I suppose that being over fifty I should be used by now to this creeping feeling of superannuated post-post superfluity and quasi-irrelevance but just when one is foolishly imagining being on top of things–knowing for instance about The Flaw or how sexting works with robo-software–well then I do something like show some earnest late ’70’s films in a college class and yeah, just stick a fork in me for indeed the world of my young adulthood is as far from the world of today’s students as the world of sailing ships and whale bone corsets. Today in class we watched Coming Home with John Voigt and Jane Fonda and there on screen was an era of rotary telephones, black and white televisions, cars as long as ocean liners, cigarettes in every possible setting, and a collective and corrosive anger toward almost everything and everyone in the world. It was an era when the “F” bomb was not only out of the bag but it was used in common parlance as in: “Fuck the Establishment, those corporate hacks and soulless pall bearers carrying the corpse of freedom.” (For example.) While the movie has its own sadness and tragedies I found myself feeling elegiac for the easy to pronounce outrage of those days. Now, as our planet burns to death and the intersections of sex slavery, famine, war, and the globalized land grab for the last resources on earth is fully underway we’re all too polite. Way way too polite.
I feel better for saying so.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 