On The Banality Of Everyday Conversation

Here’s what’s so great about blogging, and creating online content in general: Once you’ve said something, you don’t need to ever say it again. If you have strong feelings about, say, the electoral college, then you can write a blog post on the subject. Fine-tune it, revise it, research to help you with the weak parts, find an appropriate image, and publish. After that, a) you’ll feel less of a need to pontificate about it in person, and b) when you do, you can always just point people to the blog post. But more than conveniencing yourself, you’l have contributed to the larger conversation, not just between you and the people you were drinking with last weekend, but between you and the rest of humanity. Sure, most of humanity won’t bother to read your post, but at least it will be there for them to find.

Recently, I found myself listening to yet another conversation (in person) about whether or not there is a god. The only people who really enjoy such conversations are inevitably the same people who either never read a book by (or about) any major philosopher, or did because they were forced to in school, and completely forgot about it. Hearing someone say, for example, that there must be a god because sunsets are so beautiful, grates on me horribly, but not because I think it’s “wrong.” It grates because it is not really a statement in itself, but merely a shallow rehash of the first few lines of a long, complex, and extremely well-documented conversation that has been going on between the greatest minds of our race for thousands of years.

When someone tries to get me to discuss the nature of divinity, or truth, or morality, or money, I feel overcome with a futile exhaustion. Somewhere, I think to myself, there is a very good book that contains this entire conversation, and all its variations, and one or both of us should just go read it.

image by victoriapeckham

Movie Trailer Review: Religulous

This trailer is nothing but a series of jabs from Bill Mahr, with cuts before we get to hear the responses of the people he’s talking to. The implication is that you’re not going to see the movie to learn anything, witness a meaningful dialog, or see anyone except Mahr (or those who agree with Mahr) say anything clever or cutting.

Much like Borat, the work of Tom Green, or all of reality TV, the basic mechanism here is the exploitation of unwitting people who are caught off guard, don’t know what audience they’re speaking for, and have no control over the editing process. It’s the epitome of old-school media: monolithic, dogmatic, non-interactive, and subject to the views of whoever is calling the shots.

The fact that the first moment in the trailer is practically identical to a moment in The Godfather Part 3 underlines just how myopic this whole venture is. No doubt, Mahr doesn’t know about this similarity, or doesn’t care, because, after all, it’s all about him.