Like Pope Urban VIII and the Church elders and Italian aristocracy in the face of Galileo’s heliocentricism, we see plainly the mechanics of reality and yet choose to believe their opposite.

The Internet is destroying everything. It must be stopped. We love it, we use it, we mainline it like smack, and in the meantime it’s laying waste to civilization as we know it, meaning, every common form of culture and communication.

Consider how many times weekly we hear about how the Internet, in all of its varied manifestations and equally in all of its costlessness, is destroying the newspaper industry.

And the book publishing industry.

And the music industry.

And the film industry. And broadcast television. And magazines. And theater and dance and live performance of every kind.

Not to mention everyday human contact, social intercourse, conversation, old-fashioned porch-sitting socialization, club meetings, hoedowns, card nights, cocktail parties, letter-writing, ad infinitum.

Even porn is being devastated. And, like the lice gone hungry on a dead man’s head, the advertising industry, utterly dependent upon all of these old forms, is close to simply eating itself. Only video gaming is thriving, overlapping as it does with the Internet and surviving in any case as part of the same paradigm, the sit-in-front-of-a-monitor-and-stare posture that is coming to dominate human activity. You’re doing it now.

We hear and understand that these industries and art forms are dying, and yet I have yet to hear anyone blame the Internet with any vitriol. If it is blamed, it is done indulgently, almost happily, as you might blame the evolution of a new sense organ for rendering smell obsolete. We may bemoan our losses, but no one is deeply considering the source, or what we should do about it, if anything.

There isn’t much we can do, of course, because The Internet has booming business advantages across the spectrum, and represents our newest instrument of “progress,” which is considered a self-defining social good. Anyone who proclaims otherwise is dismissed as a Luddite – without having their arguments answered or countered.

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Everybody should watch this a few times, and some of us should be made to — Glenn Beck lost in the miasma of his own reactionary daydreams, lamenting the loss of the greatness that America once was, openly and tearfully (he mists up like a bride’s mom) mourning the America represented best, he thinks, by a few 1970’s network TV ads, one for Coke (!) and the other for Kodak (!), and pleading with us to remember “how it felt!!”

America “used to be united!” he cries. And of course, he’s right — the nation used to be relatively untroubled by minority rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, extreme economic disparity (for a time, anyway), and the other vast myriad of things that challenge the hegemony of plump, wealthy white men like Beck. So he’s absolutely correct, and you can’t even tell him he shouldn’t be upset by the fact. But we can save our sympathy, I think, for bigoted, retrogressive demogogues, and perhaps dedicate it instead to the vast majority of citizens everywhere who never had so much to lose.

But the fact that Beck points to nothing so much as a pair of corporate TV ads as his deathless illustration of how “life used to be” is truly amazing — perhaps, because he lives in a warped, weepy, nutbag-covering TV world all his own, Beck doesn’t quite understand that those commercials were commercials. For products. Comprised of adman hucksterism and cheap-shill sentimentality. They aren’t real, Glenn. And they weren’t real when you were a boob-tube geek kid, either.

Take Jean Baudrillard – please. One of America’s most-watched pundits posits a few moments of old contrived TV advertising as our great nation’s lost idealism? This is TV cheese earnestly crying about the state of perceived “reality” by comparing it unfavorably to a Coke commercial. A Coke commercial. We’re down the rabbit hole a little, it seems. And how many millions nodded with him, perhaps shed a tear or two as well? Wait, I’m faklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. 

Perhaps Beck is correct again — his constituency may have wholly lost the capacity to discern TV fantasy from what’s real. They vote and shop and recreate and even remember the way TV tells them to. And these aren’t kids raised on the Web, but old timers, those old enough to remember the 70s and pine for the days of segregation and all-white Presidents and restaurant smoking and women who knew how to bake. Or, more to the point, the days of Archie Bunker, the Wide World of Sports, and beer ads with honest-to-God jingles. Those were the good old days.

So, Obama has won a Nobel Peace Prize, eight months into his term, for creating “a new climate in international politics,” for promoting multilateral diplomacy and advocacy for arms control. He’s 48, and the first standing President to win the prize since Woodrow Wilson.

Let loose the dogs of neocon tantrum-throwing.

Very soon, someone will decide that Swedish meatballs should be renamed “freedom meatballs.” (Don’t presume Glenn Beck will make a distinction between the Swedes, who dish out most of the Nobels, and the Norwegians, who delivered the Peace Prize.) “Freedom massage” will follow, then “freedom fish,” “freedom erotica,” and “freedom yellow pea soup.” Maybe “Norwegian Wood” will get boycotted off the new Beatles Rock Band.

No reason to stop there: forming a boycott against Nobel winners’ books could follow (as if the people capable of being convinced of these sorts of things ever read), but I expect it’d peter out before Nobel laureates’ medical innovations are called out. My guess is no one will even mention the economists, because no one understands what their contributions are anyway, and why they all contradict each other year to year.

Wait a minute – Woodrow Wilson? For The League of Nations, which was dubious, and in spite of yanking the U.S. into WWI? Hey, didn’t Henry Kissinger get one of these?

