Noth­ing so neat­ly epit­o­mis­es how skewed pri­or­i­ties have become as the “Bar­ben­heimer” movie delir­i­um.  If the gush of praise, analy­sis and oth­er com­men­tary is any indi­ca­tion, a doll and a shade of pink embody deep lessons and cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance. The oth­er half of the con­joined title ought to be an admo­ni­tion of how lit­tle progress West­ern cul­ture has made since invent­ing the means to destroy it and pret­ty much every­thing else. Would that it were so.

Rather than grasp­ing how to stop the rush to self-anni­hi­la­tion, our cul­tur­al norm is to keep find­ing less dra­mat­ic but equal­ly effec­tive ways to kill each oth­er and the plan­et, direct­ly in war­fare, or by greed and tech­nol­o­gy focused on exploita­tion, rather than sus­tain­able use and gen­er­al benefit.
The heat­waves and wild­fires wreak­ing indis­crim­i­nate destruc­tion and mis­ery across the world have appar­ent­ly begun to con­vince all but the kith and kin of flat-earth­ers that cli­mate change is both real and poten­tial­ly ter­mi­nal for humans. The “Oppen­heimer” film should be a good spur in the race to cope with the hav­oc we’ve caused,  instead of ways to kill each oth­er . The like­li­hood of that is dubi­ous to say the least.
In what the Ukrain­ian Deputy Prime Min­is­ter described as “a 24/7 tech­nol­o­gy race”, more than 200 Ukrain­ian com­pa­nies are work­ing “hand-in-glove with mil­i­tary units on the front lines to tweak and aug­ment drones to improve their abil­i­ty to kill and spy on the enemy.”
                    ALL HAIL THE RIDICULOUS
The Bar­bie movie pro­vid­ed what one crit­ic described as “instant util­i­ty to polit­i­cal actors and oppor­tunists of all kinds.’’
When politi­cians weigh in on a movie about a doll, it’s anoth­er indi­ca­tion, if any was need­ed, of the shal­low intel­lect of those elect­ed to gov­ern, which says as much about vot­ers as the pink-wrapped doll movie does about cul­ture and maturity.
A pop­u­lar con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor kicked off a dis­parag­ing video review of the film by set­ting a doll on fire and boast­ing he had “… like, pages and pages of notes” to dis­sect the movie’s evils.
Since he also has, like, a teenager’s grasp of, like, lan­guage, maybe he’s like, in the right space?
Exag­ger­a­tions, mis­lead­ing claims and pal­pa­ble lying by politi­cians have become lit­tle more than busi­ness as usu­al, anoth­er sad sign­post that there seems no lim­it to gulli­bil­i­ty. That’s exag­ger­at­ed even more when aug­ment­ed by greed.
Here in Cana­da, sev­er­al indi­vid­u­als who had enough smarts to make seri­ous mon­ey, recent­ly hand­ed over $45-mil­lion to a 24 year-old with no finan­cial train­ing, exper­tise or expe­ri­ence beyond what he’d picked up play­ing video games, to play with in the cryp­to cur­ren­cy swamp. When the obvi­ous hap­pened, the “investors”  thought they could recoup the mon­ey he blew on lux­u­ry cars and oth­er indul­gences, by kid­nap­ping and beat­ing the con man up.
                      WHEN THE FOOLISH FLOURISH
The sav­ing grace is that by and large gullible greed affects the par­tic­i­pants direct­ly, and the rest of us only tan­gen­tial­ly. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the same can’t be said for the cul­tur­al sub-sec­tion, with a seem­ing­ly lim­it­less reserve of febrile  rants and scur­rilous chat­ter to out­spend all oth­er points of view or intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty. The bay­ing mob of social media doesn’t warn or ques­tion, it con­demns. There is no weigh­ing of the scale in pub­lic sham­ing, no accep­tance that a “sin­ner” might also be sinned against. And yet ratio­nal, sup­pos­ed­ly edu­cat­ed peo­ple, offer them will­ing obeisance.
Near­ly four cen­turies ago, Shakespeare’s Ham­let ruminated:
“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of out­ra­geous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of trouble,
And by oppos­ing end them?”
Pur­port­ed­ly in the name of tol­er­ance and equal respect for any and all points of view and demands, the 21^st cen­tu­ry answer is at best a whim­per­ing; “Umm, maybe not.”
But as Karl Pop­per, gen­er­al­ly regard­ed as one of the great­est philoso­phers of sci­ence of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry pos­tu­lat­ed: “If we extend unlim­it­ed tol­er­ance even to those who are intol­er­ant, if we are not pre­pared to defend a tol­er­ant soci­ety against the onslaught of the intol­er­ant, then the tol­er­ant will be destroyed, and tol­er­ance with them.”
                      LOONS BEAT THE LOONY
Loons, the icon­ic birds who live on the lake where I am now, are high­ly ter­ri­to­r­i­al, which is a nec­es­sary form of intol­er­ance. To pre­serve order and their species, they’ve evolved four dis­tinct calls; tremo­lo, wail, yodel and hoot.

The vocal­iza­tions are used in courtship, ter­ri­to­r­i­al dis­putes, to com­mu­ni­cate between pairs, off­spring and among flock mem­bers, and to sig­nal alarm. 
Their reper­toire also goes some way to sooth­ing the souls of humans for­tu­nate enough to be able to lis­ten to them when dark­ness, unsul­lied by unnec­es­sary ambi­ent light, push­es the sun below the hori­zon of the for­est across the lake.
If you’ve nev­er heard it (and I con­fess this isn’t the first time I’ve writ­ten this in a blog post) sit in a dark­ened room, shut out all oth­er sounds and then click on this link. I’m will­ing to bet it does more for your psy­che than Bar­ben­heimer.

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