If All My Friends Jumped Off A Bridge, I Would Take Pictures From A Position Of Relative Safety
Wow, these titles are getting long.

I was driving, so I didn't get a chance to see what it was called, but as we were pulling away from the local mall a few days ago, Mrs. Pops let fly a viciously sarcastic "Oh my God". Across the street banners announced the opening of a shiny new Lo-Carb Café specializing in all the parts of the meal nobody likes, 100% Atkins Approved.

This is where I do the Carrie Bradshaw "It got me to thinking..."

And this is where I publically chastise myself for referencing Sex in the City and being such a girl. Hey, I watched it for the boobies, OK?

Seriously though, it got me to thinking. There are fads that flash in and out of fashion, leaving no lasting effects in their wake other than a few embarrassing pictures of you with big hair, acid-washed jeans and a bandana tied around your thigh à la Chachi.

But then there are things, like this Atkins nonsense, that infiltrate a society so completely that they are able to build walls to keep out change; walls impervious to things like reason, common sense and (worst of all) context. The chain of events gets broken and the fad becomes self-perpetuating, self-justifying, self-actualizing to the point where not only can we hardly remember a time before it but we almost certainly can no longer imagine a vanishing point on the horizon of the future.

In a way I suppose I understand that this is a source of comfort for people, so the perpetuation is easier than the denial of it. The result is the bubble, where people get just a little loopy, in every range of society, from top (wherever you think that might be) to bottom (ditto). Hence publishers in 2000 will print unsupportable ridiculousness like DOW 36,000 and people will buy it because no one can imagine the economic good-times of the late 90s-early 2000s ending.

This is where I really fire up the History Snob side of Pops. Turn away now if you've recently eaten.

The prime causal factor for a "bubble" (and there have been many, economic and otherwise) is a widely agreed upon public denial of the relevance of history, recent or ancient. Using the Internet Bubble as an example (and everyone should see the documentary Startup.com if you haven't already), people would throw around terms like "New Economy" and laugh at the old timers who thought you had to have something actually to sell and that you should do so for a higher price than for which it was bought/manufactured. No, the whole point now was technology and the IPO; the whole idea of providing a marketable service or aiming for profitibility was passé.

There is a basic reflex arrogance in human thought that leads people to believe that the time they are living in, the exact RIGHT NOW is the ultimate, the End of Days, the culmination of all human experience (or if you're an apocalyptic religious type, the time just before that). There are loads of existential questions bound up in that notion, but the basic fact is that we generally think we know everything we need to know about not only the RIGHT NOW but also (and this is important) about the What's To Come.

Sadly--shockingly--this is where we can learn alot from the French. Say what you want, but they are pioneers over there in many fields: wine snobbery, crippling work stoppages, military humiliation and macrohistory. They invented the ideas of an integrated interdisciplinary approach to history and of the longue durée, looking at history in terms of centuries instead of particular instances in order to get a better feel for the long-term effects of events and movements over time.

I should point out that this approach was only developed originally in 1928, so they didn't really have time to see the Germans coming.

What's the point of all this? It's like it says on the front of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: DON'T PANIC.

And that is why I am not curled up in a ball weeping, lost in a sinkhole of depression just because George Bush got a post-convention bounce and John Kerry didn't. As I type this I'm smiling, feeling very smug and vaguely French, which explains the smell.

Right now Kerry's down by 10+, but who am I (are we) to assume nothing dramatic will happen to change political fortunes in the next six weeks?

Just ask the guys who wrote DOW 36,000; you can buy it at Amazon.com for $0.39 right now if you want to.

Oh, and Atkins makes your hair fall out.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 8.8


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 9:30 PM