We've seen so many things change slowly, now all at once.
Anno Domini 2016 was infamous for the mass die-off of celebrities, starting with David Bowie and Alan Rickman in January, and cascading into Prince and so many others as the year wore on. Many of these deaths were a result of advanced age and to be expected, but that they happened all within that one cursed year was startling.
Four years later, we seem more cursed than ever. “Boo-hoo-hoo, 2020 is so mean” is a meme category all its own for all the crises real and (mostly) manufactured we’ve had to deal with. What’s interesting is the other mass die-off that’s going on, namely, the passing of the institutions. Here’s a quick list off the top of my head.
Journalism and journalists
Public health and public health officials
Hollywood, television and movies
Mainstream publishing and bookstores
I call this the living death of the institutions because the institutions are not going away entirely. There will always be a need for narrative-pushers and propagandists, and there will always be those who need the fear and anger they promote. Before the Fake News Flu Pandemic, people were addicted to the misery porn churned out by journalists after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Before that was Operation Desert Storm.
In 1990 when Ted Turner still owned CNN and it was presumably more reputable, the so-called news channel came up with a booming timpani fanfare and a logo for the operation to frame one apocalyptic tune-in-tomorrow mini-story after another. The news would later smugly speak of people having withdrawal once the operation was over and the news went back to more mundane matters than, “Is America finally over its Vietnam syndrome?” i.e., is it too cowed by past experience to go to war with the biggest baddest worstest dictator ever since the H-word?
That was 30 years ago. I’m an old guy; I can go farther back than that. When I think back to Vietnam and how the papers and televised news treated Nixon, when I think of how Jimmy Carter was roundly, relentlessly mocked and then Ronald Reagan all but canonized as the Greatest Ever, when I recall how viciously Bill Clinton got dragged as President, when I think of the media’s promotion of George W. Bush as a Great Wartime President until he was safely into his second term, when they turned on him for his presumed mishandling of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath (I didn’t like Bush, but that was grossly unfair)—when I think of how “9/11” was branded and misreported, how we were bamboozled into the necessity of two wars now normalized as Forever Wars without end—I find it difficult to accept that people take anything said by anyone professing to be a reporter at face value.
It’s not that the media and its minions lie. They have always lied, by commission and omission. They get caught, everyone shrugs their shoulders, the people keep coming back for more. A few years back Rolling Stone got an entire fraternity in trouble with a fabricated gang-rape story. Rolling Stone is still in business, and why not? The New York Times and the Washington Post carry on to this very day after decades of promoting false narratives. Even the authors of the libelous pieces face no sanction. They lose their gig at the one paper or magazine they’ve slimed with their malfeasance, but quickly move on to another.
As of this writing, I am astonished at how boldly the media denies that ballot-stuffing/harvesting has happened in this year’s national election, how they are all but memeing Joe Biden into the presidency by insisting he won a very sketchily conducted election that has yet to be certified. Yet many are finally turning away. The one-time titans of the approved Conservative, Inc. viewpoint, FOX News, the Drudge Report, and Breitbart have lost most of their viewers/readers this year over what is perceived (accurately) as controlled opposition narrative.
That people are breaking away from Conservative, Inc. (as it’s called on the outlaw websites) is enough for me to add it to the Living Dead Institution list. Like National Review, it will all go on, but with no credibility to the emergent dissident right who scorn the very name “conservative” as representative of weakness and compromise. You couldn’t conserve the little girl’s room from the creep in the dress following your granddaughter inside is a popular retort to the bitter clingers scared to leave their media/society-approved table.
Next up, I’m surprised no one has suggested the hashtag #DefundPublicHealth in the wake of all these ginned numbers and arbitrary lockdown and mask mandates. The top public health officer in Pennsylvania is an elderly man in a dress who insists on being addressed as a woman. This is a prime example of the “scientists and scholars and experts” the pandemic panic peddlers cite by way of appealing to (risible) authority.
At least half the country doesn’t trust them anymore. How this will shake out is anyone’s guess. People have seen for themselves the kooks and cranks and power-trippers celebrated as high priests of secular pseudo-science. Some indeed think those kooks and cranks and power-trippers are wonderful. It’s the quietly disagreeing and disgusted Others who are the living wild card.
