One is tempted to go first after the fattest target, Harry Potter (one is even more tempted to make the obvious jokes about “academia” and “fattest”, but one will manfully resist). The thing is, I think I get the appeal of something like Game of Thrones — the part of the appeal that isn’t spelled “scads and acres and furlongs and metric shitloads of tits,” that is, which makes up the appeal of 99% of any given HBO show (seriously, where would that network be without gratuitous nudity?).
We’ll get there, fear not. But the appeal of Harry Potter absolutely eludes me. I’m sure it’s a charming enough story, but … it’s kid stuff, and they’re not reading it with their kids, because they don’t have kids. And it’s really creepy, y’all, how seriously they take this kids’ stuff. As Vizzini pointed out yesterday, the very mature deep thinkers in the Totally Legit Joe regime are whiling away their hours behind the razor wire by choosing spirit animals for themselves, based on their favorite Harry Potter characters. And while that is absolutely the kind of thing those imbeciles should be doing, instead of attempting to govern, not a one of them is under age 40 (Jen Psaki, for instance, is 43 — and also, according to anonymous White House sources, a “wild cat”; make of that information what you will).
Part of it is just the infantilization of American culture, of course, but it’s strange and disturbing how the more educated, professional classes seem to be not just more infantile than the hoi polloi, but much more passionate about it, too. I know a senior ER doc at a big hospital, for instance, who is waaaaay into Star Wars. And I don’t mean Star Wars collectibles, though of course he has a bunch of those, and as silly as that is in itself (guilty as charged; let me show you my baseball cards sometime).
I mean the dude is just really, really, really into Star Wars. He’s got Star Wars shit all over his house … his huge, grossly expensive, “befitting a senior trauma surgeon whose wife is also a big league university administrator” house, in the toniest part of town, to which he routinely invites other big league people, including — for professional purposes — politicians and powerful apparatchiks. And let me hasten to add, he’s not House MD, whose abrasive “quirks” are tolerated because of his preternatural genius. This guy is, himself, a slick political operator; he’s got plenty of social savvy. But … he’s also got a scale model Millennium Falcon hanging from the roof in the dining room.
I’m sure there’s an explanation for how nobody but me seems to find this really, deeply, disturbingly fucking odd … but there it is.
Severian, “The One Pop Culture Thing”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-16.
December 29, 2021
QotD: The pervasive infantilization of the “elites”
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