Palmer Events Center
Culturally Vacuous
RECEIVED Thu., Nov. 5, 2009
Dear Editor,
I click on the Discovery Channel and find a story about Ardi, a 4-million-year-old human ancestor, which overturns much of our preconceived ideas about how humanity evolved. This insight was delivered through a megacorporate empire focused on spectacle.
At work, I set up a server based on RAID drives, gigabytes of RAM, web-enabled business applications, firewalls, and global broadband infrastructure in support of an unbelievably intricate supply chain. Somehow this infrastructure, spanning every continent except Antarctica and well over 90% of the 6.4 billion people living on Earth, is “culturally vacuous.”
The History Channel equivalent is long on UFOs, gang warfare, and end-of-world prophecies but also has the occasional snippet about recently rediscovered technologies from Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as artifacts lost at sea and/or buried in various places in the New World. When I get bored with this, I switch to WWF.
I have teenage friends who complain that the music the radio stations play today is worthless, the late 1960s rock & roll being the “good stuff.” They might have heard Mozart and Beethoven in music appreciation, but this is perhaps too far out of their cultural space.
I walk into one of the megacorporate bookstores that line our freeways to pick up a copy of Nature magazine, to entertain myself with stories of enzymes, zeolites, dark energy, and algae blooms. These stories are written, for the most part, by people patiently creating and monitoring very sophisticated experiments with very sensitive instruments and using advanced statistical analysis to draw their conclusions … when they’re not faking the whole thing at the expense of the American taxpayer.
Trips to the moon: spectacle. War in Afghanistan: militarist. Media publishers: panderers. America’s “talent” is spent lecturing Americans on all the good things Americans aren't.
I click on the Discovery Channel and find a story about Ardi, a 4-million-year-old human ancestor, which overturns much of our preconceived ideas about how humanity evolved. This insight was delivered through a megacorporate empire focused on spectacle.
At work, I set up a server based on RAID drives, gigabytes of RAM, web-enabled business applications, firewalls, and global broadband infrastructure in support of an unbelievably intricate supply chain. Somehow this infrastructure, spanning every continent except Antarctica and well over 90% of the 6.4 billion people living on Earth, is “culturally vacuous.”
The History Channel equivalent is long on UFOs, gang warfare, and end-of-world prophecies but also has the occasional snippet about recently rediscovered technologies from Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as artifacts lost at sea and/or buried in various places in the New World. When I get bored with this, I switch to WWF.
I have teenage friends who complain that the music the radio stations play today is worthless, the late 1960s rock & roll being the “good stuff.” They might have heard Mozart and Beethoven in music appreciation, but this is perhaps too far out of their cultural space.
I walk into one of the megacorporate bookstores that line our freeways to pick up a copy of Nature magazine, to entertain myself with stories of enzymes, zeolites, dark energy, and algae blooms. These stories are written, for the most part, by people patiently creating and monitoring very sophisticated experiments with very sensitive instruments and using advanced statistical analysis to draw their conclusions … when they’re not faking the whole thing at the expense of the American taxpayer.
Trips to the moon: spectacle. War in Afghanistan: militarist. Media publishers: panderers. America’s “talent” is spent lecturing Americans on all the good things Americans aren't.
Meredith Poor
