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Star Wars, David Bowie, Hillary Clinton, and Peyton Manning

Star Wars, David Bowie, Hillary Clinton, and Peyton Manning

Last updated on: February 9, 2016 at 12:12 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Star Wars, David Bowie, Hillary Clinton, and Peyton Manning 2016-02-09T00:12:56-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Last month my feeds were dominated by Star Wars, David Bowie, and Peyton Manning.

Great culture endures and so the play Hamlet has been performed, is being performed, and will be performed. Great culture endures because even though there may not be a great deal of money to be made, the art has the power to transform our lives. Great art may also entertain us, though sometimes it disturbs us even more, but it endures because the beauty is irreplaceable.

A mark of a dying culture is when it begins to consume the past or tries to live in it. The old is polished up and made better, but creativity stagnates and is replaced by decadence. The 1913 revival in old Imperial Russia of 1613 fashions in the salons of Petersburg is an example. The fad for dressing up as shepherds just before the Revolution in France is another.

When I was a child I would pick “more” over excellent: a quart of just-ok ice cream over a smaller amount of great ice cream. This is a childish error and adults learn better. We know that very good food takes time and that less is often so much more. However, this adult understanding requires restraint. We cannot keep eating if we want the best . . . even the rich cannot do that since they would simply grow jaded on greatness.

Can the party of our President do no better than recycling the candidate of the 1990’s? Having gotten the X-Files back, older, but not better, do we have to endure 1990’s politics? Hillary Clinton is a retread in search of an original idea, left only with the novelty of her gender. The sad thing is the candidate is running in a genderless time: why should ze/they care about a formulation of “rights” that depend on a gender binary?

Super Bowl halftime shows have gone from bad (Up with People) to decadent. Yesterday’s show was big, bold, and had talented stars, but there was nothing new . . . not even the depravity. Yesterday’s wardrobe malfunction is today’s costume design.

Forget the morality for a moment. Most of us are too jaded to be offended and that is sorrowful. The music wasn’t new, groundbreaking, or interesting. Star Wars wasn’t new, novel, ground breaking, or innovative either. I point to Star Wars, which I did like, lest anyone think that given my age (old) and ideas (Victorian) that I simply didn’t like the Super Bowl show and am complaining.

I did not like it, but then I did not like the unendurable cheese of the half-time shows of my youth. They were worse. Those old shows meant to be “wholesome” which in my childhood meant the acts of twenty years ago drained of their edge. The half-time show, like the commercials this years, was technologically excellent, well done, but lacked any creativity: been there, done that, at least L times. If you enjoyed the show, I am glad, but was it really memorable, worth the hype, or groundbreaking?

What was the last thing you saw that was? Theater. Concerts. Film. Television. Isn’t it dominated by the safe and the mundane? Or wait: have they tried to be “original” by doing something merely weird?

I enjoyed Star Wars, but nobody can say it was creative. Somebody will rightly point out that Hamlet was a reworking of an old story and that is true, but the reworking was better in every way. You cannot say that about Star Wars. It was better in technical ways and more true to our contemporary values, but derivative.

And of course it will be suggested that there was much hack work in Shakespeare’s time and that was true. Technology has given us one big disadvantage: the ability of money making, derivative, safe, mediocrity to go viral and shout out the rest is much greater.

David Bowie, I can dimly recall, was “edgy” and “pushed boundaries” in ways that seem quaint at present. He was a passable actor, decent pop musician, and an excellent showman, though Michael Jackson a better musician and showman. David Bowie was original for the time, but a great deal of the originality was in the shock value. “I shall remake myself!” and he did. The prudes would harrumph and some lonely kid somewhere would “relate” and money was made. Meanwhile, drugs were consumed, fans were abused, and the whole process kept lurching along.

And now we have done it so many times that the old bad boys are now dead and the new bad boys can cease to be boys at all to be a bit offensive and even that grows tired after gender is bent for the fiftieth time. Mrs. Grundy would complain, but she left bored.

The NFL seems oddly geriatric to me in the same way: Peyton Manning hardly able to throw fifteen yards without wincing and yet his last game the main story. Why? The next generation of “heroes,” stars under thirty, look so less heroic. Maybe Cam Newton, a Christian and a promising player, can shake his growing pains and become a star. I am sure someone will, but in the age of concussion protocols, the very story line of the game is changing. Is an aging gun slinger now heroic or merely pathetic?

So in some ways the NFL consumed itself looking backward at Super Bowl 50: the games of yesterday, even the players, looking backwards. The old times were not better, but fresher . . .less commercialized (!) or at least they were better at hiding the rot. The NFL needed some Lombardi-Linus to come and remind us what the game was all about by reading from John Facenda, but nobody did and perhaps nobody can. OJ taught us that much of the wholesomeness was an act to cover up the rot of our contemporary rulers.

So much of what we do is intentionally backwards looking: a remake to capture the old audience with a refresh to grab some new folk. We have always done this to some extent, but now the sheer volume can crowd out other choices.

Is this good for us?

There is good news! We are in an era where my kids can film in HD on their phones and they are. We can write books and publish them if we wish . . . and we are. But we are also drowning in waves of decadence: unoriginal material spiced with moral failing. This is new . . . to this extent. Can we endure it?

I know we can, but only if we pause, stop, think about it, and decide to quit. We can stop rewarding remakes, inferior imitation. Bluntly: we must stop consuming so much. There is not enough quality to fill our demand and so the easily generated junk culture risks overwhelming us. The GOP has moved past the Bush dynasty, the Democrats can let their do-over go.

Let’s pass on a bag of chips from yesterday and eat some really good home cooked food made with creativity and love tomorrow.

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