I just finished reading a play called "Inherit the Wind". Yes, it's the same "Inherit the Wind" as the movie and screenplay by the same name, at least as far as I could tell.
Seemed like a book from a bygone era. An era preceding this current era when books, if they are written at all, are written to tell all or to sell out. This was a weird book by current standards - a book full of ideas concealed by very well executed art.
It is too bad that both are so out of vogue now.
This is an essay about ideas. Not any particular ideas, just ideas in general. So lets talk about ideas such as they are found nowdays.
There is a big to-do on the AM radio lately about Ann Coulter's most recent offering. It is an idea book, I guess. That is, if you credit the ravings of a pit-bull bitch as ideas (I use bitch here to imply that the pit-bull just referenced is "female - not to imply that she is, in the vernacular, a "bitch"). Despite her bark and bite, Coulter does look hot in a short skit, writes a mean attack essay, and turns a phrase on a dime. "You can never be too rich, too thin, or too conservative" was her most recent memorable utterance. Still that's not an idea so much as a punch line... albeit, in her case, "a punch line to live by."
I suspect that the quality of ideas these days is why ideas and thinking are so unpopular now.
More on ideas: My son was going to list his favorite books on his "MySpace" profile. Books are a common place where ideas can be found. So what does the latest generation read? You'll never know if you go to his MySpace. He was about to list Angela's Ashes and Rich Dad, Poor Dad as his favorites when, just in time, a friend intervened. It was a close call, but his friend saved him from compromising his coolness by providing evidence of even the most meager literacy.
Whew, that was close. Almost turned in to a pointy head there, kid.
Oh, and it's not just kids. I know a person who graduated from college a few years back with high grades and a business degree. This person claims to have never read a single book in his life unless it was assigned and required. When you ask him about his text books he can answer competently. When you ask him about novels or ideas, he's absolutely blank, but not concerned by this fact at all.
What does it mean to live in a society that doesn't conceive of thought, much less value it?
After 50 years of years of baby booming, Me-generationing, X-genning, downsizing, rightsizing and mass-marketing, after thirty years of the collective pursuit of self interest, we of the older generation are leaving for our children a future of intellectual and financial impoverishment. The coming generation will be worse off than the one that came before - just as the current generation is worse off than "the Greatest Generation" that Tom Brokaw worships so much. Why is that? Because the one percenters of the last three generations, having survived the New Deal through the Great Society, have done something about the threat to their way of life posed by... yes, thoughts and ideas. Realizing that these are supremely dangerous to their interests, after long struggle through the 60's and by dint of TV, drugs, reduced funding of public schools and the eradication of business ethics courses in business schools, they have eradicated thought and ideas from the modern landscape.
And now they can heave a sigh. Their property rights are safe at last.
Sleep tight America, but don't dream. And if you do, don't think about it when you wake up.
