Generation Bubble

Holiday Hiatus

Today begins Generation Bubble’s holiday hiatus. We’d like to thank our readers for helping GenBub grow by leaps and bounds in the months since its inception.

Look for posts to resume after shortly after January 1, when we’ll return refreshed and ready for what promises to be a tumultuous 2010.

Until such time, we invite newer readers to peruse our back pages. They offer, we think, a unique chronicle of the events of the past nine months or so.

And we encourage you to consider following Generation Bubble’s link feed on Twitter (account name “GenBub_tweed“) and joining us on Facebook (group name “Generation Bubble“).

The Unobtrusive Dinosaur: A Review of Wallace Shawn's Essays

Shawn’s book is not a self-help manual or a how-to guide, and he offers no precepts. Instead, he reveals his own struggle to make a life and the uneasy peace that he may or may not have found. The result is a demonstration that a life grounded in reality and guided by a continuous questioning of morality, reason and art can offer a true hope (a hope that is not reduced to a slogan beneath the smiling face of one of our “leaders”) that life and humanity are still possible. But Shawn is resolute that art, morality, or reason alone cannot offer this hope.

The Cloud of Unknowing (cont'd): Admiral Yamamoto as the 20th Hijacker

Islamofascism transformed the incomprehensible face of worldwide Islam into mere incoherence: they hated freedom in general and our freedom in particular. Even better, Islamofascism tied in perfectly with our own growing belief that 9-11 was the new Pearl Harbor. Unable to accept that the events of 9-11 had been masterminded by a very tall Saudi billionaire criminal who now lived in a cave or by the disheveled and obese Khalid Sheikh Mohamed we knew that hidden eastern hordes lay in wait, ready to make the trains run on time and destroy our way of life. So what if nobody had actually seen Islamofascists goose-stepping to midday prayers, we had found our enemy and our war.

The Cloud of Unknowing: Glenn Beck and 9-11 Atavism

9-11 is only a Rorschach test, a mirror disguised as something else and held up before our believing eyes. We want life to be meaningful and when it is not or when it defies our chosen meanings, we call that disaster. Somewhere in the hazy cloud of debris raining down on Manhattan we thought we saw something: the devil’s face, American virtue, a clash of civilizations, or our own fragility. This is the reality of legerdemain: the suicide bomber is quicker than the eye. The act of flying an airplane into a building and the subsequent fall of that building are fundamentally meaningless. Viewed objectively through the eyes of god or the camera of a spy satellite flying far overhead, 9-11 is simply an event that occurred. The closely held truth of the magician is that magic takes place entirely in the minds of his audience.