Escape Pod Dreams - 28
Created | Updated Dec 23, 2003
Where's Robert Palmer when you need him?
An era of change, and era of confusion
They say that those who don't quote George Santayana are doomed to say what he said anyway.
Unless Oscar Wilde said it second.
The tradition of the bon mot and the mot juste's (and that other thing I can't remember the Italian for,)
biting the dust in the Socialist near-victory in the class struggle
has left the barely educated and hardly articulate with the daunting task of filling their memories with half-remembered aphorisms,old playground joke punchlines, ad slogans and movie lines.
The so-called "classical" education of former times having left the stage for a touring engagement in Japan, the modern convenient "training" of the young is letting the literature of the past and it's convenient storehouse of ill-mannered comments for every inconvenience gather dust.
Even the relatively modern radio programmes of the last century are finding themselves wanting in the young ear, because as low as some of the humour was, it was based on a common understanding of literature, theatre and current events.
The ability of the young computer literates to use the Google contraption for practically any subject seems to fall down and not get up when it comes to historical references.
If it happened before their first awareness of video programming or movies, then it probably has no bearing on their innovative little lives.
And if it was published before Harry Potter, then it probably wasn't as good, unless it were that Tolkien fellow, who makes good movies...
