That is what I said and when I said it to myself earlier this evening, it sounded bizarre, hyperbolic even. But it's not. It's the truth.
If you think about it, there is no winner in Jenga. There is only a loser. You set up the stack and then one by one, each player removes the block and places it, again, on top of the stack--in an attempt to keep the Escheresque column in place. But eventually, like most other things, it falls. It collapses. It meets its demise. And one person is usually responsible for its fall.
And there, around the campfire, sit the other players, voyeurs if you want to get right down to it. I, myself, have been one of them. We sit there salivating at the thought that the blame for the fall of those blocks could fall on someone else.
This is a depressing game of wooden hot potato and it says nothing more about humanity than the fact that we are at an age in our history where we genuinely like to watch other people fail, where we like to place blame, and worse yet, maybe we are a people who, as Alfred Pennyworth said in The Dark Knight, "...just want to sit back and watch the world burn."
Are there many more malicious versions of this kind of voyeurism? Of course. Yellow journalism perhaps. The lack of acknowledgment of genocide and war unless its funneled through a vintage Hearst publication iced with sensationalism. Our willingness to watch a YouTube video chronicling those acts of violence, excusing it with the perennial reasoning that this is all a part of human nature.
Is Jenga really our biggest problem? Of course not.
Is it the harmless past time it has been portrayed as? Of course not.
Sign of the times? Damn straight.
No comments:
Post a Comment