Last Friday, Bill Maher gave a good demonstration of how science fiction speaks to our current anxieties in New Rule: A Bone to Pick with Undecided Voters. Start paying close attention at the four minute mark to see how life imitates art and why that might actually offer us hope.
I wasn't the only one to catch this. Greg Evans of Deadline Hollywood did as well in Bill Maher: Hollywood Blockbusters Predicted Trumpocalypse.
Bill Maher gave props to Hollywood – particularly its sci-fi visions – for showing voters both the end of our world and a way to salvation: In his episode-closing New Rules comic monologue, the host of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher last night asked what movies like Divergent, The Hunger Games, Elysium, Snowpiercer and The Giver have in common.I couldn't have said it better myself. Here's to being with Bill Maher and supporting the “cold, technocratic boss lady in a pantsuit.” It beats being led by Immortan Joe!
Can you guess? How about post-apocalyptic worlds rescued and controlled by a “cold, technocratic boss lady in a pantsuit?”
Touting Hollywood’s uncanny ability to predict the future – Star Trek‘s flip-phones, Minority Report‘s touch-screens, Morgan Freeman as president – Maher then reminded viewers about the big screen’s recent nuclear obsession. “Folks, blowing up the world is something that could actually happen,” he said, setting up the bit in earnest.
He has a point. Although it's not the whole country that's stupid. Remember, the other three-quarters did know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and Trump is losing.
ReplyDeleteBut frankly I blame the weird way the educational system in the US is set up. Both funding and control are almost entirely local. I don't think any other advanced country does it that way -- they all have education mostly under central-government control and nationally standardized. In the US, all these backwater areas where people think the Earth is 6,000 years old and homos are evil because Gawd didn't make Adam and Steve -- they can and do perpetuate the same level of understanding of reality from generation to generation because they control their own schools and what little federal standardization exists can easily be flouted because it's seen as "un-American". That's how we wind up with millions of people who think the Sun revolves around the Earth, can't tell Fox and Drudge from actual news sources, and vote for Trump.
At least there's still more of us than there is of them, but we need to do something about this.
Even Mexico has a centralized public education system. The states may administer the schools, but the curriculum is national. As for centralizing our curriculum, that's what Common Core tried to do, albeit weakly. Even that got a lot of push-back from both the left and the right, but it was the right that how the power to actually slow it down.
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