Nightmares and Banalities
I wear stripes. He wears stripes. He sports facial hair. I sport facial hair. His bangs fall to your left. My bangs fall to your left. And those stylish spectacles! It could only be My First Bloggingheads Feat. Matt Yglesias…
With the benefit of 24 hrs in retrospect, I must say there is something lingeringly, hypnotically bizarre to me about the specter of Dick Cheney leading a new new Republicanism that’s soft on group marriage and torture. Could it really be getting less and less silly to say this is where the country’s collective headspace is headed? Horrors: Dick Cheney, clutching the zeitgeist by the whosenwhatsen…
I think I came off about as soft on Sotomayor as I wanna be, but, again, I’m really offput by the way some of Sotomayor’s offhand remarks seem to presage a world in which our nightmares are more banalized and our banalities grow more nightmarish. Saying “aspiration” instead of “inspiration,” without skipping a beat, is strangely unnerving even in a post-Bush America; many of our quantitatively superqualified, from high school on up, seem somehow to be qualitatively slipping. Never before has a culture been so credential-clogged yet so colossally casual. I’m still thinking — as the footage reveals — about how to best make sense of this. I will say I love the note of hope and healing on which Matt and I manage to end, shortly before my headset died.
I enjoyed the observation of the self-serving theatricality of it all. From memory, “Just another fund-raising opportunity that doesn’t serve your and my interests” I think is a mash-up of you and Matt, but I think it’s the most important thought of our time.
Just yesterday I was chatting with a friend who writes manages a parenting and sex blog, as well as a blog of her own adventures as a polyamourous single parent. I had just told her that my mentor was trading in his career as a photographer to become the of a 700 person evangelical congregation, then I pointed her to this post The Gospel and Sex
“Oh my god, I love this guy. Who is he? Is this your mentor?”
“Nope. Some guy I found following a link at TheAmericanScene.com”
“I’m bookmarking this. I think I might blog about this.”
Meanwhile, my mentor is using my films, eroto-toxins and all, in his ministry.
People are worn out. The endless “fundraising opportunities” might be very good for keeping rents paid inside the beltway, but they’re exhausting to the rest of us, and we’re moving on.
— Tony Comstock · Jun 4, 02:08 AM · #
“Saying “aspiration” instead of “inspiration,” without skipping a beat, is strangely unnerving even in a post-Bush America; many of our quantitatively superqualified, from high school on up, seem somehow to be qualitatively slipping. Never before has a culture been so credential-clogged yet so colossally casual. I’m still thinking — as the footage reveals — about how to best make sense of this.”
I find it hilarious that you wrote this about a conversation with Matt “Typos” Yglesias. Feeling passive-aggressive, James?
More generally, I think your worry is susceptible to massive observational biases. This is the age of YouTube. Never before have we been able to record and play back others speaking off the cuff with such ease. For all we know, Aquinas misspoke all the damn time, but had good copy-editors for the <i>Summa</i>. Now, you can worry about the effects of this casualization of discourse, but I think it is faulty to infer that these small-bore mistakes imply a broad drop in cognitive standards.
— salacious · Jun 4, 07:29 AM · #
“More generally, I think your worry is susceptible to massive observational biases. This is the age of YouTube. Never before have we been able to record and play back others speaking off the cuff with such ease. For all we know, Aquinas misspoke all the damn time, but had good copy-editors for the <i>Summa</i>. Now, you can worry about the effects of this casualization of discourse, but I think it is faulty to infer that these small-bore mistakes imply a broad drop in cognitive standards.”
Similar arguments have been advanced for the increase in detected Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes. I also remember reading in Roger Corman’s How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime how he was taking aback by the VHS era, and people’s sudden ability to watch his films side by side and notice that he was using the same stock footage over and over and over. As I have previously cautioned Chet, the internet is going to make all of us look like complete idiots to our children and grandchildren.
— Tony Comstock · Jun 4, 11:57 AM · #
Is it glib to call a person glib without having first read anything that person has written?
Is it ironical to bemoan casualness in the same breadth in which you promote a casual, content-free forgettable hour of blah blah blah?
— Klaus · Jun 4, 09:32 PM · #
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