Scary television
Last weekend I was watching a segment of Book-TV on Cspan-2 in which the author of a new (non-fiction) book that discussed our relatively low rate of reproduction and its consequences. There are people who have been warning us about this aspect of our dismal future for years; their argument is mathematically compelling and their warnings are dire.
That said, the Author, who's name I do not recall, mentioned a recent movie that was based on an exaggerated version of the subject of his own book. The movie is titled "Idiocracy", it is a comedy in which two people of average intelligence find themselves in a future in which they are the smartest people in the world. The premiss of the movie (and the Author's book) is that those with lower intelligence are more prolific breeders than smart people. The Author said that in parts the movie was actually pretty funny.
So a couple of days goes by and low and behold, there was the movie scheduled to come on the Comedy Channel. So I watched it.
The movie was everything the Author had said it would be although he didn't mention just how much of its premiss was based on crass commercialism. Blaring nonsensical advertising was the backstage of every scene and in fact dominated the movie, and needless to say all of the stupid people were totally in tune and immeshed with it.
Now here is the really scary part. As I watched this idiotic movie it was interrupted more or less continuously by commercials for the stuff that is sold on TV these days. Normally I just fast forward through the commercials but with this movie that was nearly impossible to do. I could not tell the difference between the movie and the commercials. So here was a movie that was based on the notion that crass commercialism's eventual end is a society so god damned stupid that it can not in any way care for itself could not be distinguished from the crass commercialism surrounding us today.
In the end there will only be four companies; PepsiCo, Direct-TV, Exxon, and the power company and life will seem as normal as mother's milk.
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