Po-Mo Polemics
Cheers to the New Age. Whatever that may be.
What is this ‘New Age’ anyway? What is ‘modern’? It is a popularly held belief that today we are living in a post-modern age. What is this ‘post-modern age’? I hear a lot of talk about post-modern this, post-modern that, but never really about post-modernism and what in god’s name is it. That is one of the few concepts in the past decade that has eluded me time and time again. That and, of course, women, Nietzsche and Britney Spears. When I think of Po-Mo, I’d think of Las Vegas, silicone tits, the Endgame Theory, Jenks, post-structuralism, the internet, Warhol, Foucault, de-construction, Derrida, McDonalds, consumerism. Not to forget Mr. Paul who taught me Film History back in 2004. He had the pleasure to confuse the living hell out of me by introducing the class to this whole Po-Mo she-bang thingamajig.
Maybe there are just too many ideologies and complexities in this melting pot with a capital M smacked on it. There’s just too many of too much going everywhere at the same time. Today’s world seems so endless it’s scary to think that we might not be far off from the tip of the bell curve. It’s even scarier to read Fukuyama’s teleology-buttered ideas. I don’t know whether we’re about to hit the brakes or that we’ve been screeching for the past few decades. Either way, it still boils down to the fact that we might be one of the last generations of this great yet sometimes benignly stupid family of humanity.
The global warming clock has long started. Mother Nature is pissed (think El Nino, Katrina, the recent 30-minute mini storm in Subang Jaya). Invisible forces like the internet, the Secret Police, corruption, intolerance, are taking over. Capitalism has humanity by the balls. The end of days prophecies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are steadily being fulfilled. Children are growing up (or rather pushed into the adult world) far too fast. Groups such as women, gays, blacks, Jews that were repressed in the past have now finally risen and are taking over. MTV, drugs, consumerism become new religions. Globalisation has bridged continents and is quietly bringing the world suffocatingly closer together. So close that we willingly let foreign forces through our membrane (in it’s most primary form, membranes ensures the security of cellular identity) and risk losing ourselves.
Theology and secularism are both still stuck in an endless war. Pollution becomes the new ignorance, a kind of an intangible version of your friendly neighbourhood treehugger. Reality TV programmes are mushrooming from every ridiculous microscopic cell of shit ideas known to man. Girls are becoming boys, and boys are becoming girls. Fashion is starting to look like “oh dear lord you poor soul, did Ray Charles climb out of his grave and dress you up?”. Music is the same. There’s even a music band, with two band members who look the same, called Same Same. I mean for the love of god the road nearby my place is called Jalan Bot Laju. That’s Speedboat Road in English. Can it possibly get any worse than that?
It’s a classic case of ideas running away from us. That infamous phenomenon called the writer's block. We are so running out of ideas. Wait. That’s all I needed to say actually. Ignore the whole two paragraphs above. All I had to say was, “We’re running out of ideas”.
We are running out of ideas.
And that my friends is exactly why the world will end.
(12.23am, 25th May 2006)
