An extended LJ project, Part One

[chaosotter]

In honor of hecubuscathead's wonderful, wonderful fable and fairy-tale summaries (which happen to contain some of the best analysis and commentary I've read in a while, because she is honest and straightforward and isn't talking about them primarily to advance an ideological framework she's trying to pummel them into), I've been kind of wanting to do a series of

Comments

[thegreatyeti]

I admire your ability to read the worst crap out there without setting fire to such steaming piles of crap and flinging them into traffic.

On the subject at hand, I think it is almost more depressing that things are not worse than they have ever been. It adds to the feeling that the bad things are just so ingrained into society or our psychology that we seem doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Prophets have always been successful (money, fame, influence) by using scare tactics. Predict the worst, and people listen too you. I guess there is some sort of survival benefit there, but it sure would be nice if it didn't. It would be nice if being kind and generous were survival traits. Maybe some day the survival of the fittest will include the good human traits.

Then again, I am a dreamer...

[chaosotter]

I'm not sure it's admirable, exactly

[chaosotter]

I think a lot of our contemporary Golden Age nonsense comes from our tendency to assume that the mass media of a particular time reflects what was going on for everyone, as opposed to only those people sufficiently powerful to be represented. If archaeologists tried to reconstruct American civilization from mid 20th-century educational films, they'd have to conclude that black people weren't even invented until sometime in the 1960s.

Or, to put it another way, I like Jane Austen a lot. But conspicuously missing from her books are the people who build those houses, clean those sheets, cook that food, sew those clothes, and empty those chamberpots...