"Times, Why You Punish Us?"

Madame:

Outlaw wisdom?  I’m thinking that if alien observers from space exist, it must certainly be their conclusion that it has already happened, and they are frantically searching the archives to see how they missed it!

As for Foolishness Zsar, we have so many stellar candidates (legion) it would be like declaring a King of Ice Cream Flavors—entertaining, but certain to make many say “no way, it should obviously be X.” 

Your comments on how we export our ignorance and exult in our shallowness are bitingly exact.  I too have cringed when traveling, for much of the same reason you list.  It’s a wonder that people abroad like Americans as well as they do, given that the perception is often that the everyday American not only has crude tastes, but must be a proudly ignorant pawn of the powerful and manipulative.  I guess many abroad are willing to give you a pass on the assumption that if you are traveling somewhere actually out of your insular country, you must be a cut above.  I’m going to go with that interpretation, self-delusional as it may be! :)

In addition to Madame's excellent post http://www.99percentbeauty.com/2013/02/the-power-of-intent.html on her own blog, let me reprise and expound here on the most popular post (http://passionateexamination.blogspot.com/2012/04/spank-daddy.html) on The Professor Blog.  Popular, alas, not due to its content, but because of its title, which has brought to the site many with a fetish.  One disappointed site traveler even left a single word comment of his displeasure. 

The post goes to the heart of the matter: Just as what you fill your eyes, ears, lungs, and stomach with—and conversely, what you miss out on—becomes you, so does what you fill your mind and your time with become you.  They also channel not just what where you get your “information,” what you think, but HOW (including, maybe, how deeply or not) you think.    

We need to quit proving Chris Hedges—and Pogo—right. When this culture begins emphasizing attention to its pressing issues—many of which are nearly-formed catastrophes—rather than entertainment and diversion, it will be the wrenching step needed.  When we actually shorten sport seasons and numbers of sports events, when the video game industry experiences only modest sales, when crass materialism and deification of wealth become passé, and instead book groups, magazine clubs, blog clubs, discussion groups, service groups, academic lectures, roundtables, citizen information circles, and other mostly in-person meetups are reenergized and experience dramatic growth, we will have stepped into the footprints of a path to right ourselves.

There’s a message to our fellow citizens.  “What are you valuing, what are you emphasizing? We can be widely informed, or we can be diverted and escapist (including escaping into work), but we can’t be both.”

Recreation and pastimes are welcome and needed things.  There is a time for diversion and escapism, but that’s our problem.  They’ve been getting far too much of it.