[lbo-talk] Sexpresso coffee shops take Seattle by storm

Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu
Sun Feb 4 20:44:46 PST 2007


B. wrote:
> I was about to say that this "Sexpresso" thing should
> go in the Idiocracy since, as both you and Carl Rmick
> mentioned, in the future Starbucks has evolved into a
> sex shop.
>
> However, unlike you, I think it's a good movie, albeit
> with some unfortunate b-movie trappings that make it
> see dumber than it really is.
>
> Also on the news tonight: teens and young adults
> filming themselves barreling into fences to knock them
> over has become a kind of recreational sport for kids
> in New York. They videotape themselves ramming bodily
> into wooden fences and toppling them over, and post
> them to YouTube. Pure Idiocracy stuff.

I'll reserve judgment on the movie (I've not seen it yet), but I question the underlying premise. This cultural "degeneration" trope implies that there is a Noble Tradition that has been sullied by the crudities of modern life. When I look in the past, I see plenty of misery, cruelty, and stupidity. --Less than 100 years ago Southern papers were advertising Sunday lynchings as a proper, Christian family outing! (Bring the kids! Buy some souvenirs!)

This "everything's going to hell" trope is more or less like some crotchety old geezers on a porch complaining that things were better in "the good old days". Sure, there's plenty of stuff we need to change in our society (e.g., our pathetic health care system); however, there's plenty to be proud of too (open source software, public libraries, the community college system). You can find anecdotes of stupid or mean behavior in any society at any time; to extrapolate from those anecdotes to some meaningful historical trend is, to put it bluntly, sloppy reasoning.

Miles



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