How much more stupid can everything get?

Stupid is what stupid gets.

I think I first shed television. Did that feel good! No more browsing the channels trying hard to land the least stupid content, in the rare moments when I didn’t wish to be stupefied. I think the commercials did it. They were getting too annoying, loud and stupid for their own good.

And films, films too. For me, the joy of going to the cinema was spoilt when  a new Colosseum was built in my city, by name if not by form. A multiplex. It always smelled of primary school dining hall to me in there, and that was NOT good. The only good thing about the multiplex, and the entire shopping city surrounding it, were the clouds upon exit. That part of Ljubljana always got plenty of dramatic sky. Or it was only that it stood out when compared to the abyss within.

For a while, American mainstream cinema had been leaving me wishing to hit somebody. Or at least demand my money back. How much more shallow, predictable and stupid can a movie get? How stupid can you be and buy the trailer as something you MUST see before all the friends see the film (and possibly advise you against seeing it)? How can an entire industry be based on the first weekend, before the reality hits?

So that went soon after the television. I felt so much lighter already.

The internet that replaced the two is of course exactly as stupid as an individual wishes it to be. Anybody who complains about any single social network is complaining about their own power, skill and preferences in friend-choosing.

So I went a bit one way, and found self-deprecation, self mind-fucking, self-aggrandising, and what not. (Anybody who wishes to draw correlations with blogging, be my guest. I’ve always called it a self-newspaper anyway.)

Then I thought maybe I should look beyond myself, to see what the world is up to.

No offence, world, but it’s still better to aggrandise one’s own self.  How much more stupid can powers that be be when considering how much dung can a regular person swallow? What else are all these regular violent attacks other than vomiting?

One after the other, public opinion-making giants are losing it: sincerity, credibility, numbers. I must include politicians in this mess even though it is clear that they are not even buying it themselves any more (Bush Jr. came dangerously close to popping every credibility balloon already, I can’t forget his eyes. It was not even pretence, it was a boy dying to tell another what They Said).

How can anybody still believe or have trust in anything anyhow? We have never been as free and able to learn about the results of certain actions, get all the facts, see through. Feel the truth. And more and more of us are doing it, on our own time, in our own ways, for as long as it takes.

For myself, it appears that I believe I’m doing it by posting doggie pics. But you, you are still young.

Photo: a © signature mmm production