Upsides, Downsides, and Upside Down Sides

I'm not one to complain, nor am I one to celebrate, but I must say that the current pandemic that we seem to be experiencing (a virus that was obviously engineered by the Norwegians to boost international sales of lutefisk) is nothing if not exciting and thought-provoking. 

I can hardly imagine what it must have been like in 1918, the last time there was a pandemic, but I know for sure that they had neither television, nor the internet. Shit, radio was still pretty new back then, wasn't it? You probably had three choices: 
1) Stay at home
2) Go out and get sick
3) Read
It is a testament to the American resistance to education and intelligence that the Spanish flu killed about 650,000 Americans. "Hhmmm...Golly-- should I go out and possibly catch influenza that will likely kill me, or...read?" Americans, not to mention people throughout Europe made their decision, it seems. 
Today, as a similar pandemic weaves its way through American culture and immune systems, we are not so hampered by the limited choices that dogged our geographical and generational forebears. Today, we have a wealth of activities and practical and social activities and amenities that make staying at home for prolonged periods of time not only possible, but potentially enjoyable. For a while, at least. 

Broadly speaking, we can mark television, the internet, and video games as activities that give us the illusion of living in the world without missing a beat. But when I think about the true upside of the pandemic, I am talking about the humor it has produced through the production of memes. memes are basically jokes that use visuals and occasionally non sequiturs to amuse us and express the absurdity of our own reactions to what health care workers are calling a global health emergency:
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And yet, at the same time, relatively tight confinement can create tension between family members, husbands, wives, partners, roommates, siblings, and so on. Professionally, the same annoyances bordering on frustration that turns into anger become commonplace. For my part, you already know how I feel about zoom meetings ("You Know What? Fuck Zoom."). The anger mixes with humor as well: 

But as always, dear reader, I do not look to the past, nor do I sit complacently in the present, awaiting my fate. Instead, I think about the future. What lies ahead of us over the next one, two, four years? I know what doesn't: good television. 

We're pretty much fucked. The pandemic is keeping you and I confined to our homes, but you know who else it is confining? Jeffrey Wright, one of the principal actors in Westworld. As Bernard in the HBO television series Westworld (I know, "it's not TV." Anyway...), Jeffrey Wright is among the many actors who, through this television series, prompts viewers to ask themselves about how technology is on a path to shift our understandings of consciousness, and whether the history of humanity as traditionally defined by the organic substances that make up our bodies is one that will be outpaced by the combination of physical technology and artificial intelligence. Bernard, for example,  can turn himself on and off like a computer and run diagnostics, but is that really so different from going under anesthesia for a biopsy?  My point is, it no longer fucking matters, because season four of Westworld is not going to happen until at least 20-fucking-24. So, you know...shit.
Will there be a fourth season of Ozark? Sure, you can count me among those who hope there will never be one, but if you are among the folks who long for a drama set in the southern midwest that is basically a cross between Dexter and Deliverance, then guess what? You're pretty much screwed, too. Homeland? No. Mandolarian? Nope. The Good Doctor? Hell no. 

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Ok, I get it-- the flaw in my argument is that 90% of television these days is derivative garbage. But even that garbage is better than what we will be left with, which I suspect will be a flood of reality TV shows that are light on artful production, and long on gossip, obviously contrived conflict, and people with no talent whatsoever. And of course, people who are rich enough to believe that they are talented singers even though the notion of drinking bleach is more attractive that subjecting one's ears to the noise that some of these entitled pricks exude. 

And that will be our lives for three years. 

If anything kills TV, it is going to be the inevitable reboots of Survivor and Joe Millionaire, both of which will make a ton of money for network executives (on the backs of unwitting and frankly idiotic attention hogs), and they will likely forget that there are alternatives to making someone catch and cook a lizard over an open fire while nude on a desert island. 

The only hope, as we look towards the true apocalypse-- the collective forgetting of good entertainment-- is that the masses will be forced to return to what was once central to cultures all over the world, producing in its wake an intelligent, thoughtful, and well-spoken population with an expansive vocabulary derived from years of dedicated concentration on understanding the world around them not through moving pictures, but by words on a page. It could be the true intellectual renaissance that the world has been waiting for, one in which patience and thoughtfulness characterize human interactions, and critical thinking derived from the systematic collection of material through reading can be the benchmar---

Oh yeah. Audiobooks. 

Fuck it. We're fucked. 

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