3 Ages Of Our Modern World

Everybody knows about the Stone Age, the Ice Age, the Age of Enlightenment and all the other designated periods of human history. Unfortunately, most people don’t give a rat’s ass about any of them and generally believe that history is just a feeble attempt by old men with bowties to bore the bejesus out of us. While this is true, history is also a living thing, and since you’re reading this, you are a living part of it. For example, if you were born before 1977, you’ve already lived through 3 distinct historical eras.

The Age of Elvis — (Not to be confused with the Space Age which happened simultaneously but was artificially created by World War II German scientists who didn’t want to go to prison for being Nazis.) The Age of Elvis began when Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. (Sputnik was a year later.) It was characterized by young people gathering in social groups to listen to music, drink and/or take drugs, dance with each other, talk to each other, touch, laugh and generally enjoy themselves. The Age of Elvis died when Donna Summers’ soliloquy to sex, “Love to Love You, Baby” moaned its way to the top of the charts in 1975. After all, that little disco ditty is best enjoyed by one, two or perhaps three people in single-minded privacy.

The Age of Lucas — This period began on May 25th, 1977 when George Lucas released Star Wars. Since the last human, Eugene Cernan, had left the moon in 1972 — with no hope of anyone ever returning — Lucas figured (quite rightly) that people were a lot more interested in watching space on a movie screen than actually taking the time and trouble to go there. He built a virtual universe that earned more money than NASA spent in the last years of the Apollo program, exploring the real one. Along with a few of his movie-making buddies (Spielberg, Scorsese and Coppola) Lucas changed our society from doers to watchers and made video viewing more than just an occasional leisure activity. The Age of Lucas abruptly ended on May 19th, 1999 when George released The Phantom Menace, a piece-of-junk film that gave the finger to an entire generation of fans. But by that time, they all just shrugged and paid their money.

The Age of Jobs and Zuckerberg — By the end of the last century, the Space Shuttle had run 95 missions and wasn’t even news anymore. People were much more interested in creating a personal playlist for their iPods (introduced in 2001) or building a personal fan base on Facebook, the one-screen-fits-all virtual cocktail party, created in 2004. Nobody cared that music had become a one person/one headset activity (unless you wanted somebody else’s gunk on your earbuds) and that many of our “friends” were people we didn’t actually know. The truth is 50 years after our grandparents danced together in the rock n’ roll living rooms, basements and backyards of their time, the party was over. Since then, our time has been measured out in bits, bytes and bandwidth, and now we’re very much in danger of having those weird guys with bowties I mentioned earlier, discussing the Age of Jobs and Zuckerberg as the era in history when humans finally abandoned human contact entirely.

However, history marches on, and one of these days, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is going to launch some tourists into space — and man are they ever going to send back some selfies that might change the world!

I’m Scared Of The Mob (2018)

I’m a coward. I’m scared of the mob.

One of the problems with observing our modern world is you spend most of your life in fear. This comes from having an opinion and voicing it outside the comfy confines of your own head. It’s a truism in the 21^st century that, whenever you say anything about anything, you’re going to piss off somebody. Most people get all free-speech-macho about this, but when push comes to shove, everybody knows that our society is unforgiving around unguarded opinions. More importantly, when the mob turns against you, you’re punished severely. This is why we’ll never produce a contemporary Mark Twain: the consequences of unedited thoughts, in today’s world, are just too dangerous. Far better to be momentarily safe than monumentally sorry. Thus, people with pens tend to stick to the road most travelled. Unfortunately, that road is crowded with dumbass clichés. Future anthropologists who attempt to piece together our society from the mountain of evidence we’re going to leave behind will conclude we had an unholy obsession with heterosexual white men. They are the nominated villains of our time, so naturally the record will read like a bad John Grisham novel. It’s a sorry state, I suppose, but it beats the hell out of our world according to Suzanne Collins and E. L. James!

Actually, there’s no real problem with history recording our time as the shallow end of the intellectual swimming pool. None of us are going to be around to be embarrassed by it anyway. Nor do we have to worry about future chroniclers calling us cultural cowards. They won’t be the slightest bit interested in our existence. After all, you get historical ink from speaking up, not lying down.

The thing that burns the bacon, however, is that having set the table for a vigorous and dynamic dialogue, we’re now scared skinny of the food fight it might create. Just look around: we have a mostly educated public with the information of the ages at their fingertips (literally.) We’ve cracked open the Old Boys’ Club and now have instant access to all manner of ideas from everywhere and everyone. Furthermore, we live in a free society, where (for the most part) the rule of law gives free range to these ideas. Life is good, right? Wrong! The first thing we did with this intellectual banquet was set dietary restrictions. Not to beat the metaphor to death, we’ve populated our world with so many sacred cows that, in the land of intellectual plenty, we’re starving to death.

