United States culture has plunged to celebrating or deifying sub-triviality.
It systematically shrinks elephants into fleas and inflates fleas into elephants.
Take today’s cover story in The New York Times Magazine, “Plastic Fantastic Mattel wanted ‘Barbie’ to kick off a new wave of brand-extension movies. Greta Gerwig wanted it to be a work of art.”
Barbie dolls do nothing to impart wisdom. They do nothing to impart ethics, learning, or a keen sense of justice. They do nothing to inculcate civic responsibilities. They do nothing to prepare children to discharge their duties as citizens. Barbie dolls are a distraction from the serious business of growing up and abandoning our hormonal instincts and gratifications in favor of our cerebral faculties and an insistence on asking and answering “why” before proceeding, if at all, to “how.”
The United States confronts the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. Unchecked, limitless, presidential powers have surged past the tyrannical practices of British King George III which provoked the American Revolution—including the power to play prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to kill any person on the planet suspected of endangering national security based on secret, unsubstantiated stargazing. Such harrowing power escapes any oversight from Congress, the judiciary, or the American people.
The New York Times Magazine, however, would never have featured Barbie dolls without expecting a huge and applauding American audience. It knew that if the Magazine began to feature adult fare like “justice, the end of civil society” or “separation of powers, the Hope diamond of liberty,” its readership would vanish. In other words, we have met the enemy of American culture, and we are they.
Thank you. My sister asked me to go see this film with her and I could not put into words my visceral, reflexive, revulsion. Shared. I’m certain she knows I refer to the VP as “Bidenz Giggle n Grin, Barbie.”