We shouldn’t take the Peace Prize too seriously, of course, but the Rightist tribes have good reason to be miffed – coming so early in Obama’s public career, it’s obviously an international backhanded slap at the Bush Adminstration, who were as liable to win a Nobel as Phillip Garrido. It couldn’t be any louder or clearer, as righteous messages go, though it could’ve, one way or another, been a good deal earlier.

Arriving late the debate, I’ve thought long and hard about the Polanski case, in which a famous and respected Oscar-winning filmmaker is facing charges for having champagne-&-Quaalude-leavened sex with a 13-year-old 30 years ago, an incident everyone has known about in the intervening years and gave hardly a thought to. The charges seem indefensible on his part as long as you don’t admit that 13-year-olds sometimes have sex (in Texas if they wait a year they can get married), and don’t admit that you’ve ever plied a woman with drinks in the hopes of getting her into bed. (C’mon, you have. I have.) Hell, it’s kind of indefensible anyway.

But I’ve finally decided where I fall on the issue: I don’t care.

I don’t care because Polanski’s victim doesn’t care, and because it’s old news, and because it’s an ambiguous case with a smattering of judicial chicanery involved, and because the more fiery point being snookered around in the press now, by brickbrows who believe in the destruction of a mythical Hollywood Babylon, is the petitions that have been rather thoughtlessly signed in Polanski’s favor.

But if Polanski goes free or goes to prison, it doesn’t matter to me anymore than does Mackenzie Phillips’s lurid assertions about her father. This isn’t public policy, or even a scandal about people that matter. It’s just a fart in the wind. It’s a semi-abstracted moral question that’s fun to argue about over cocktails. Until it’s not fun anymore. I don’t believe Polanski should “get off” because he’s a celebrity, but neither am I convinced that there’s much “getting off” that should be necessary, given the situation and the years and the rest. Frankly, my gut reaction is that if I’d suffered what Polanski suffered – seen his wife cut to ribbons and the baby cut from her stomach, not to mention escaping the Holocaust – then I can imagine feeling as if I had carte blanche, come what may. But then I might very well have gone to prison, and I wouldn’t expect there to be much debate about it.

Certainly Polanski’s was loathesome behavior, but is it deathlessly criminal decades after the fact? Does the passage of time alter or semi-neutralize the importance of what happened? If I brain you with a tire iron (obviously a less venal scenario), that is assault. 30 years later, what is it? Something even the victim should care very much about? It seems uncertain. Every state, including California, has a statute of limitations for straight-on rape, usually ranging from between three and ten years. Is that reasonable? They’re not applicable to Polanski because he had already pled guilty in a plea bargain deal that the judge was apparently not going to honor. Is that reasonable? It’s a legal boondoggle now, not a case about preadult sex, which is something I could’ve guessed would’ve happened if I’d noticed a young teenager stripping in Jack Nicholson’s jacuzzi while drinking champagne late at night and having world-famous men photograph her.

It’s 2009, and nothing, literally, is at stake. I know statutory rape is bad, but I’ve also known teenagers that screw and do dope, sometimes in tandem. The world still turned.

I do think it’s a good thing the authorities waited, or else we might not have The Pianist, which is a very good movie. Then again, I could’ve done without The Ninth Gate.

I don’t care. Lock him up, set him free.

No one will suffer too much from the fact, but it’s a sobering indication of the state of things American – that the new film Creation, starring Oscar-nominee-&-winner Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly and produced by Brit producer king Jeremy “Chariots of Fire” Thomas, has not and may not find a distributor in the United States. The film is a romantic costume drama – ordinarily a safe, medium-budget bet for American theaters – about the life of Charles Darwin.

Nobody will stake the movie for an American run, despite the fact that it has been already sold to distributors in virtually every other corner of the globe. The South Koreans and Australians and Japanese and Italians will see it. But not us. It wouldn’t be a blockbuster here, but it would’ve earned.

Michelle Malkin’s books may be bestsellers thanks to a right-wing bulk-buy, and simian radio shows might gain audience share via the rubbernecking curious and amusement-starved, but here’s cold evidence of the market responding for real to the neocon forces in this country, a country in which evolution is taught in every school. Distributors have decided en masse that the uproar by the anti-evolutionist faction in our society would be too much of a hurricane to handle.  “Darwin Day” — November 22 — is fast approaching, after all, and the efforts of Kirk Cameron to alter On the Origin of Species and distribute 50K copies to college students may just not be enough to stem the tide of common sense.

Creation may not be a good movie, but nothing about it can be remotely as terrifying as the simple fact that a distinctly American brand of proud ignorance has won this tiny fight over any consideration of reason, educated culture, fact, or even capitalist greed. Think about that for a minute, and tell me you don’t smell medieval brimstone in the air: a major industry has decided not to invest in a project that might earn them profits because too large a section of the American public and the froth-lipped media that stokes them are giving their ignorance primacy over the truth, and do not want that ignorance defied. (By “truth” I mean the truth of evolutionary science and Darwin’s work, not of the movie’s portrait thereof, which is probably romantic nonsense.)

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