Welcome to Our Golden Age of Bullshit
Observations in a world gone bananas, one topic at a time
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Our Golden Age of Bullshit, a tiny new publication on Medium.
What is this, you ask? It’s just an open-ended series of short posts on widely disparate topics, yet all sharing a single theme. You guessed it — the batshit crazy times in which we live, when nothing is as it seems, emotions run higher and higher (completely disproportionate to their purported cause), educational standards are disastrously diluted, and attention to societal problems diminishes in inverse relation to their significance and difficulty.
You know the score. Emoting has overtaken reasoning. Shouting has drowned out good faith debate. People everywhere have retreated to insular bubbles and like-minded tribes. Social media companies capitalize on the most absurd fault lines in the human psyche. Most movies are formulaic adaptations and/or spiritless, blandly focus-grouped reboots of established “franchises.” Ridiculous cable news shows have coarsened discourse and deformed national politics into a low-rent subdivision of the entertainment industry.
The media, universities, corporate America, politicians, bureaucracies, the police, local city governments — institutions everywhere have lost all credibility with the public, and they deserve to have done so. The president of the United States is a former reality TV gameshow host. His vanquished opponent was perhaps the most inept presidential candidate in modern times (and likely the only Democratic contender who could possibly have lost to him). And people put way too much emphasis on the presidency in any case, to the point where it’s warped our politics and expectations beyond the realistic structure of our government.
Basically, our culture is mired in B.S. minor and major, big and small, funny and tragic.
I’m sure all this rings a bell and that you could easily add to the litany. Not much further explication is required — just look around.
The beauty is that it’s utterly inconceivable that we’d ever run out of subjects here. So this publication will be all over the place. Hell, it might even be cause for you to call meta B.S. All’s fair in free Medium postings. And it’s not like I’m immune to being full of shit too. In fact let me start: I’m making all this sound pretty serious but a lot of these posts are gonna be about some trivial nitpicky stuff.
But whatever. All you can do is laugh, sigh, and call bullshit when you see it.
Won’t you join me?
Suggested topics and submissions are always welcome.
