New depths

I have spent far too many blogposts the last sixteen years arguing what might be the new nadir in our present human conundrum. Each low water mark is so quickly eclipsed that I am hesitant to even bring it up anymore at the risk of pandering and sounding banal. But it is obvious to me that we are clearly off the tracks and that our leaders lack anything approaching emotional maturity.

This week we had three incidents which significantly flagged my angst-o-meter. Two of our wealthiest and most dangerous tech sultans have gone full WWE or UFC and challenged each other to a Texas Cage Match in a stupid testosterone showdown. How infantile. These people are holding the reigns of our social media? No wonder we are in such pitiful shape. It is not even funny and we need to look inside ourselves and see why we glorify and tolerate this stupidity.

Then we have two female members of congress involved in a similar throwdown and calling each other bitches on the floor. Nice. Perhaps the upcoming martial arts deathmatch of Zuck and Elon can add a female undercard.

And then we have our endless fascination for five rich fools who chose to descend into the depths of the sunken titanic in an untested craft and perished and conveniently forget that a ship with hundreds of migrants sunk in the same week because it lacks the same tragedy and cachet for us. 

Should I even mention that a justice on the highest court of our land accepted a $100,000 seat on a jet airplane from a rich lawyer with a lawsuit before the court and justified the apparent conflict of interest and ethics violation by saying that the seat would have been empty without him? Like something a ten year old would say...And exactly why does Leonard Leo control the judiciary in this country?

Somewhere along the line we have clearly lost our way. I wish McLuhan was still alive because I think he would tell us that the medium is still the message and that when the new communication technology is allowed to become a clearinghouse for fake news, lies and discord it might take a few generational turns of the wheel in order to right our own sunken ship.

We humans are lolling around in a big heap of shit and we have convinced ourselves how much we enjoy the fetid smell of our toxic prison cells. But don't worry, next week's chapter is bound to be even more horrible and outlandish. It's how we roll.