It is just fun escapism. What is wrong with that? Why do you have to analyze everything to death?

I have been hearing these words since I was a small child, and ever since the first time I heard them, I identified them as the rallying call of the enemy. You see, I am not adverse to a little escapism fluff, nor am I opposed to having a little fun. However, even at a young age, I quickly realized that what is being sold as a harmless repose from the day's troubles and serious fare, quickly becomes the center of a life which slips by completely unexamined. That one statement is the artist, critic, or society itself saying "yeah, it sucks and doesn't stand up to even the most cursory examination, but forget about that, because people want to like it." It is the ultimate admission of a shoddy product, given the lamest possible excuse not to even try and aspire to better. If there is one thing our society doesn't need, it is more mindless light entertainment to help us escape from the concerns of the day. That pretty much sums up all we have left of a culture anymore. Even what passes for deep intellectual debate among serious minded individuals these days, would have been embarrassingly trite party banter for college philosophy freshmen twenty years ago. There is no way around it, we have become the most educated society of ignorant morons the world has ever seen, and the main reason is the quote which started this article.

The idea that it is nice once in a while to just enjoy something, without thinking too much about it, has changed over the years into a perception of a god given right never to have to think about anything more than 10 minutes, and to proceed to ignore anything which is no longer fun the instant it gets boring. The result is that we end up with a society where people spend more time considering which luxury car brand is right for them, than they do thinking about things that really matter, like what they are doing with their life, or how their actions affect those around them. We have a society where people spend more time thinking about which movie to go see, than they do thinking about the movie once they have seen it. A society where people are currently blogging about the fact that they have nothing important to say. It is a dead end of a society, which leads nowhere except a pointless repetition of learned consumer responses, executed not through rational sentient thought, but through a capitalist reflex of an unthinking monetary amoeba, drifting along searching for food and pleasure.

Of course, it really isn't much of a surprise to anyone who has spent any time studying western culture. The insidious combined trends of anti-intellectualism, and hypercapitalism, make a heady mix which quickly entices all but the most obstinate or curmudgeonly into realizing that watching the next round of American Idol on your 800-inch-diagonal, 3-millimeter-thick, LCD Home-Jumbotron, while snacking on exotic imported cheese snacks sitting in your BMW-branded leather home theater isolation pod, is a lot more fun that thinking about the possibility of a moral imperative for sentient beings to improve society beyond the accomplishments of the previous generation. It becomes all too easy to forget that if you spend all your time relaxing, taking it easy, and not thinking too much about it, pretty soon it is no longer a diversion, but a way of life. Before you know it, you are no longer the erudite, well-educated intelligentsia, ironically indulging a guilty pleasure to take your mind off of all the serious things you otherwise are mulling over. No, pretty soon the only difference between you and that trailer trash cruff you feel so intellectually superior to, is the size of your paycheck, and what brand of booze you drink as you wash away your life in a meaningless stream of mindless smalltalk about tabloid stories and reality show episodes.

We are becoming a society not only adverse to critical thought, but in fact incapable of it. Every time we allow the level of public discourse to slip another notch, because "it is all just in good fun" it takes us further and further from a society even capable of understanding the difference between intelligent conversation, and mindless drivel. In fact, I have no doubt that at least one person will comment on this very article, asking me where I get off thinking I have some right to say what is or isn't drivel. That is because we have already reached the point where a lot of people are offended by the very idea that anyone might talk about something deeper than which mobile phone to buy, or who did better on Top Chef.We have become so embroiled in escapism, that we are starting to mistake it for real life.

It isn't that I dislike fun shows, or lighthearted books, or entertaining plays. It is that I am getting very worried about the simple and indisputable fact that entertainment is becoming a substitute for genuine art or societal discourse. It isn't that there is anything wrong with a bit of intellectual desert, but just like a literal meal, when you get to the point where every meal is nothing but desert, you are going to start having problems. As I sit listening to innumerable people, supposedly smart ones at that, prattling on about the most inane of topics, and practically giving dissertations on the unimportance of efficacy, insight, meaning or decent construction in light of market acceptance and monetary success, it becomes very clear that desert is all that is on the menu. We have become convinced that what sells is the measure of what is good, and have forgotten that no one ever went broke underestimating the consumer. What sells is, quite frankly, a pile of stupid tripe, and if that is society's measure of what is good and meaningful cultural commentary, then we might as well hang it up and head back for the trees. Society has always had to deal with the lowest common denominator, but there is a big difference between dealing with it, and aspiring to it, and that is a terrifying thought. 

