Every day in every way we are, I am told, getting better and better. How do we know? Well, for one thing, there's ready access to culture (like the Lollapalooza Grunge Festival we occasionally celebrate near my beloved Seattle). There are also cleaner, safer abortions (if you don't let fundamentalists cow you into making overdrawn definitions about for whom, precisely, they are safe). And, of course, TV screens are larger than ever. This last item is especially important because it feeds into our increasingly receptive minds the critical information we need to know (such as the scientifically proven fact that every day in every way we're getting better and better—and that we should buy more and larger screen TVs).

In addition, proof of our upwardly mobile sociological evolution can be seen in the fact that we are no longer shackled by superstitious adherence to the taboos of a bygone age. Unlike olden days when, in Thomas Howard's words, human beings "believed they had souls, and that what they did in this life had some bearing on the way in which they would finally experience reality" we now know that nothing means anything, it just is. This, I am assured by my large screen TV, is a staggering ethical leap. To read transcendent significance into a cluster of atoms is pure illusion (I learned this from Carl Sagan on "Cosmos"). Now we know that truth lies not in this meaningless flux of physical events (and all events, I am told, are merely physical events), but in our personal truth of the moment—how we feel, not in what things "are" and not in what they might "mean."

# posted by Squach : 9:10 AM   |