big a switch, though, because I think the influence of pop culture is as damaging as the influence of corrupt religion.  In fact, it might be more so, because not everyone has religion, but just about everyone watches TV.  And it’s worse because this kind of fundamentalism doesn’t get the same amount of attention.

Just found this immense quote from David Foster Wallace on Andrew Sullivan:

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship….

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.

The premise of North of Sunset is that the movie star becomes so addicted to celebrity that he needs to take it one step further – so murder becomes real power compared to the fleeting worship of celebrity.  The irony is that those who call themselves atheists on a place like Daily Kos are worshipful of the political process, as if fixing the schematics of government will fix our problems – that takes some amount of faith.  Setting aside the argument that atheism is a kind of worship, people will find other things to believe in.  “Belief” doesn’t equal “in God.”

Which is why pop culture can be a kind of religion, and why it’s effects are as damaging as the idea that the earth is 6000 years old.  Except the people who mock that concept might not spend as much time mocking the effects of pop culture, even if those effects are just as damaging to the progression of human intelligence.

An example, one of many. People seem to like Flo, the Progressive insurance lady, but really watch this.  She’s talking to an adult like she’s in preschool.  It’s demented:

Infantalizing an adult’s intelligence to this degree is treated like it’s normal.  Eventually, people start thinking it’s OK to have this level of intellectual rigor.

The Golden Calf

This weekend’s the Oscars (that gold statue is the new Golden Calf – I’m not religious, but if the mythology fits…), where the too rich get together to celebrate themselves.  The incongruity here is equal to the lunacy of the teabaggers.  The Bush-supporting teabaggers tend to vote against their self-interest, protesting against a health care bill that is intended to help the middle and working class.  By the way, remember when McCain and Palin were selling themselves as reformers?  Reform means writing new laws – and writing new laws does not equal government takeover.  Teabaggers are really moronic.

Same time, while celebrities tend to vote against their self-interest by being liberal and accepting higher taxes, they also promote the idea that being fabulously wealthy and pretty is the pinnacle of success.  It’s one very-believed American Dream that dicks the country as much as corporate conservatives.  They are corporate America.  They are propaganda for money.

More dementia:

This isn’t even that bad, it’s by rote, but the fact that’s by rote is the insanity.  I’m not anti-entertainment.  I think Steve Carell as Michael Scott is a genius.  He manages to be both offensive and vulnerable at once.  But so much of Hollywood is damaging – both in the sense of making people feel inadequate, but also that inadequacy is for something they shouldn’t even necessarily desire.

All told, I’m not feeling a whole lotta hope.  Stupid messages are sent out into the ether with the same regularity as greenhouse gases.  The former likely enables people to not pay too close attention to the latter.  They’re both core to how civilization functions, which means they’re both core to how civilization could end. A weapon of mass distraction can reap a whole lot of damage. The insanity of culture in some way allows insane acts, because they’re not far off from what passes for everyday life.  It’s not too big a leap to have a psychotic break from a culture that’s permanently on the brink of breakdown.  Yeah, there’s a reason I wrote an apocalyptic novel.  Weirdly though, the novel’s more hopeful than reality, because the fact that I wrote it at all implies that I still think there might be a future better than this one.

Posted on March 7, 2010 at 6:02 pm
http://www.theamericanbookofthedead.com/2010/03/07/lunacy/
Categorized under: Blog
Tags: David Foster Wallace, Dystopia, Hollywood