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| Caesar Flickerman |
Comedian Jim Carrey has gone rogue. He was interviewed on the "red carpet" for an event called New York Fashion Week. The interviewer asked Carrey what he thought of the many "icons" that were at the event. Carrey responded by calling the whole event "meaningless." (Why, then, was he there?)
Carrey continued, sounding like an existentialist philosopher, or the book of Ecclesiastes.
Before walking away, Carrey concluded, “We don’t matter.”"
If we are but "a field of energy dancing for itself," then of course we don't matter. But we are not. And, we do.
Carrey went off the grid. That's good. Because the grid is absurd and meaningless. Humans? As icons? To be adulated? How stupid. How uncreative.
I cannot get the image from The Hunger Games out of my mind, where Caesar Flickerman stands before the crowded auditorium, twisting every moment into happiness before the brain dead crowd. The people are hungry. The Capitol gives them The Games. In the Capitol, life is a game; hence, what once was thought evil is served up with heaping bowls of sugar.
We are bored. Look at people. Can you not see this?
In response, to placate us, and to hide the inanity, our shallow culture dishes out entertainment.
We devour it and, for a moment, are sedated.
Upon awakening, we find ourselves bored.
Caesar Flickerman knocks on the door, and sells us his happy drug.
We ingest it, clueless, happy.
There is no life, no meaning.
That's what "boredom" is. It's not having nothing to do. In America we have so much to do that we have lost the ability to do nothing. Boredom is finding no meaning in our never-ceasing doing.
The author of Ecclesiastes saw this over two thousand years ago.
Everything's boring, utterly boring -
no one can find any meaning in it.
Ch. 1, The Message
