New year gloom

January, the month of beginnings. The hopeful New Year baby, cheerfully pushing aside the tired Old Year graybeard. A time to be enthusiastic, optimistic.

And yet, I'm depressed. Not for my own life, which is purring along quite smoothly, thank you. But for the civilization in which I live.

Is it just me? Don't you have the feeling that nothing is working out right? That we're not just going through a downbeat phase, but that we are well advanced into a long-term era of secular decline? That we -- you and me, the folks apt to be reading this post -- resemble those reasonably well-off Romans in the Late Empire, nice folks who went about worrying about getting promotions and helping their kids get into good schools, not noticing what was happening around them? That the economic foundations of their civilization had already collapsed and that they were living off the assets of the past, that their culture was increasingly debased, that the barbarians were storming the gates -- maybe not yet gates close at hand, but Roman gates they had never stormed before?

I don't mean by all this just that I'm perturbed that the Pac-10 and Big Ten did so poorly against the SEC and other boorish, no-account conferences, although that hasn't improved my mood any. No, my thoughts turn to even weightier matters.

For example, in yesterday's New York Times, columnist David Brooks argues that the average American has lost confidence in our political institutions, in our scientists, in our foreign policy, and in our business leaders. Most of all, the average American has totally lost confidence in what Brooks calls "our educated classes." "Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year," he claims.

I've spent too much time watching football this past week, which has given me an exposure to the world of television that I usually lack. The commercials! Ad after ad glorifies an image of the American citizen, and especially the adult American male, as an idiotic, loud-mouthed adolescent -- an ersatz teenager, with all of a teenager's understandable immaturity and gross behaviors, but with none of a true teenager's hopes of growing up and becoming educated into a more intelligent and sensitive human being.

I especially marvel at the televised trailers for upcoming movies, movie after movie displaying an obsession with bleak post-apocalyptic dystopias, cops gone wrong, autos consumed by fireballs, and heroes (or are they villains? who knows?) shooting, slugging, slicing, blowing up, vaporizing and otherwise eliminating everyone who gets in their way, as though human beings were disposable adversaries in a computer game.

Look at the films by major studios opening in January alone: Daybreakers (plague has changed most citizens into vampires); Book of Eli (father and son try to survive in a bleak post-apocalyptic world); Legion (God's fed up and has sent angels to terminate his experiment); Dread (college student taking part in case study uses it to play on the fears of his peers); Edge of Darkness (cop on rampage -- supposedly a good cop, but I didn't like the looks of the trailer); Bitch Slap (no comment). Some of these may be artistically sound movies, and some may be movies I'll actually decide to watch, but that's not my point. The point is that similarly themed movies come at us month after month -- and that movies with these violent and grossly pessimistic themes tend to be the films that best succeed commercially. That fact, I submit, shows something disturbing about our popular culture -- and our popular culture is the measure of our civilization.

I'm worried and I'm depressed. But I'll try to look on the bright side: we still don't entertain ourselves by watching humans being fed to the lions, although Texas's obsession with the dealth penalty does give me pause. Someone will write me that I should just not watch movies or TV if it's going to disturb me all that much. You're right, I'm free to choose my own amusements, just as the more finicky citizens of Rome were free to write poetry and play the lyre and ignore what was going on downtown in the Coliseum -- but shutting their eyes to what was happening to their own civilization didn't save the Empire, did it?

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to check my local newspaper and see which theaters are showing Avatar this weekend.