Is It Monday Yet?

Late in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent has quite unexpectedly learned to fly, having been taught that the trick is to throw oneself at the ground and miss.  As he soars through the air, he is hit hard in the small of the back by what turns out to be a party that has placed itself permanently in orbit.  He is invited inside and meets the permanent partyers, some of whom are quite repugnant.

As it turns out, it was such a good party at the outset that its momentum never flagged.  At the time of Arthur’s initially painful encounter with it, it makes regular raids on various planets to replenish supplies of drinks, guacamole and chips and incidental necessities.  It has now been going strong for several generations, and the younger partyers are showing signs of degeneracy (not that their forebears didn’t).

Douglas Adams came from the UK but settled in Santa Barbara, where he shared a love for a certain seafood restaurant with Jonathan Winters.  (Someone needs to investigate the possible connection between what that restaurant serves and the production of great humor.)  But it occurred to me that his story of the perpetual, free-floating party is quite a good parable about today’s United States.  In a recent post I quoted someone as calling this “the first entertainment culture since the fall of the Roman Empire” (“Cotton Candy and Circus”).

One of the symptoms, as I see it, is utterly inane advertising tricks such as the slogan of Monday Night Football:  “Is it Monday yet?”  Has anyone thought through the implications of that?  Does ESPN consider its viewers such a bunch of bleary-eyed couch potatoes that they’ve actually lost track of what day it is?  Well, maybe they do, and maybe they’re right in some cases.  Then there is Anheuser-Busch, which in the past put out some of the best commercials of all time.  Who wouldn’t love the one in which one of the older Clydesdales gets back at the young colts for kicking snow on him and the others by smacking a tree and covering the colts with snow?  Or the one in which a young Clydesdale slips into a harness and tries to pull the Budweiser wagon?  Finally he manages to get it moving, and the camera pans to the rear, where an older horse is pushing.

But Monday is my night off? Why am I working?

So what is the new Anheuser-Busch commercial tack?  “Drinkability.”  Brilliant.  Man, every time I see that I’m moved to go out and buy a case of Bud because I now know it’s drinkable and the other brands aren’t.  I had always wondered what was wrong with them.

Have our minds become so blitzed by our orbiting in Adams’s perpetual party that we’re moved to action by this stuff?  I don’t know of another generation anyplace in the world in which people actually paraded their ignorance.  (“Well, I studied French in high school, but I don’t remember a single word of it.”  Or “Oh, yeah, I studied geography in school, but you’ll have to tell me whether Miami is north or south of here.”  Laughter.)  Anyone who shows signs of having more of an intellect than, as Douglas Adams puts it, a demented bee, is passed off as an “elitist.” Do I detect just a smidgen of hypocrisy in that?

Everyone has seen the staggeringly frightening signs of ignorance, but the question that arises is whether people a majority of whom don’t know who fought in World War II or who won are capable of maintaining a representative government.  Non-intelligent, ignorant partyers are emphatically not intelligent voters.