They shoot horses, don’t they?
There’s a 1969 movie, that does to marathon dancing what George Orwell did to bacon. From Gary Johnson’s DVD review:
Pollack uses hand-held cameras and extensive tracking shots to place the movie’s audience within the mass of speed-walking dancers who stumble and groan while their muscles scream in agony. Competitors fall to the floor, their limbs convulsing. Pollack’s camera weaves between the dancers, staring at their glassy eyes and their clenched jaws. It’s one of the most grueling episodes ever captured on film.
And all this while the M.C. screams Yowza! Yowza! Yowza!
Or, as old Hobbes, the patron saint of borderline gimmicks, talk-show hosts and born-again politicians had it:
[There will be] no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
We’ve never had it so good, they say - in the West, of course. That’s why we’ve got to the point where almost more people divorce than marry each year, more and more children are morbidly obese and fashion & life style magazines try to kill as many teenagers as possible through remote control anorexia, and where reality TV-shows are like those old lions & Christians attractions in emperor Nero’s Collisseum – serving the exact same purpose, albeit much uglier, both in terms of aesthetics and philosophy.
We live in a moral vacuum, surrounded by neon, bombarded with noise and drowning in our own waste. Or, in the words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
These days though our worst nightmares are not foretold by witches. They are brought to us through adverts, news shows and online Doom’s Day articles.
So, give it a year or so and Soul, TechFate, Moldcell and all the other Mobile Moron Muggers will offer you their latest monstrosity: the new talking and thinking, tap-dancing toss pot toy, – no doubt with a serious discount if you hand in your old brain in return.
Ending on a happier note, though: when humankind finally does get its photo taken for evolution’s scrapheap scrapbook, there might be other, much more elegant and worthy creatures who will find some use for our abandoned artifacts.
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