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Cartoonland
Death to Cartoonland!
Now, how do we kill it? Between deepfakes and willful ignorance, it won’t be very long until we will no longer be able to distinguish genuine electronic news gathering images from propaganda.
We already live in an infantilized culture, constantly feeding us cheap tripe to consume at our leisure and for our cultural sustenance, and to produce landfills on our landscape and garbage islands out at sea.
Cultural change hardly ever keeps up with political change — and vice versa. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two. The competition over cultural legitimacy and civil rights between the varied communities that make up our neighborhoods, cities, counties, states, regions and the nation remains intense, despite the fact that there is plenty of legitimacy to go around. E Pluribus Unum and so on.
What the conservative parts of our experimental democratic republic seems to find the hardest thing to let go of is its put-down culture. The fallacy of civil rights as a non-renewable resource in our culture creates an environment where respect is not easy to come by — not at face value, anyway. It is like one’s enumerated civil rights are somehow diminished when those we were once free to put down as weirdos are allowed equal status in the light of those same enumerated rights. For, to bestow respect at…