Maybe the Caveman on the Geiko commercial is right to be upset. After all, when pop culture gets to call you dumb, that's a bold statement to absorb. After all, this is a country that has an Easy Button for Christ's sake!!! We have reached the point where mocking our own desire for "The Simple Life" has gotten out of control. We celebrate being 'smarter than a 5th grader' and continue to paint anything intellectual as elitist and disconnected from the mainstream. It's more important to have street cred than real cred. More people know about Rosie, Paris, Britney, Lindsay and Nicole than any five 2008 Presidential candidates. We just televised the National Spelling Bee, but the interest was more about being voyeurs into the freakish world of the gifted and talented. It's not like we're trading in our spell checker (you'll have to kill me).
More and more we want the Tom-Tom to tell us where to go, rather than learning the streets of a new town. As this generation of PHYLO's rise to power, leadership has been challenged by the group think of the reality show video diary. We all get dissed, flamed, fronted and checked by the 'posse mentality'. Borat and Jackass get laughs because they put our primal instincts on a pedestal. News flash, that stuff will be funny 2000 years from now. If I'm back in flesh, I'll laugh then too. But if we're going to develop our potential as human beings, we need to understand that the PHYLO-IQ is more about cultivating social intelligence. To graduate from egocentric to enthocentric to a more worldcentric view we need to start seeing smart, creative and innovative behavior away from the classroom.
We've continued to connect cognitive development to it's literal core even when the culture went from stressing a lexicoded approach to a more opticoded one. It's been a bait and switch on ourselves and the first casuality on that conflicted position has been our natural affinities. In that sense, we're all somatic savants. The key thing to do from here is not waste all this shared intelligence waiting those elusive five minutes for Wapner. Then, as now, K-Mart still sucks!
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For more on the movie, Idiocracy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
1 comment:
When it comes to common sense and the general public, you are right on the money. It seems the trend to need to "dumb down" just about everything. Yesterday on TV I saw a public service announcement that told parents how to instruct their children not to be flattened by the Ice Cream Truck. Has the country come to this? We actually have to tell parents to tell their kids not to run in front of the Ice Cream Truck? I don't remember those PSAs on the TV when I was a kid yet my mother was smart enough to scream out the window at us in her best ONTO voice "WATCH OUT FOR THE TRUCK-HE CAN'T SEE LITTLE KIDS". My PHYLO dad told us that if we missed the truck, we'd live... and we could always go to the store for ice cream.
Common sense is unfortunately not so common in this day and age. There are a lot of dingbat PHYLOs out there and I've seen just as many dopey ECOs and ONTOs... Haven't seen many ditzy EXOs but I'm sure they exist too.
Is it an epidemic of stupidity or is life so complicated that everyone has their head up their own asses? I'd sure like to know-I have absolutely no patience for stupidity.
ADF, who not only doesn't need a PSA to tell her how to raise kids but was also smart enough not to have them when she didn't want them even when society makes you think you must
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