I was dreaming I was on a water ride called the Zambezi River, in the ACTUAL African jungle, which was still filled with poverty, but where a bunch of wealthy Americans had more or less parachuted, then built something for sybaritic tourists.
And it occurs to me a ride of this sort–everyone lumped together in a moving car someone else controls, content to consume whatever experiences present themselves, in a sort of out of doors TV experience–is a great metaphor for much of America in particular.
I may or may not have mentioned this, but I lived in Europe in the 1980’s as an exchange student, and was struck by how much more adult and mature the kids were. They were still kids, in many ways, but on clear paths to a responsible and stable adulthood. This was in huge contrast to everyone I knew, or almost everyone I knew (there were definitely exceptions) back in the States.
I honestly, truly think that a huge issue in America is the habits that TV instills, of passivity, formlessness, tolerance for violence and eventually a thirst for it, which itself furthers a vaguely dark sense of anomie that was already an endemic disease here, or beginning to be, when TV started.
Jordan Peterson recently did a talk where he commented on this, in effect. Violent TV does not make kids violent, but as he in effect said screens make people stupid; and to this I would add that violent TV DOES mute emotional responses, push kids into a degree of social dissociation, and in my view add a touch of gray to everything in that kids life, such that in a life of frivolity, drinking, and induced conviviality some vague horror and despair is never fully absent.
Here is the thing: if you were born in America, in some respects you were born in the Capital in the Hunger Games. I think most people watching those movies know that, and would prefer to forget. Katniss hunted in the mountains, like the rednecks our mainstream media wants you to demonize or forget, depending on the day.
I just used forget twice in paragraph. Forgetting is an important theme, isn’t it? Forgetting amounts to an induced blindness, doesn’t it? You lose the ability to see something in the present by losing the ability to call it to mind from somewhere else. The present becomes an endless, what? Roller coaster. If you become passive, it bothers you less.
But how many people care about the half billion or billion people sent by the policies of Anthony Fauci–by unwarranted blind trust by the leaders of other nations in the wisdom, skill and benevolence of America–into severe poverty, where hunger and the diseases of hunger are ever present realities, as is death? Not many. Most of us don’t think about the rest of the world EVER, unless told to do so; and the Anti-Liberals are vastly more concerned with defending this scientifically indefensible response than exerting ANY of the energy they usually do to pretend to care about suffering people around the world.
And so they suffer, and we in the Capital are oblivious to it, by and large. I don’t know these people. I haven’t been to any severely poor place other than Tijuana once on a church mission, but I can see them easily enough in my mind. I know the statistics, and statistics, if I might invert the line attributed to Stalin (that he could have said, but probably did not literally say in exactly that way), are people, are human lives, are people you would pity if you just saw them and have a functioning soul.