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As for Hollywood, television and movies, I have a funny story to start out with. Not exactly ha-ha funny, but a little. Ever since I caught the premiere of what I at first dismissed as The X-Files for the Tiger Beat demographic, I’ve followed Supernatural and the paranormal misadventures of the Winchester brothers for its improbably drawn-out 15 seasons.
I was relieved to learn this 15th season would be the last. They would be going out more or less on top after a few more-interesting-than-most seasons. Of course, the Final Boss the Winchesters faced was none other than God himself. He’s not a very omniscient God, let alone loving (which is why I’m not capitalizing his pronouns), but he does threaten reality itself, and the Winchesters very much in particular.
This final season was interrupted by the COVID-19 panic. Sometime over the summer the show’s crew was able to pull it together to finish filming the remaining episodes. They debuted in October with what passes for the beginning of the regular 2020-21 TV season. The series finale aired just before Thanksgiving. All I know from Twitter is Supernatural followed the tradition of Lost and Game of Thrones in terms of once-great shows disappointing their core audiences at the finale. And that my wife and I have yet to bring up among ourselves the notion of streaming these episodes and watching them.
That’s the funny ha-ha part for me. Fifteen years invested in watching this TV show and its sudden absence made my heart the precise opposite of fonder. Also, it really has been that kind of year. I’m not the same person I was in September, let alone March. For this I blame the real God. How my tastes in everything have been evolving even before I found myself a Christian again is a long think-piece all its own.
As it happens my newfound indifference to anything and everything Hollywood grunts out comes just in time for the once-unthinkable to happen—the deliberate murder of the metroplex theaters. Big-budget sci-fi/fantasy films will still screen in IMAX and whatever, there may still be an arthouse theater in the college towns, but the days of seeing the latest light comedy or the sequel to a long-running franchise on a big screen are coming to a close. The “ant farm” metroplexes will either close or modify to accommodate the most elaborate sound and video technologies employed in modern special effects. Drive-ins may or may not make a comeback. This is all very new and it’s hard to say what will happen. Everyone seems to be taking this in stride, though, and why not? It seems like the natural progression of things.
Like everything else, what was once a near-universal experience of movie-going will become a niche interest. Most people will make their own popcorn at home and watch the streaming. I never thought I would see the day, but someone signed off on this and here we are.
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What’s to be said about mainstream-published books and bookstores that hasn’t been said already? These have been shambling dead for a while, with the occasional Barnes and Noble or Books-a-Million featuring more space for Funko Pop toys and other knick-knacks than actual books.
The real gut-punch for me, though, is remembering when writers like John Updike and Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal used to be important. It was a big deal when they published a new work. Now almost no one knows who they are. Books aren’t a big deal any more. Literature is a course in school, not a living, breathing art form. Blame critical theory, blame the Internet, blame comic book movies, blame the dumbing-down and infantilization of the general public. It’s gone and it’s not coming back. It’s a very small niche interest at best, the smallest of all I’ve mentioned so far.
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I can’t help making faces at the friends of mine on Facebook who detest the theater of athletes kneeling for the national anthem before sporting events, yet still support these athletes and their teams by watching them. I’m not the only one who’s turned his back entirely, though.
Consider: One hundred years ago the entire U.S. of A. used to shut down for baseball’s World Series. Some say 1994’s Year Without a World Series (because of a strike) drove the stake into its heart, but it was on the way out long before that. Professional baseball has been a niche interest for decades now. The National Football League’s Super Bowl came so close to being a nationally unifying event but that’s over, too. It’s still a good night for the bars—assuming they will be allowed to be open in this time of the Forever Pandemic—but it’s already nothing like it used to be.
So many once national obsessions turned niche interests of several hundred thousand fans, maybe even a million or more fans. Still what is one million in a nation of 330 million?
It’s sad to think there will never, ever be another event like The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show that caused guitar sales to go through the roof and energized popular music. That we’re all multi-cultural and diverse and with different tastes and interests doesn’t help. Not only is there nothing to unify us, we don’t want to be unified. We want to hang with our increasingly atomized, but comfy-cozy tribes. It is what it is, despite the messages we’re sold in media only so many people pay attention to anymore.
We’ve turned more than one corner this A.D. 2020. As of this year we are thoroughly divided and quite decisively conquered.
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