April 25, 2017
Source: BIgstock
But lest we think that only millennials fangle such identities, we needn”t look far to find journalists who believe their inner circle represents the world as they cite the practice of two friends as a trend and three as an epidemic. Still others aggressively press their cheekiness against these journalists as if posing for a celebri-selfie. Making hajj to past articles, we encounter the occasional comment-board ghoul who felt that writing didn”t exist until he desecrated it. A similar case of downright necrophilia plagues the writer, company, and comedian who see every death as an opportunity to write about their life. Given such solipsism, we needn”t wonder why politicians and activists see the boycott as punitive as the marital advice of the Lysistrata and Quran. Similarly, isn”t the true measure of self-sacrifice on a flight when we give up space on our phone (so that we can videotape a man being removed from an actual space we refused to give up)?
And if Twitter is a bathroom stall, answer boards host the occasional unfriendly remnant of previous users. Case in point, a child basically asks whether he could donate a vein to his dying father. That one man devoted most of his post to the child’s spelling errors and still beat out more informative and uplifting posts, unfortunately, won”t shock you.
Similarly combining the pretension of Duchamp’s Fountain with its utility, modern artists do not engage with art; they merely use it as a canvas to relieve themselves of self-importance. As such, most literary journals exist for the sake of being submitted to rather than read, as the market has begun to illustrate. Furthermore, the most established craftsmen use their guild only to show how important their work can be”be it an author’s obsession with metatext or Hollywood’s obsession with itself. Sadly, this superficiality translates to political positions that are more art with less matter. So though our president can pose a threat to the Republic, we”d never know from the likes of Paul Auster, who is too busy speaking out for the sake of being heard, and Meryl Streep, who takes more umbrage at Trump’s acting chops than at his policies.
Western philosophy was born of the need to prove existence beyond the self. All these years later, we”ve come to find that the self and the reality it authors have become de-ontologized as well. For insofar as the world becomes an extension of myself, I lose my integrity. Worse still, clitsch always strives to undo itself by professing how much other people matter”and it succeeds. After all, if it wasn”t for my public, who else would look at me?
