Captain PMS - Habermas

Captain’s Blog Stardate 9/11

I am responding to Deep Thunder’s blog on Habermas. It is not that I disagree with anything he said, it’s just that while I was reading the response it struck me that there seem to be two other parties running alongside the cult of the new. As Deep Thunder points out there is a group that glorifies the future in post-modernism, but there is also a cult that glorifies the past. This weekend I visited a shop that specializes in pop culture art and kitsch items. The place is an eye-catching canvas of brightly colored paintings, movie lunchboxes, clocks made of TV posters, and stools covered in comic strips. The owner talked non-stop about his love for memorabilia the whole time we were there. When I read DT’s blog it made me think of this person and how some people glorify the culture we think once existed. It is like the slide Roger put up the first night of class with the cast of Happy Days smiling at the camera. The American family was never like that but we like to believe it was and when we see those images it makes us think that those days were better than these days.

DT says we are constantly waiting for the next batch of freshly hatched technology to come along. I agree but what I find interesting is how we try to make so much of this new technology appear retro. We saw this in architecture in the slides we were shown and on our walk downtown, however, it is everywhere around us once you start to notice it. We are the cult of the new; a group that searches for the next hot thing so they can figure out what will be hot next. Then we can go buy the hot thing but only as long as the packaging looks like yesterday’s new hot thing. No wonder we are all so exhausted.