It used to be that the only thing that governed public discourse was civility. There was decorum in our discussion. For example, we didn’t call each other names – like alt-right asshat and snowflake libtard. Perhaps certain subjects were handled delicately, but there was never any thought that they should be avoided. In fact, it was a matter of honour to shine light into the darker parts of our society – distasteful or not.

These days, those days are over. We have more conversational taboos than a tribe of Borneo headhunters. (No offence, headhunters!) There are a ton of subjects in our world that are simply no longer open for discussion. Some of them I can’t even name in these pages without hollering up a verbal lynch mob. In the past few years, this list has expanded exponentially. Soon the only subjects anyone will feel comfortable commenting on will be Donald Trump’s infidelities and the zombie apocalypse.

People like me, who know enough about history to understand what the mob is capable of, are cowards at heart. It’s one thing to go Vaclav Havel on the powers that be and strike out against censorship and oppression. After all, history shows us that eventually the pen is mightier than the sword. However, it’s quite another to stand alone in front of a self-righteous mob of social media trolls who are gathering the torches for a good old-fashioned Twitter roast.

In these troubled times, I do not fear the endless apparatus of the omnipotent state. It’s the Eagerly Offended anarchy of social media that scares the crap out of me.

Full Disclosure: I originally wrote this is 2013 but had to do some editing because things have gotten a lot worse in 5 years.

Let’s Fix The World — Part 2

As I said on Tuesday, the world is a mess (“Let’s Fix The World”) but here are three more things that would fix the problem — if only we’d start thinking outside the box.

Bring Back Bullies! — When we eliminated bullies from the classroom and the playground, we unintentionally created a bigger problem. We produced an entire generation who a) don’t understand the world is full of nasty, evil bastards and b) don’t know how to handle them when they show up. I’m lookin’ at you, Vladimir — or Donald ( whatever your pleasure.) So, every time some pipsqueak Kim Jong-Un dick-tator starts waving his nuclear weapons around, the entire world has to come to a screaming halt while we try to figure out what to do with the guy. This is a waste of time. It would be far better to have the bullies show up in the first grade (like they used to) and we could learn how to deal with them long before it gets to nuclear-warfare-scary. That way, we’re not playing around with these nutbars for years when we should be concentrating on serious things.

Build Some Useless Stuff — This isn’t my idea, but it’s brilliant. What we do is take all the students coming out of university with worthless degrees (art history, media studies, leadership, philosophy etc., etc., etc.) and put them to work building a bunch of massive, useless monuments. Things like Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid or the Great Wall of … uh — well — maybe a wall isn’t such a good idea — but, anyway, stuff like that. This would keep these half-educated cretins so busy they wouldn’t have time to sit around bitchin’ about their lot in life, blaming the 1% and causing trouble on Facebook and Twitter. And they’ll be too tired to be constantly yipping about “safe zones” and “cultural appropriation” and why we have to change the he/she pronoun to some made up “ze” bullshit. The result would be the rest of us could quit wasting a ton of time, trying to placate these malcontents — and we can get on with trying to solve the world’s real problems. Plus, we’d get a pile of new roadside attractions for selfies and such.

Buy Things — It’s pretty obvious that our world is crap at solving problems. Just take a look! When we tried to feed Africa, we ended up with Sir Bob Geldof, stumbling around like a tramp looking for a hot meal. When we tried to halt Global Warming, we ended up with Al Gore whose personal carbon footprint is the size of Milwaukee. And now that we’re trying to solve the refugee crisis, who do we find on the front line? George Clooney and Susan Sarandon! (Why don’t we just ask Sean Penn to run the UN and get it over with?) However, there is one thing our consumer society does extremely well: we know how to buy stuff. We need to use this ability to our advantage. For example, if we’re serious about saving the African White Rhinoceros, why don’t we just buy them all? (There can’t be that many left.) We buy them all, stamp them with “Property of …” and hire a bunch of Los Angeles policemen to look after them. Poachers might be mean and ruthless, but there’s nothing on this planet meaner than the LAPD! And, honestly, how much would it cost? The EU spends 100 billion Euros every year on foreign aid: a few rhinos would be a drop in the bucket. Another example. Want to end poverty in Mali? Buy it! Then send a couple of boatloads of liberal arts graduates (from item #2) over there to build pyramids, and you’d probably get your initial investment back in a couple of years from tourism alone. This could work for everything from saving the rain forest to stopping the cocaine trade. Plus, if we just use the money Western politicians waste every year, nobody’s going to feel the financial pinch. So this year we buy all the whales and tell the Japanese and Norwegians to go hang; two years from now, we buy all the heroin in the world and burn it in the Libyan desert — because we bought that the year before.

Actually, the sky’s the limit. All we have to do is quit wasting our time and think about it.

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