The Molloy-verse - The junk drawer for my interwebs

Killing the Past Doesn't Help the Future (or Why I'm Tired)

Why does every article I read lately feature the death of something or the end of another thing? We keep hearing that the past is dead. Murdered by progress.  Good riddance because we'll never need it again. The hipster hordes want to stamp out the imagery and completely remake the world in their image and ideal. Is this the insecurity of my generation coming to the forefront? Or is it a younger generation living entirely in the now and wanting to stamp out nostalgia?

 If it's the end of everything like newspapers, what will happen to those scenes in movies when the spy is sitting on a bench, passing time reading a newspaper. You know the one, the spy is waiting for his next meet up (maybe he never lowers the paper) or is using the newspaper to conceal his identity. If we kill the past, a newspaper might make the spy stand out as suspicious. It's interesting that in fiction, various technologies always look forced or dated. The iPad in someone's hands in a movie today might be this generation's version of the 70's porno mustache. Does our culture really need to move that fast and constantly be up to date?

Can we all agree to stop with the hipster aesthetic? I don't need everything to be the apex of design and functionality. It all makes me tired. Is the need to murder the past borne from the same hell that gave us jumpsuits, disco, and the pet rock? Is it the cousin of the Swatch watch and acid wash jeans?

It's accelerating. Maybe not in the way Douglas Coupland imagined, but things are getting faster and faster. On the one hand we're awash in information. It's delivered to us in both raw and curated forms: Information Democracy. On the other hand, the zombies haven't vanished. They're still here cycling through meaningless trends and the need to be first (at a much quicker pace). Instead of raising the discourse, the fad-hogs are just hungrier. The rest of us? We're just more tired. While we never worked to keep up, it's become more of an arduous task to fight it off.

So as I hear more often that I'm weird for not liking soccer or NASCAR, for continuing to read paper (instead of digital or nothing at all), for desiring open solutions to technology and information gathering (instead of choosing design or a fear of technology witchery), I'll just wish it would all slow down again. Just a little.

What do I want/believe in?
  • Not being available 24 hours a day
  • Apple is just another big tech company and is sometimes not the best option
  • Physical books and newspapers
  • Big companies should be regulated but individuals should be left alone to make (sometimes poor) decisions for themselves
  • Children should be kept out of bars but smoking should not
  • Baseball doesn't need replay but football does
  • The 1980s were the worst decade known to man and should never be celebrated
  • There is nothing wrong with a healthy does of cynicism
  • Everyone is too worried about being productive all the time

Trends in the Tea Party

So the Tea Party has been making noise for a while but up until now, no one has studied them or tried to figure out who they were. It turns out that my suspicions are more correct than I thought. The Tea Party is full of older white Americans who are angry about their level of influence waning. They see America changing and feel that it's their way or the highway.

The New York Times has some great stuff from a recent poll and some video blogging that highlights this. For those of you who don't like or trust statistics, I think the poll was conducted fairly well (I do this stuff professionally). What's more jarring is that when you look at the faces, not one of them is different. They're all older and white. Even their haircuts (across gender too) are similar!

When I read the poll article I'm more convinced that this is a group that dislikes the idea of helping anyone. I'm more convinced that there is some latent racism present. It's old thinking that deserves to go away. It's fear that tries to hide behind the Constitution (which they clearly don't understand) and name calling. It's sad really. 

After eight years in power we've all seen that the ideas the Right tried out didn't work. Their foreign policy, their economic policy, their environmental policy are all failures. They're responsible for the economic crisis we're in. It's time for a change. Even if you don't like Obama's policies, we need to do something else. The recent past was a disaster.