7 Depressing Takes

Christian Influencer, the desecration of Saint Patrick Cathedral, the End of Entertainment, Two Bad Songs, and One Bright Ray of Hope

Hello Friday my old friend, it’s time for some takes. This week, I looked far and wide for cheerful and hopeful stories and thoughts. But, O Best Beloved. I failed utterly. All I could find were heaps of outrage. But not just the sort of usual outrage that we’ve been living with for the past many news cycles, the getting mad over things that don’t really matter. No, some of the things this week were foul and terrible and destructive. In other words, yet again at the end of the week, we’re back around to the total demise of civilization. If you were feeling happy about your life, I beg you will reconsider. Everything is on fire and you will shortly be on fire—probably.

this is fine (What you get when you type “This is Fine” into the AI Image generator on Substack. Seriously, I do not know what is going on here.)

One—Tears Are Not Enough

I’d really love Google Gemini to do something with this. I bet putting it in would make the tiny jinn powering all our computers explode into a billion tiny beams of sadness:

For the youngsters out there, in the 80s, American celebrities recorded themselves singing something called “We Are The World” which, now that I think about it, is a pretty silly name for a song meant to raise money for people in other parts of the world. What does “we” mean to you in that sentence?

I didn’t know there was a Canadian version, but, as you have observed if you clicked, it is also terrible. I love the enthusiasm. I love how into it they are. Of course, it did nothing at all to ameliorate the plight of the starving Ethiopian—that wasn’t a problem that could have been mended by singing songs and collecting money. It’s adorable that Americans and Canadians thought that it could, that they ever believed that heaps of earnest emotional musical outbursts might have “done” anything. Now, we’re seeing at home, of course, that those things are not worth anything here either. Your feelings of tolerance and goodwill, and even your cash and singing cannot stem the tide of evil.

Two—the State of Entertainment

A lovely friend sent this depressing article along. You may have been noticing that the kinds of movies and even music that are available to watch or listen to are not that great. Disney hasn’t been making anything tempting. In fact, every movie franchise has been filled to the brim with empowered females all spouting, in the words of the Critical Drinker, “The Message.” Not the Eugene Peterson version, but the relentless DEI propaganda. But maybe this failure on the part of the entertainment industry is going to open the way for more interesting Indy and small production art, movies, and music. No, says the writer, Don’t get your hopes up. Entertainment is dying. It’s being devoured by doomscrolling which is addictive and that by design:

The tech CEOs know this is harmful, but they do it anyway. A whistleblower released internal documents showing how Instagram use leads to depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. Mark Zuckerberg was told all the disturbing details. He doesn’t care. The CEOs all know the score. The more their tech gets used, the worse all the psychic metrics get. But still they push aggressively forward—they don’t want to lose market share to the other dopamine cartel members. And with a special focus on children. They figured out what every junk peddler already knows: It’s more profitable to get users locked in while they’re young. And the virtual reality headsets raise even more issues—because they rewire users’ brains. Experts are already talking about “simulator sickness,” and that’s just the physical nausea, dizziness, and headaches. Imagine the psychic dislocations.

You should read the whole thing, not least because there’s a big fat picture just above that paragraph of the CEO of Apple wearing those stupid goggles. Also, there are some nice graphics of big fish eating littler fish. The biggest fish is called “Addiction” and is eating, in progression, “Distraction,” “Entertainment,” and finally “Art.”

It did suddenly strike me that I haven’t sat down to watch a movie or anything other than YouTube videos lately—no wait, that’s not true. Every time my girls finish reading an Austen book, they always watch the movie version, and usually I manage to catch a few minutes. There are enough versions of Pride and Prejudice to keep us occupied on the long winter evenings. Nevertheless, it is sort of tragic that they have not ever had the thrill of a big, glorious period romance arriving at the local theater and then going in a big twittering pack of friends to see it. I got to watch the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma in the theater, and, unfortunately, Titanic, which I found deeply stupid at the time, and even more so now. Will this ever be a thing for them?

I suppose if any of us became bored enough, we might begin to produce our own artistic entertainments as I did growing up in Africa without electricity or running water. We read books out loud and had to sing songs and boring stuff like that. In this way, while piles of Zoomers are desperately scrolling and bashing into posts with their AI goggles on, in real life people could be walking around just being normal. I don’t want to get my hopes up though.

