Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Amusing ourselves to death

Skip to comments

Mike Peterson Published: March 26, 2012 1 minute 4 comments

It's All About You may have to go on my list of comics I have to resist putting on here too often.

Today's strip, however, is about something that concerns me and, although I've touched on it in other contexts, I don't know that I've addressed this full face: We really are "amusing ourselves to death," as Postman put it, and he little knew the half of it.

In "Fahrenheit 451," Montag's wife is permanently blissed out on a giant, interactive television soap opera, and I think that, if Bradbury had been able to foresee Facebook, he might have depicted her endlessly playing Farmville and amassing useless, incorporeal rewards in other addictive, pointless on-line games.

But, in Bradbury's vision, the government was out burning books to stamp out thought. What he (and Orwell) didn't realize (and which Huxley did) is that there is no need to outlaw what people will reject on their own.

Let me pause to suggest that, if you have a teenage child in your orbit who was eager to see "The Hunger Games" movie this weekend, you should bundle up all of the aforesaid and make a present of them. "Hunger Games" is a fitting shelfmate for any of those books.

This is slipping off topic, however, because the issue isn't just about political thought and the way we relate to power. It's more rudimentary than that: It's about being able to whistle, and to think.

As a student in junior and then senior high, I walked a lot. We were a little over a mile from town and, even if I hadn't had a social life, I played sports and had other occasions to be dumped at the crossroads by a bus, whence I had to walk the rest of the way.

Without headphones or ear buds or any prerecorded entertainment at all.

On those walks, I used to think about things.

I also used to put my fingers in my mouth and under my tongue and try various angles and combinations with the result that, today, I can call my dog from a good distance in the country, or get a cab quickly in the city. And, back when the boys were young, I could step out on the porch, blow a particular tune, and get them home from anywhere in the neighborhood including — at least during the summer — inside their friends' houses.

But I spent far less time learning to whistle through my fingers than I did just thinking. Not about anything in particular; just rolling things around in my mind, inventing dialogues that would never happen to solve problems I wasn't being asked to address, or just … thinking.

Maybe that only happens in the country. Maybe in the city, the existing cacaphony is such that adding your own soundtrack helps preserve your sanity.

I mean, without presuming to judge their ability to think, I don't know a lot of city people who can whistle through their fingers.

A number of years ago (and that number is "seven"), I was working on a series of stories about constellations. While I knew the mythology half, I was drawing on friends-of-the-blog Sherwood Harrington and Brian Fies for the astronomical information. 

One of the constellations was the Magpie Bridge, which comes from a Chinese legend based on the Milky Way. Sherwood and Brian cautioned me that the vast majority of my readers would have never seen the Milky Way.

I was gobsmacked. The Milky Way fairly lit up the sky when I was walking home at night as a boy.

But a year or so later, Sherwood made the same observation to Chris Clarke, who blogged about it, asking people when they had first seen the Milky Way. It was fascinating, and sad, to find that, indeed, the sight is extraordinarily rare for city people, who are, of course, the majority in this modern age.

Could walking in reflective silence be the same thing, a pleasure taken for granted by the few who live apart from the distractions of city life, but unknown to the many who do not?

I do know that a lot of city folks, when they come to the country, get seriously freaked out by the silence at night, though I don't think of the country as particularly quiet.

There's plenty to hear, but you do have to listen.

And maybe we've lost the ability to do that.

In other, very welcome news:

He's b-a-a-a-ck!

(We have missed you, my friend.)

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.