Notes

Happy Note
Let's start with a happy note. Here's a church liturgy we can all welcome. Allow me to don my mortar board for a second and remind you that all social gospels are basically feel good gospels, that is, ex cathedra, so to speak. This lends extended meaning to the idea of low lights and candles.

Less Happy Note
Yesterday's Times Magazine supplement's issue was all about we the people being dominated by digital technology. For example, in Becoming Screen Literate Kevin Kelly acknowledges how we are inundated with screens. We watch movies while we pump gas, we look at the cell phone screen as we text message, we look at the CID screen (hard wired or remote) at home to determine if we will answer the call, we look at the laptop screen at home and the desktop screen at work, we look at the TV screen, we look at the microwave screen, and so on ad nauseum. We even look at screens within screens—video and computer games, YouTube, Face Book, etc.) As Kelly says, "We are headed toward screen ubiquity." In the same magazine, a group of ad experts, all of whom are involved in digital and/or online advertising give their views on how these bombardments of digital images and sounds effect our lives in ways we are not even conscious of. As Robert Rasmussen says, "Remember 'Star Wars'? The bigger narrative was about the way people involved 'Star Wars' in their lives: the T-shirts, all the talk about it, the fan fiction, the nicknames, the dialogue people quoted. People were willing to brand themselves with all these other elements that were outside the movie experience." The important clause is that people were "willing to brand themselves." Thus Mr. Kelly's ubiquity becomes Mr. Rasmussen's commodification.

Least Happy Note
In his review of Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997 Geoffrey Wheatcroft notes how the British fancied themselves to be the modern heirs to the Roman Empire. Despite a few demurring historians who warned about the consequences of such emulation "lest the tragedy of the Roman Empire, whose extremities grew at the expense of its heart, should repeat itself," the Brits soldiered on.  How did the Brits rationlize against that warning? They took to the moral high ground—they contended that they were bringing the blessings of freedom, liberal politics and liberal economics to essentially retrograde societies. That is, blessings all around! If one agrees with Mr. Brendon's numbers, the British Empire lasted about 216 years. If you do the math, you'll note that so far the US empire has lasted about 227 years, starting with 1776, and that's obviously arbitrary. Better starting points could be the French and Indian Wars, the Louisiana Purchase and/or the Mexican War. So do modern empires last only 200+ years? In any case, here's the significant question: Is the social and economic turmoil we're currently facing a harbinger of the end of the growth of our "extremities at the expense of [our] heart?"