If you watch fox
“news,” you might consider these the darkest days humanity ever faced.
I hear all the
time from people that “America’s never faced worse times.”
Sorry, folks, but
if you think present day America represents the worst of human history, you
need a history lesson.
We used to put
children in factories where machines literally ripped off their limbs.
We used to die
significantly sooner.
We used to gamble
with our lives every time we drank a glass of water.
We used to outlaw
across the board not only homosexual marriage, but interracial relationships (unless you just wanted to
rape your slaves; that seemed okay).
Women couldn’t
vote. Neither could a list of other taxpayers.
We didn’t possess
Internet. You couldn’t fact-check whatever the politicians told you, or meet
people in other countries and humanize them.
We watched TV on
the programmers’ schedules.
Cellphones didn’t
exist. You used to sit stuck at home because you expected a call.
When’s the last
time wolves ate someone in your neighborhood? That used to prove a common
occurrence.
We can predict bad
weather.
We can vaccinate
against disease (unless we decide as a nation to accept medical advice from a former porn star). We can discover ahead of time which illnesses we
might likely develop.
We can peek into
your body without a single slash.
We live in a
country where we throw out the heels of our bread and use actual food to
decorate our other food.
One of our
greatest problems in this nation remains morbid obesity.
These doomsday
preachers need to calm down. It feels ironic that these same doomsday-ers also
say, “These kids don’t realize how good they have it,” and whine about how poor
people can afford refrigerators.
How does this fit
into the entertainment industries and the politics therein? Movies, television shows, comic
books, and music often will, as art, reflect life. When we live in fear, art
reflects our fears.
Sometimes
entertainers make light of those fears, our kneejerk reactions.
Take The Winter Soldier, the Captain America sequel that lectured us
against the quest of security at the cost of freedom. The good captain makes
the distinction between fear and freedom. They exist as two forces in
opposition of each other.
Ironman 3 took this even further.
Michael Crichton
wrote a novel called The State of Fear,
which started to make some of the same points before it nosedived into lunacy.
State of Fear offered a story in which
democrats deliberately embellished the threat of manufactured climate change in
order to sway voters. Then, the novel took an even wider left turn.
It turned out that
terrorists did change the weather
with a weather-changing device to create tornadoes and whatnot.
So. Yeah. Crichton’s
novel missed its own mark by miles.
The longwinded State of Fear suggested that celebrities
stand separate from climatologists and should therefore shut their mouths about
climate change.
I want to agree
with that, but people will flip right past a news show where a scientist wants
to share some fact and figures, whereas those same viewers will stop short to
hear what Danny Glover or Big Bird want to say.
Want to get your
message out there? Use Opera as fancy stationery.
Americans make
ridiculous purchase based on unfounded fears.
Gun safes under
the sofa.
Panic rooms.
Gun racks under
the bed.
Alarm systems for
your house and car, neither of which do a damn
thing to protect you or your valuables.
Guns hidden in
fake books on your bookshelf. I really can’t wrap my head around that one. Seriously,
give me one situation where a gun hidden in a fake book makes any sense.
Every politician
states her or his case on fear. Vote for me, or terrorists will behead your
children. Vote for me, or the ozone layer will vanish. Vote for me, or your
mother-in-law will move in with you.
Commercials operate the same way. Buy this, or someone will steal your identity. Buy this, or your
children will grow up stupid. Buy this, or your spouse will feel unsatisfied
and cheat on you. Buy this, or your neighbors will judge you.
A life lived in
fear cannot pass for a life worth living.
Calm down. Smell
the flowers. If a bee stings you, you get stung.
Thanks for reading.
You probably noticed
that I went about a week without a blog entry. I apologize for that. The
creation of the prototype for my card game, Duelists
of Darkwana (based on my novel series, Diaries
of Darkwana), managed to eat up a lot of my time.
I also need to
explain, on that note, where the heck the third novel for that series went. It
sits done and ready to publish on Kindle.
At the moment, my
wonderful cover artist deals with a few distractions. I promise that as soon as
I get the completed cover art from her (if not sooner), I shall publish the
third novel in my series.
I
publish my blogs as follows:
Tuesdays:
A look at the politics of the entertainment world at EntertainmentMicroscope.blogspot.com.
Wednesdays:
An inside look at my novels (such as Daughters of Darkwana, which you can now find on Kindle) at Darkwana.blogspot.com
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