Quotulatiousness

January 5, 2010

QotD: What will be the big inane fears of the Twenty-teens?

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:37

What will be the great hysterical fears of the coming decade? By definition, such worries need to be simultaneously undocumentable and just plausible enough to convince politicians, celebrities, civic do-gooders, captains of industry and media types that our very society hangs in the balance.

For a classic example, think back to the 1980s, when Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Sen. Al Gore, helped form the Parents Music Resource Center and addressed the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation regarding the pressing topic of sexual, violent and occult imagery in pop music. As Mrs. Gore wrote in her best-selling (and now hard-to-find) 1987 book “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society,” “By using satanic symbols on the concert stage, and album covers, such as those used by Ozzy Osbourne…certain heavy metal bands lure teenagers into what one expert has called ‘the cult of the eighties.’ Many kids experiment with the deadly satanic game, and get hooked.”

It is probably only thanks to the intervention of the Gores that we managed as a country to wrestle free both of Beelzebub’s and Ronnie James Dio’s bony grasp. Which, it’s worth adding, might have been preferable to that of Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner.

Nick Gillespie, “Don’t Fear The 2010s! Embrace the coming decade’s new distractions and overblown worries”, Reason, 2010-01-05

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1 Comment

  1. It’s terrible form to comment on your own posts, but I really liked this section from later in the article:

    A new Zogby poll reports that about one-third of Americans “believed there would be greater technological advances by 2010.” Who isn’t disappointed by the lack of jetpacks and doggie treadmills like on “The Jetsons”? The iPhone came out like three years ago and there hasn’t been anything else invented since then, right?

    When we’re not complaining that the rate of innovation is so fast that it’s causing future shock, we like to complain that it’s been years since anything radically new has rocked our world. Sure, the Clapper was promising, but it utterly failed to usher in an age of smart appliances that would do our bidding without even being asked. The contraptions in SkyMall magazine run decidedly more toward hot-dog-and-bun toasters than something as futuristic as, say, an airport-screening device that actually works. Given that the first big jump to the Internet, networked computers and e-commerce started more than a decade ago, we’re perfectly poised for a perennially recurring panic that we’re in a new Dark Ages and that the major innovation necessary to pull us out of our current recession is never going to happen.

    Comment by Nicholas — January 5, 2010 @ 13:45

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