The Extinction of our Species: Not necessarily a bad thing.
We have an unfortunate tendency towards apocalyptic themes in this house. Mostly I blame Mr. Salamander, but this time I have no one but myself to blame. An article in the New Yorker matter of factly describing the signs and symptoms of the accelerating process of human extinction, caught my attention. At the time I thought extinction would be a pretty bad thing and I was upset. Mr. Salamander, by contrast, in his outrage about the clumsy and unnecessary damage to living systems done by far too many self-centered homo sapiens on the planet, was willing to contemplate the notion with a fair amount of complacency, if not satisfaction.
Last night we watched Hangover, the wildly popular movie on the perennial theme of men behaving badly. And while I'm fully capable of distinguishing slapstick from fact, I have to say that the extreme popularity of movies like this drives me to my own sense that the human race, or at least the half of it that finds this stuff amusing, might be better off considered a failed experiment on the part of the Mystery. I think we have become in large part a culture that glorifies stupidity and exults in puerile mean spiritedness. I like funny smart humor. I don't think stupid is funny. It's certainly not adaptive. I think Darwin would agree.
I need to have more respect and hope for my fellow man and (by that I do mean male) as the world comes apart at the seams. This kind of movie does not support that feeling. Reassuringly, Mr. Salamander was not particularly amused.
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