Any day now, we should be expecting to wake up to the news of a giant squid suddenly materialising in the centre of one of the world’s major cities, its tentacles entangled within seminal towers, like the Empire State Building or the Eureka Tower – pretty much the way it happened in Watchmen (the graphic novel, not the movie). It will be either that, or a full-scale alien invasion. It is the only thing that will make sense and top everything that is going on in the planet.
Because, we’re already half-way into 2016 and we can affirm that it has not been a very good year so far – it has been rather terrible. Every day we wake up to a new wave of the unthinkable, slapping us in the face; these past few days, we’ve been following Recep Tayip Erdogan decisively and slowly imposing his own totalitarian regime, as a backlash to the failed coup that had us worried and alert last weekend, in a manner reminiscent of the events that followed the Reichstag arson in 1933. The leader of a developing nation, praised by the west for the ‘economic marvel’ that is going on in Turkey, ‘temporarily suspending Human Rights Conventions’ and the world watching, in a state of numbness.
Before that, it was a 19-tonne cargo truck barrelling into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France; terrorist attacks in Istanbul, in Brussels, in a concert venue in Paris, in a gay bar in Orlando, Florida; hundreds of people dying in Iraq and Syria; countries in the EU ‘temporarily’ suspending the Schengen Agreement; millions of people fleeing the Middle East, only to be drowned in the seas; the UK voting to leave the EU; far-right parties on the rise throughout Europe; aeroplanes being shot down – or mysteriously vanishing altogether; Donald Trump having a real chance at becoming president of the United States and thus gaining access to nuclear weapons.
How much worse could an alien invasion be? To say that we were not prepared is an understatement. We’ve been devouring world-altering news with an insatiable appetite, gradually getting used to the extraordinary becoming daily routine.
To say that the media have not risen to the occasion is also an understatement. Times like this call for contemplation, but the sad irony is that, it is exactly a sign of the said times that ‘contemplation’ has become a kind of luxury for which there is no time in a 24-hour news cycle. The mainstream media organisations operate like children on a sugar rush, constantly feeding us with terrible news and calling for reaction, instead of contemplation.
We’re seeing the world changing in front of our very eyes and we’re given very little chance to adapt our world view. This is not solely the fault of mainstream news outlets; it is largely due to the fact that our daily news diet is provided to us through social media, which means that we’re only exposed to news groomed to our taste and the views we already agree with. Overwhelmed by the world taking shape around us, we’re cornered in our ‘safety rooms’, among our peers, consuming comfort food for thought; neither contemplating, nor reacting, we ‘do our moral duty’ by signing petitions, painting our profile pics with the colours associated to each respective tragedy and flood the web with mournful tributes to the pop culture icons who die each day.
That last part is not without significance. The year 2016 has been the year of pop culture genocide, marked by the demise of one celebrity after another, as if there’s an epidemic, claiming the lives of beloved artists. The truth is rather less biblical; these were people whose ascendance was in accordance with the emergence of mass culture and they experience the effect of old age, augmented by the excesses and substance abuse associated with the sub-cultures they emerged from. People from their generation die all the time; if it seems as if there are more celebrities among them, it is because these icons were a product of a time which created icons and allowed for more people to become iconic figures.
But in our celebrity-obsessed culture, famous artists are god-like beings, worshipped like demigods were in the ancient times; their demise creates an asymmetric void in culture, an out-of-proportion sense of collective loss. The world is changing and the gods we learnt to worship as teens are abandoning us.
How did we find ourselves in this condition, so deprived of the analytical tools that would help us make sense of the world? Is it our very dependence on the produce of pop culture that made us immature, like overgrown teenagers, unable to handle deep questions or engage in any kind of debate, other than confirming our already set world views?
Interestingly enough, there is a time and place where we come out of our niche and add to the public discourse. It is when we vote for our representatives, the ones who engage in debate on our behalf, while we crawl back to our ‘happy place’ surrounded by our like-minded peers. Certainly, the parliament is more like a theatre in which said representatives routinely go through the motions, playing their part – even so, the parliament remains one of the very few areas where an active dialogue is being held among people representing dissenting views. And it is no wonder that this kind of activity is systematically being defamed and dismissed as boring, ineffective, counter-productive – or just plain corrupt. Maybe we need more of that. Maybe we should take a leaf out of the old ‘representative democracy’ book and try to replicate it in our daily conversations; reach out to those who are not like us and listen to them. Yes, that might entail logging off our social media accounts for a bit. If we survive that, we might survive the news.