Image Credit: Contributed/Jeffrey Loewen

“Fun.”

Is there possibly a more risible and contemptible three-letter noun in the contemporary lexicon?

Fun: it’s everywhere these days. It’s there on the margins of whatever screen you happen to stare into. It’s calling you over the airwaves of whatever radio station you’re currently dialed into. And television, of course, is awash in Fun, from the aspired-to celebrity conferred episodically upon willing hopefuls on talent shows, to the advertisements punctuating all the merry-making with ever more inducements to join in the game.

It’s a con-game, folks; this thing called Fun. But you don’t set the rules. You probably don’t realize that you’re participating in this game; but you are. You get sucked in every time to turn on a screen. Hell, you even pay for it. Willingly! There’s something insidious about this thing called Fun; and it will turn you into a mindless zombie if you have too much of it.

Let me explain, for all you funsters out there, careening about on your Harleys, and your Seadoos, your smartfreakingphones aslant and aglare with apps vibrating your souls into vivacious victimhood.

Not too many decades ago, fun was a simple thing. A couple kids with a plastic bucket and a shovel could spend hours on the beach pleasing themselves with their industrious imaginations. Doubles in one’s hockey card collection could, lickity-split, be clamped with clothespins onto the spokes of one’s bike and the resulting roar could thrill a kid for days to come.

But something happened to good, old-fashioned, fun. And I suspect that my generation, the Baby-boomers, are responsible for this shift to the new, not-really-all-that-fun, Fun.

Somewhere along the line, a horrifying possibility opened up to the spoiled-brat mind of the post-war masses: The possibility that we could remain young forever, not grow up at all, and just keep on having Fun.

And we’re having so much Fun these days that it’s hard to tell who the real adults are anymore. The Fun and the lust for eternal youth has transmuted the shite-thinking of consumer capitalism into the fool’s gold we aspire to ever more rapaciously from one purchase to the next.

Like I suggest, even the adults amongst us are looking less and less adult as time passes. Doctors, once seen as the rational protectors of health, have often decided it’s more lucrative to cater to the Peter Pan consumer out there, and opened ever more prolific numbers of clinics, offering body augmentation and enhancement to keep Baby-boomers’ appearances as preternaturally young as our erstwhile minds.

Botox restores the fading bloom on the proverbial Boomerette rose every bit as effectively as the pharmaceutical industry has brainwashed the aging male Boomer that he needs to be a stud as virile as a sixteen year old. Hell, the aging male Boomer doesn’t even resemble a man anymore. Take a look down your average Okanagan summer boulevard these days and you won’t find a man out there. You will see instead a sea of swaggering Baby Hueys, foppishly turned out with puerile short pants barely concealing plumber-cracks, prematurely-polished pates blinding to the eye, hideously coloured print tees clinging to every worked-out corpuscle, the unspeakably tiresome presence of a baseball cap, and shiny new sneakers inevitably untied and loosened up.

It’s what we might refer to as the Infantilization of the North American Man and the Bimbofication of the North American Woman. And there’s little chance that the transformation is going to end any time soon.

After all, we’re all having so much Fun these days, chasing after the Youth that we swear we’ll never leave behind. But the Fun we are cajoled at every turn to adopt as our raison’d’etre is the slick and sick palimpsest that occludes the hideous truth of the beast that lies beneath.

And what is the truth? you ask. The truth is, we’re dancing on the very thin edge of catastrophe. Our country and the World around us has been hijacked by the corporate powers that be into a supranational Empire with its inherent laws and codes of conduct. The Empire loves its citizens to have Fun. It’s what keeps the Empire safe from too much monitoring from below.

So go on, have your Fun. Have your Youth and its free-wheeling lusting after the New. At a certain point even Baby-boomers will have to wake up. And when we do, we will realize that we have paid a dear price for our time of Fun in the sun and it will be even higher than our personal credit card balances. It’s a shame we devalue the natural progression of Time, and the need to reflect like, well, adults used to do. And the fun that we so eagerly seek? It will be unmasked as the contrived conviviality that it truly is. And in the end, the Empire has won the game. Again.

News from © iNFOnews, 2014