The Grinch Awakens

Christmas 2015, with apologies to Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my children’s generation destroyed by Lucasfilm, attention-deficient hysterical naked,

Dragging their fingers across iPad screens looking for an angry fix,

Towheaded preschoolers burning with the ancient nostalgic connection to the mediocre starry space opera of their parents’ youth,

Who potty trained and diapered and costumed sat wriggling and sugared in the supernatural darkness of Cineplexes and IMAX domes contemplating Jedi,

Who bared their brains to two dimensional characters and savage marketing campaigns under Christmas trees illuminated,

Who passed through preschools with blank cool eyes hallucinating Tatooine and blatherskite Yoda’s empty koans during story time,

Who were expelled from family dinners for R2-D2 beeps and Wookie yells and pasting Princess Leia stickers on the windows of the Subaru,

Who cowered in unmade bedrooms in jammies, burning holiday gift cards on themed Lego sets and listening to their parents’ tortured hermeneutics through the wall,

Who talked continuously seventy hours from park to playground to play date about storm troopers and light sabers and Jar Jar Binks,

A lost battalion of bedtime conversationalists yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering fan fiction memories and Anakin anecdotes and Jedi kicks and shocks of Senate chamber and reactor core.

…

What sphinx of durasteel and armorweave pried open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Screen time! Sensory overload! Sedentary days and nature deficit! Moloch!

They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the bandwagon to childhood! unscripted play! picking flowers! digging mud! Down to the earth! into the forest!

 

image credit: Yoda Claus, YodaJeff http://www.yodajeff.com/pages/seasonal/christmas/

source poem: Howl, Allen Ginsburg https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/howl-parts-i-ii

 

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Book List for the Apocalypse: What Should We Be Reading in 2014?

Scientific libraries are being destroyed by the government of Stephen Harper in Canada. Members of the same government continue to stall on the establishment of environmental standards for the oil industry. To the south the congress of the United States has ground to a halt because fanatical elements in one party have constructed a false history of their country, apparently with no nobler goal than to destroy government and give everyone a gun.

Government agencies, most visibly in the U.S., are at work, seemingly intent on collecting every thought of every person. They do it with the excuse that they are protecting these same people, trying to pretend that thought and action control is not the goal. The U.S. government is imposing its tax laws on other countries.  Meanwhile, many library administrators are at work destroying knowledge by trashing books and journals or condemning them to obsolescence via electronic media. Many CEOs of large corporations are amassing huge sums of money for themselves and, to a lesser extent, their shareholders, while fighting unions, off-shoring jobs, and pushing more and more people from the middle class to the working poor.

Though the trend lines for the issues outlined above don’t look very promising, no one can tell for certain where we’re headed. Despite recent suggestions that the humanities are headed the way of the middle class, literature provides the most vivid roadmaps, if not the most certain. Are we headed toward the world of corporate and government control over a remnant of clueless semi-humans depicted in Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddam” trilogy? Or maybe something closer to thought-controlled, past-less and soulless world of George Orwell’s 1984? We can hope the end result will not be like the post-Nazi conquest Britain of Robert Harris’s Fatherland, nor quite as hopelessly grim as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – though the paranoia and deceit of Vichy France in Alan Furst’s “Night Soldiers” series do seem at times disturbingly contemporary. But maybe there are other, more hopeful pathways open to us?

We’re curious, what do you think? What books would you recommend we all read to get ready for whatever brave new world is awaiting us in 2014 and beyond? Please make your suggestions in the comments section below – after all, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be well read, even as the hand basket descends.

– Michael Hayden