They’re All Going to Laugh at Us, and Maybe That’s the Point

Do you remember those old PSA advertisements aimed at scaring youth from drugs? I remember one from the not-so-distant past where the narrator holds up an egg (these days he would have to auction off his house to do that) and says, “This is your brain.” In the next shot, we see a delicious egg sizzling on a cast iron skillet while the narrator says, “This is your brain on drugs.”

Not to ignore the obvious comment about how omelets are like crack, but one could analyze this PSA and come to one of two conclusions.

One, drugs are bad, and they will fry your brain.

Two, drugs are good because they’re full of protein and taste great with hot sauce.

Note to readers who haven’t figured it out yet: Don’t do drugs. They are not good for you. For evidence of this, see Twitter and Facebook comment sections on pretty much every article.

You’ve seen them. “I’m literally dying!” “That was the best movie ever!” “He’s destroying America!” “The alien experimenters have done it! They’ve successfully bred a class of lizard people bent on consuming the entire internet for their nefarious ends. We must stop them, or the entire galaxy will implode!”

Okay, fine, that last one was my own invention, but remains no less silly than the voluminous stupidity to which we subject ourselves daily.

If you’re literally dying, see a doctor. If that was the best movie ever, you’ve obviously never seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I took a walk today, and nothing looked destroyed.

We have gleefully skipped into the age of ridiculousness.

Outrageous frivolity has existed for as long as man. It turns out that humans are great at turning mundane things into simultaneously epic mountains of awesomeness and the fires at the doorstep of hell itself.

If it seems to you like rhetoric in the free marketplace of ideas has gone off the deep end, you’re not alone. This is an era where crazy sells. No one gets press for calmly employing rationality to move America to real solutions for real problems. But make a ludicrous claim about some sinister plan to make children worship goats, and you’ll generate front page news for days on end, after which you will have convinced legions of people that you’re right.

Hyperbole has become so commonplace that we the people are practically immune to it.

With apologies to literalists everywhere, the drugs are good, and we like them.

We writers make a living on hyperbole. It’s as much a part of storytelling as analogy. Using figurative language to spark an emotional reaction for the reader is a trick authors have employed for millennia. No one ever laughs because the tactic provides both use and value.

Then again, how do we take debate seriously anymore when it has become such a stage for the absurd? Is politics supposed to solve problems, or entertain us?

No one is arguing that passionate speech on issues that really matter to us is to be discouraged. On the contrary, we should be engaged. We can argue facts with real world applications. We can debate without slandering those with whom we don’t entirely agree. We don’t need the drugs.

Perhaps the world doesn’t run on sanity. If it did, count me out. Then again, could our civil discourse be better off with a little less drugs and a lot more reason? I’m a big believer in that. Divisive partisanship is the biggest driver of the addiction. Don’t take that politician or television personality or social media influencer at face value. Always question. But don’t be afraid to laugh at the inanity of it all.

In the meantime, email “Big Tech” and demand the ability to use Comic Sans for when you really want to be taken seriously.