I held onto my Nokia cell phone until it basically dissolved in my hand. Having observed people staring into their smartphones in a sort of hypnotic state I didn’t want to join the club. But it’s a big club and you must join.
I wound up getting an iPhone 13, and Jane added Facebook and assorted apps and I became a full-fledged member, checking my phone every spare minute for the email that would change my life. Right.
Then I started watching reels, 60 second bits of visual info. You click on one and could doom scroll forever! You can start on something like a bunch of Mountain Goats, scaling a sheer vertical rock wall (one my favorites) followed by, a heart surgeon with advice on surviving cardiac arrest followed by a voluptuous woman waking by in a bikini, followed by an expert saying should eat 12 eggs every day, followed by an expose of the Aliens who built the pyramids and are still living in hidden chambers beneath, followed by a bikini clad woman on a trampoline , followed by an expert saying not to eat vegetables because they will kill you, then a mongoose fighting a cobra, another expert advising to eat ONLY ribeye steaks, and then if you’re lucky some more mountain goats, this time being chased by a snow leopard.
Taking a breath here.
Now my boomer brain is pretty much calcified, so this stuff has little effect on me, but imagine the effect it will have on the current generation of teenagers who have total access to it.
How do they figure out what is REAL…. and what is just a REEL!
It’s a sticky wicket!
All very understandable sentiment but we can’t stay here long. The other side is trying to play this as a game-ending tsunami, but it’s not. We lost the round but not the fight. Here’s a quote I read this morning from John Fetterman, Senator from Pennsylvania who went on the record saying democrats should,“Buckle up and pack a lunch, because it’s going to be four years of this.”
I have to admit I was extremely optimistic about the election. Having Kamala was great, a human to vote for instead of that vile fat slob riding a golf cart. However it turned out, after watching a candidate pretend to give a blow job to a microphone, 20,000 people filed out of the rally shouting “THATS OUR GUY!!!!”
R.J.- Haaa…..wait, not. One of the millennials EVER mentioned smoking.
Joe Ford- Yeah well.
R.J.- In a previous interview it was raised that boomers are “Too old to matter.” What’s your reaction to that.?
Joe Ford- I think that being a boomer, a person of this generation, there’s a certain productivity that was expected. There was an America that was on the rise. A lot of things were not told to us that we had to find out for ourselves. In 1968 when we started seeing the fire hoses and the Pettit Bridge we began to realize how insulated those of us in the white middle class were, and how tough it was for others. So, our cavalier attitude hadn’t been confronted with defeat.
Then I started seeing older guys on the block going off to Vietnam and coming back quite changed. I just missed getting drafted but Vietnam affected all of us. The Millennials have never been exposed to the horrors of war so it’s really easy to talk big and get radicalized. Saying stuff like “Well I’m a Libertarian and the government is spending too much money defending Ukraine. And in the South China Sea, we should reconsider our imperialist tendencies.”
I think some of today’s issues can be summed up in the words of the scientist Neil Degrasse Tyson who says: “The problem in this world is that too many people know enough to think they’re right, but not enough to know they’re wrong.”
R.J.- Ok…..how’s the coffee here btw?
Joe Ford- (taking a sip) A little weak.
You can check out JOE FORD’s recording and production work @(SouthBrooklynSound.com/listen)