Three—Cultural Desecrations

This piece by Carl Trueman about that awful funereal situation in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral (clips of which I have studiously avoided watching) is so good—and depressing. He writes:

Our age is not marked so much by disenchantment as by desecration. The culture’s officer class is committed not merely to marginalizing that which previous generations considered sacred. It is committed to its destruction. Disenchantment has passive connotations, a dull, impersonal, somewhat tedious but inevitable process. But desecration speaks to the exultation that active destruction of the holy involves.

That’s the word I’ve been searching for—desecration. Holy things being trampled on purpose. Precious words being subverted and destroyed. Ordinary human compassion and care being twisted beyond recognition. When it all simmered at a low level—when you just had to drive past long strips of highway cluttered with ugly buildings that beat against the landscape, when you only had to listen to mundane pop music and freak out about not having the correct brand of jeans, when you only had to pretend to care about the lives of celebrities it was sort of endurable. But when the last beautiful places become cursed, what are you supposed to do? Anyway, Trueman goes on:

What is clear is that none of these individuals speaks the language of mourning or loss. These are not words of disenchantment. They are the exultant words of desecration. To quote the commentary at CNN, “Gentili may not have been a believer, but she likely would have delighted in the spectacle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.” Yet there is an irony here. Gentili is dead. There are limits to human self-creation. You can pretend your body has no authority. You can kid yourself and other people that you are a woman when you are a man. But you cannot defy your bodily limits indefinitely.

No—you don’t have authority over life and death. No dumb song will actually keep you from dying.

Four—We’re All Christian Nationalists Now

That movie we’ve all been waiting for, by Rob Reiner, has finally come out. It made a whopping thirty-eight thousand four hundred and fifteen dollars on opening weekend. Probably because everyone already knows how bad Christians are and didn’t need to bother. According to a reviewer who watched the movie, Reiner, who is not a Christian, believes the only good way to be a Christian is to sing more songs and send more money:

According to the film, the only authentic expressions of Christianity are the forms of Christianity that are left-coded in our society. In truth, helping the poor, loving the immigrant, and helping the helpless are not left-coded. That’s just Biblical Christianity. But it becomes left-coded when left-wing pundits and left-wing academics and activists consider all right-coded concerns about abortion and the LGBTQ agenda as “political.”

Imagine all the people, living for today, imagine just how stupid, they would have to be, oohhoooo, to think that staring into a camera made any diference whatsoever. Seriously, read the whole review.

Five—Christian Influencer

I had time, you know, in between not reading books, and decided to type “Christian Influencer” into the YouTube search bar and this came up:

Immediately felt bad for not having made any plans to fast. Not from food, not from the internet, only from Tatertots. As usual, after watching anything like this, I wondered to myself, has this person read the whole Bible, like all the way through, from start to finish? Is the Bible read in her church? What are we even doing here?

Six—Ellul

I’m reading an absolutely brilliant book called The Politics of God and the Politics of Man by Jacques Ellul (English Translation). I finished the chapter on Joram today. Discussing the mystery of God’s sovereign will, and his freedom, he writes this:

The moment and means of God’s intervention are undoubtedly unknown to us and cannot be foreseen or grasped. At no point is God determined by anyone save himself. What we see already in the story, however, is that God intervenes because he remains the God of this people. He intervenes because the one who incarnates the people who should normally represent God to the chosen people, the king, ceases to fulfill this role and is no longer the true king. At this moment God takes upon himself the misery of this people, its shame, and the evil that it commits. One might almost say that what “determines” God’s action in a given circumstance is that God takes upon himself the evil and the misery of man. Referring this to Jesus Christ, we may say that what determines the action and decision of God here and now is that he has taken upon himself all the misery of man and all the revolt of man in his Son Jesus Christ: all the misery and all the evil, including that of the particular situation which we are now living out in our own lives.

Of course, we create AI, and other things. We create them thinking we’ll be able to have greater control over our lives and over each other. But all we’re really doing is giving God more to work with, more ways to bring about his will.

Seven—I Love You Jesus, I guess?

A lovely friend asked me if I’d ever seen this, and, Dear Reader, I had not. In the words of Ryan George, “Wow Wow Wow.” This is like Sandra Lee trying to make a Kwanza Cake only it’s a song and oh my word:

I’m sorry—I’m so sorry, but, I can’t stop crying. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Please, I beg you, read the comments.

Also, have a nice day!