Laughing Unto Oblivion

“The vice-president of the United States is a memer. Members of political parties post fighting-game style videos in a bid to get their constituents hyped up . . .”

The vice-president of the United States is a memer. Members of political parties post fighting-game style videos in a bid to get their constituents hyped up. The richest man in the world is a video-game-playing, terminally on-line oddball. All over the place, grown men and women are acting like teenagers, feverishly trying to appeal to people two or three generations younger than themselves.

From homes across America to the highest offices in the land, there is no more dignity, decorum, or gravitas. What is even an adult anymore?

This would have been a cause for concern if things weren’t so desperate. Did I say desperate? I meant dumb. This is an unfathomably stupid time to be alive, but it is also deeply, profoundly hilarious.

Still, it is a somewhat sad state of affairs. I cannot speak for everyone, but many men, when we were young and full of vigor but still do in middle- and old-age, like to fantasize that we are, if not great men, at least living in great times with great men, doing our part to move civilization forward, away from the brink of collapse and into a glorious future. Maybe we fancied ourselves tribal leaders, mighty warriors, legionnaires, knights, crusaders, military men storming beaches, and in general performing heroic deeds. Maybe we wanted to be pirates, rogues, rakes, scoundrels, vigilantes, superheroes, private eyes, barbarians, paladins, or vagabonds. Instead, our heroes are either emotionally stunted or do not exist in real life.

These are the times we’re born in, and this is the lot we’re given. People need to be reached where they are, and while the arc of history, whatever that is, doesn’t bend towards anything we can truly comprehend save for the eventual end of days, it is more like a sine wave. I prefer a sine-wave theory of history to a cycle: things go up and then they go down before going back up again. Peaks and valleys and so on. But this can be broken up into multiple sine waves coexisting along the same space in linear time. Maybe one wave represents societal wealth, and another is seriousness. The variables tracked are endless. You can have more wealth than at any time in human history, have a high life expectancy, and also be really, really stupid.

This is where we are. And people need to be reached where they are. Why do you think my own stories feature so much violence and spicy scenarios and bad words? I don’t go around beating people up, acting lewd, and cursing like the proverbial drunken sailor in real life, as far as you know—there are middle-aged mothers who curse far more than I do—but I do want people to relate to what I write. These are the things you think about even when you’re writing about stuff you’re making up.

This is an attention economy, and if people don't have a clinical deficit of attention, then certainly they at least have a paucity of the stuff. Where everything is a brand—I'm sorry, where everything is BRAND™!, you have to stand out somehow, and you do that by aiming for the glandular as opposed to the cerebral.

Does this sound cynical? If so, that is not my intent. I fully admit that I, too, am mired in this world and operate in it mostly according to its rules, no matter how dumb or distasteful I find them. I am most certainly not above anything. If I was, I wouldn’t be a writer.

Great men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create dumb times, and I think we are soon going to find out if dumb times create great men.

- Alexander

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