For someone who absolutely hates the company Apple, and has no use at all for any of their products, I have spent an annoyingly large portion of my life working in either all Mac studios, or heavily Mac studios. As such, I have noticed the most inexplicable and curious phenomenon. Even though I would be lectured at length, day in and day out, about how much more stable and 'crashproof' Macs were than those awful buggy PCs, I would see constant Mac crashes, sometime seeing one machine go down multiple times in a single day. Of course the user of the machine would always assure me that this was a total fluke, and that this was the first time in a decade of working with Macs that his computer had ever crashed, because normally it "just works."

For years this seeming contradiction drove me nuts, until I came to what is the only reasonable conclusion. PCs crash, and Macs only crash when a PC user is present, so obviously the 90% of the population who use PCs, all emit some sort of electromagnetic field which crashes computers. After all, Macheads have no reason to lie about their Macs not crashing when there isn't a PC user around, right? So the only possible rational conclusion is that PC users must directly cause Macs to crash by their very presence. Since it would be silly to think that the Mac is consciously acting up just to make the Machead look like a fool, the only sane remaining alternative is that there must be some special heretofore undiscovered electromagnetic force which causes Macs to crash when a PC user is in line of sight. No doubt this is why Mac users have to take their computers into the Genius Bar so often. It isn't that there is any real problem with them, it is just that the need to spend some time in an environment where they are sure not to pick up any PC user background radiation, so that they can decontaminate, and get back to their natural flawless state. Maybe deep inside a lab in Microsoft, someone has isolated this field, and is somehow compensating for it, explaining how PCs get more stable as the years go by. This might even explain why Macheads seem, from their recounting of their experiences of using Windows when no PC user is around, to get a Blue Screen of Death every five seconds when they try to do anything on a PC, since they lack the field the to which the PC is trying to compensate.

After all, to think otherwise would be to impugn an entire group of people as dishonest, and perhaps even delusional, almost religious zealots, who lie so habitually about the supposed stability and performance of their chosen system, than only when caught sitting in front of an undeniably crashed computer would they ever admit to the crash having happened. That would be intollerant, bigoted and offensive of me, and I would never want to be seen that way. So clearly, the only answer has to be a failing in modern physics to detect this exotic radiation emanating from the 90% of the population who regularly use PCs.

I have been on a bit of an instructional kick lately. Normally I am the sort who just powers on through, figuring things out as I go. Lately though, I have had too much to do, so have been trying to optimize my time by reading up on subjects first, to get a jump on it and maybe not take so long to get up the learning curve. This has, however, brought an annoying trend to my attention, specifically that the Internet is completely worthless. If you ever want to make absolutely sure that you get the worst possible information, ask a blogger. It is, frankly, amazing to me that any group of people can spend so much time writing about a given subject, and not only never get any better at writing, but not even learn a damn thing about their chosen subject. Everything on the web, it would seem, is an opinion based on a popularity contest of ideas someone thinks they might have heard someone talking about once at a coffee shop. No matter how wrong someone is on a given subject, you can invariably find their blog where they authoritatively state their wrongness, to a throng of equally wrong dunderheads, who heap effusive praise on them for reinforcing the inconceivably incorrect idiocy they all firmly believe is truth. I have no doubt that right now you are nothing more than a Google search away from a group of earnest people blogging about how the sky is actually green, or red, or who knows what.

I know, right off the bat I can already hear the blogger response which is invariably a lot of half-understood relativism, mashed-up with a sprinkling of misunderstood political science, mixed with a dash of misplaced revolutionary zeal, some completely misappropriated market theory stirred in, seasoned with some uninformed psychology, and topped with a healthy portion of narcissistic arrogance. It would go something like: