Quote of the Week

 

 

Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man’s environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest — if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this — that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor.

–G. K. Chesterton, The Eternal Revolution, courtesy of Wikiquote

DAFOTV V: Reality TV

In the last installment, I discussed how excessive bandwidth leads to what I called “junk genres”; that is, genres of TV show that require as little overhead, planning, writing, etc. as possible.  This is necessary because the amount of quality TV—or quality anything—is relatively fixed, whereas the 24/7 structure of availability that is now the norm has increased the amount of time to be filled.   I enumerated some examples of these genres, to be expanded on later.  This is what I want to do now, regarding what I consider one of the worst TV-related phenomena of the last decade or so:  reality television.

Certainly, plenty has been said about this seemingly ubiquitous genre.  Some very recent articles of interest are here, here, and here.  I want to speak a little more generally.

To clarify what I mean in this discussion by the term “reality TV”, I refer (briefly) to my previous DAFOTV post:

I include things like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, The Biggest Loser, the recent shows Jamie Oliver has been doing, and the various shows about hoarders, home makeovers, bridesmaids, etc. on TLC, Discovery, and such under the rubric of “reality TV”. I even include Dick Clark’s old Bloopers shows and America’s Funniest Home Videos.  They may not all purport to be documentaries (as An American Family did) or have an explicit game-show aspect (as Survivor does), but the basic principle of just letting the camera roll before “real people” is essentially the same. Also, I realize that it’s not all “real”–there’s jimmying and manipulating—but it’s still easier and cheaper than writing an actual drama or researching a documentary.

So what’s the problem with reality TV?

Heading Down the Roller Coaster

Last time I essentially argued that the 90′s were the best decade, objectively speaking, of the 20th Century, perhaps of all human history.  I’d like to try to finish it now.

Basically, I argued that pretty much every decade except perhaps for the 1920′s had some major negative thing going on–world wars, depressions, social turmoil, the Cold War, and so on.  Those of us who came of age in the 60′s and 70′s (in my case, the latter, having been born in the same year as President Kennedy’s assassination) had it easy in a lot of ways–we never knew real privation, there were no draft and no wars to speak of, and it sometimes seems that the 70′s and 80′s served as backdrops to our parties.

Nevertheless, as I tried to point out in the earlier post, it’s hard to get across to those born after about 1970 or so just what it was like to live even during the tail end of the Cold War.  Maybe I was oversensitive, but the possibility of the Big One was always at the back of my mind.  Every time there was a news flash, a little knee-jerk reaction deep inside screamed “Omygod!  They’ve launched the missiles   We’re all done for!!!”  One of my most distinct memories of this sort occurred in the late evening in December of 1980.  The newsflash logo came on, my innards twisted in their usual fashion, and when the announcer came on, it was not the beginning of Armageddon, but the murder of John Lennon.  Tragic, but considering the alternative, a relief, relatively speaking.

A View from Just Past the Top of the Roller Coaster

Several years ago, when my daughter was about three or four,  I was rocking her to sleep, and as is often the case, my mind was drifting around randomly.  I was thinking about the last century and the way things have been going in this one so far.  Having a child makes one think about such things, I guess (being forty-something probably contributes, too).  It was both interesting and tragic to think that I may have lived through the greatest and most hopeful decade of our country’s history, perhaps of the world’s history.  That decade is over and has been for many years; wherein the tragedy.

If you consider, the 20th Century was pretty much a mess:  the two bloodiest wars in human history, the increasing prevalence of full-scale genocides, the worst pollution the planet has know, global warming, &c. &c. &c.  We all know that already.  There were also good things, too–I’m aware of that.  Think of it, however, by the decades (a very 20th-Century way of looking at history, in fact, so appropriate here!).

The Decline and Fall of Television: Index (In Progress)

The Decline and Fall of Television, Part 1:  Prolegomena

The Decline and Fall of Television, Part 2:  Definitions

The Decline and Fall of Television, Part 3:  Bandwidth

DAFOTV, Part IV:  Junk Genres

DAFOTV, Part V:  Reality TV

Manly Coffee!

 

Since I started back to regular blogging in May, I’ve mainly been working on a couple of theological/philosophical series that I’d long wanted to do.  When I did the posts on martinis and Manhattans recently, it reminded me that I don’t want to be too ponderous and abstract all the time.  Some culinary stuff and some just plain fun blogging has its place, too.  Thus, I am reblogging a piece I did last summer at Alexandria.  Hope you like it.

The things that come out of thinking about pop culture. Last summer (2010) I took my daughter to a free movie at our local library. It was Flipper–the original 1963 movie, not the TV series of the following few years. I vaguely remember the latter, but I don’t think I ever saw the former, released the year I was born. It is, of course, about a boy living in the Florida Keys who takes in a wounded dolphin against the wishes of his fisherman father, played by Chuck Connors. In any case, it was OK, to the extent I could concentrate with all the milling, restless kids and the mosquitoes. However, I did notice one very trivial thing. The Chuck Connors character is a rough-hewn, tough, capable sailor—a man’s man, as is typical for the way he was cast at that time. Anyway, in one scene the family is having breakfast and Connors reaches for coffee—which is served in a tiny, delicate white china cup!

Internet Make Big Magic!

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  Some things I’ve been reading lately reminded me of how we ourselves, for all our supposed high-tech sophistication, have a habit of viewing it magically.  With this in mind, I’m posting an essay I wrote for another website about six years ago, with minor edits made to reflect the passage of time.

About five or six years ago, when I was teaching high school science, I attended a two-day conference on the uses of technology in education.  As with most conferences, there were parts that were interesting, parts that were boring, things that were useful, and things that were crap.  That’s the way most things are, isn’t it?  Anyway, the second session on the first day dealt with the use of podcasts in education, and it was in this session that something interesting transpired.  

The Revolution Starts Now

Makeup Quote for the Week I

[C]onvictions might be more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it: whether the lie takes place before witnesses or without witnesses is of no consequence. The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception.–Now this desiring not to see what one sees, this desiring not to see as one sees, is virtually the primary condition for all who are in any sense party: the party man necessarily becomes a liar.

-–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 55 (emphasis added)

All the more relevant in the wake of the Penn State mess.

Entrepreneurs and Washing Each Other’s Laundry

I was reading this post on Megan McArdle’s blog at The Atlantic online yesterday.  It’s one of several places of late where I’ve heard what seems to be the current mantra for dealing with stubbornly intractable unemployment rates:  entrepreneurship.  The idea is that jobs that are well-defined and routine–those that have traditionally been stable, well-paying jobs that, while not exciting, could make for long-term employment and careers–are either being automated or outsourced.  Thus, the solution to this problem is said to be an increase in and encouragement of entrepreneurship, freelancing, and flexibility in the workforce.  McArdle quotes Arnold Kling, at the Library of Economics and Liberty site:

The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for something for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced.  The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing. That was what I was trying to say in my jobs speech.

The money quote from the end of the article, by McArdle herself,  is  ” I don’t think it’s unfortunate that progress is being made, and a lot of fairly boring jobs are being eliminated.  I do think it’s unfortunate that people don’t like it.”

This is food for thought.