descartes' zuba pants versus humility
We still look to your teachings!
My first real taste of provocative social commentary arrived in the summer before the ninth grade, taking the form an article titled "Why The Batman Movie Will Suck Even If It's Great." I can't remember the name of the magazine now - one of the late 80s swell of Fangoria knock-offs and cult movie mags that crowded the middle left-hand part of the magazine stand at Waldenbooks, right in front of the RPG stuff, I nonetheless do remember it was a little hipper, a little more New York-y and dirty punk.
Anywho, thrust of the piece was that no matter how brilliant the then-young Tim Burton might be, how cool Michael Keaton looked, or how scary Jack Nicholson was, the crush of keychains, Zuba pants, and whatever else you could stick a Bat-logo on and sell would ultimately taint the experience for comic purists and others who came of age in an era that saw the publication of then-not-completely-insane Frank Miller's classic "The Dark Knight Returns," and the movie would be just another thing that pretended to be entertainment. Even if it was great, said the piece in the magazine I can't remember, the brutal onslaught of all of that crass commercialism would still make the summer's fun suck.
This makes me think of that magazine article, that summer, Zuba pants and McDonald's commercials and that Bat logo: even if it works, things will continue to suck.
Even if we had a million more 'An Inconvenient Truths,' the global warming narrative comes right out of the philosophical and soiceital paradigms that got us here in the first place (indeed, the underlying theme of 'An Inconvenient Truth' is symptomatic of this). It's not a problem we can fix, and it’s not a problem we can shoot legislative bullets at in the hopes of killing it off. Taking it on will require a fundamental shift in the way we think about our relationships, not only to our natural landscapes, but to every other living thing. This means that ultimately we will have to stop negotiating what we need from a sense of what the planet owes us. If anything, it'll mean a new kind of generosity.
<< Home