Living in the Future

Sarah Palin appears on The Masked Singer (screenshot via YouTube courtesy of Mic)

My faith's been torn asunder
Tell me is that rolling thunder
Or just the sinking sound
Of something righteous going under

Don't worry, darling
No baby, don't you fret
We're living in the future
And none of this has happened yet

—Bruce Springsteen, "Livin' in the Future"

I had a strange moment as I was driving home last Friday. My thoughts were jumping around the way they usually do on night drives like that one. The main thing on my mind was the COVID-19 pandemic. Much more would come of that outbreak over the next few days, as restaurants and bars were forced to shut down and my state's primary election was ultimately postponed to stem the spread of disease. My thoughts also drifted to another, much stupider recent event: the completely surreal appearance of former governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Fox's already-ridiculous show The Masked Singer. Earlier that week, Palin, dressed in a pink bear costume, had spat reworked lyrics to Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" in an event that no sober person could have imagined back in 2008 when she first came on the national scene. There was no obvious connection between these two things, a deadly global pandemic on the one hand and washed-up politician's last gasp for relevance on the other. But considering them together, as two wildly dissimilar but contemporary news stories, an ominous question emerged: what if this is just how things are gonna be?

Start with the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States at least, we are not faced only with the disease itself but also with a society that seems almost perfectly designed to let it flourish: a state that has been hollowed out by neoliberalism over the past few decades, and is now presided over by a former reality show host whose reign has been marked by open incompetence and corruption; a private healthcare system that has little incentive to focus on testing and providing proper treatment to those who need it; and a culture where misinformation readily spreads among a populace that has grown rightfully distrustful of its own government and mass media, as well as of "experts" of any sort. And now that the seriousness of the new coronavirus outbreak is starting to be understood, the deep dysfunction and irrationality is beginning to make itself known: supermarket shelves left barren as people start bafflingly stocking up on toilet paper in large quantities, travel bans enacted against China and Europe over the objections of health experts, the stock market thrown into chaos, lives disrupted as universities and places of employment shut down.

COVID-19 is not the first global pandemic, and it certainly won't be the last. As the planet's climate is progressively altered and the permafrost—home to all sorts of dormant bacteria and vira—melts, and as our globalized culture continues to become more and more integrated with people and cargo traveling from all parts of the world with regularity, it's likely there's more where this came from. While some places, like South Korea, have done an admirable job of responding to the coronavirus pandemic, taken as a whole the global response does not portend terribly well for how these future outbreaks will be handled.

Obviously, the greatest tragedy of COVID-19 and any future pandemics will be the many lives lost to them. But it's fair to also ponder the cultural impact semi-regular outbreaks would have on the vast majority of us who survive them. The irony of the term "social distancing," the practice now being encouraged to prevent the spread of disease, is that it could just as easily be applied to what we've all been doing, willfully or not, over the course of the past few decades. As the collective institutions and groupings that, for better or worse, provided some sense of community have disintegrated (in accordance with Margaret Thatcher's proclamation that "there's no such thing as society"), societies have more and more resembled collections of atomized individuals. We've hardly had much choice to but withdraw further and further into ourselves as practically everything—jobs, homes, acquaintances, marriages—became more and more temporary by necessity. The personal relationships and face-to-face interactions that were once central have become increasingly supplanted by social media, which often encourages the meanest, dumbest and most narcissistic impulses, leaving people more alienated and less empathetic than they once were—not, of course, that we should wax too nostalgic about the "good old days," which were full of their own problems and injustices. And now, if every so often, we must worry that face-to-face interaction might help spread life-threatening illnesses—and cope with the inevitable disruptions to day-to-day life the response and reaction to such outbreaks will entail—that will just be one more factor pushing us towards personal isolation.

It's that same atomization that has helped give us bizarre scenes like Sarah Palin rapping on TV—or a former game show host being sworn in as president for that matter. For politics to be participatory or democratic in any profound sense, collective institutions and organizations—not to mention just some general sense of community—are necessary, and all of those are what's been getting power-washed away like an old coat of paint. So when politics based on mass organization and participation becomes obsolete, what happens? Politics must glom onto some other sort of cultural phenomena, effect some kind of merger. That's where the entertainment industry comes in.

Entertainment, after all, is yet another thing that must fill the gaps left behind by the neoliberalization of modern society. The fact that it's become increasingly available over the past few decades is not simply a fortunate coincidence—and, if possible, it will only become more ubiquitous the further social atomization progresses. How else can you keep a populace of increasingly alienated individuals from either rebelling against the system or simply imploding altogether? It's no wonder that politics and entertainment appear to be merging, up to and including a sort of revolving door that now connects the two of them: at the same time the old forms of politics have died off, entertainment dominates the cultural landscape more and more, and it naturally has to evolve to keep its consumers' attention. If religion was the opium of the masses in Marx's age, something must take its place in an increasingly post-religious landscape.

Not that we will ever reach the levels of, say, the societies imagined in Mike Judge's Idiocracy or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where every form of mass entertainment is artless vulgarity or overwhelming absurdity. No, far from it: people have to get intellectual stimulation from somewhere. There are, and will always continue to be, many shows, movies and books that are intelligent, well-crafted and of serious artistic value. But that's just it: soon enough, the only place that level of profundity or thoughtfulness might be found is in the realm of entertainment, where it's safely directed away from any use that could end up threatening the status quo and serves as just another temporary distraction from the alienation of modern life. It's something of a cold comfort to know we will always have prestige TV and cinema when they serve only as a break from the chaos and irrationality of everything else.

This is the nightmare future we are faced with—not some radical deviation, but merely the worst and most frightening (as well as the most ridiculous) aspects of the past few years and decades made regular, turned into the new "normal." The feelings of isolation and fear we're experience we're all experiencing right now could become just another part of day-to-day life, while politics is finally reduced to the level of a spectator sport—just one more reality show to waste some time on.

Of course, it's not yet inevitable. While Bernie Sanders now stands little chance of becoming the Democratic nominee, the movement he helped to build with this campaign and his 2016 one is a promising deviation from the long-term trends we've seen in politics and society. And the coronavirus epidemic plus the economic turmoil it's already wreaking could prove enough of a shock that we're forced to confront the ominous direction we're headed in, and find a way to change it. Those glimmers of hope, however small, do not have to disappear regardless of who ends up winning the 2020 election. But the window of opportunity is closing. Let these past weeks and the months ahead be a warning that spurs some sort of action, and not a preview of what the future will be.