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Stop Blaming Trump
Okay, I’ll admit: The headline here is clickbait.
But here’s a data point which I think exonerates Donald J. Trump — if, in fact, he needs exoneration — from any charges of diminishing the culture. (I’m not trying to dive into the Trump vs. GOPe argument. I’m just trying to run a business here. I want people to read this post, think about the data point I’m writing about, and then join Ricochet.)
Well, two data points, actually. The first, from Mike Shatzkin at the Idea Logical Company, about publishing trends:
The good news for the publishers is that print sales erosion — at least for the moment — seems to have been stopped … A variety of industry and company sales statistics seem persuasive on that point. The percentage of revenues coming from ebooks for big publishers has declined and the sales of print have risen. And there is even some anecdotal evidence suggesting that bookstore retail shelf space is increasing again.
Oh, wow, great! They’re printing books again, and what’s even better: People are buying books! Not just ebooks, but book books.
But wait. Not so fast. A few days later came this clarification:
The other challenge was a pushback against my claim that print book sales overall are rising. The commenter pointed out that more than the entire print book sales increase shown in industry stats can be accounted for by the rise in sales of adult coloring books, a category which has taken a big leap forward in the past 12 months. For one thing, it is impossible to predict with any accuracy whether or for how long those sales will sustain. But, more importantly, the sales of print that do not include adult coloring books, which have no ebook equivalents and are the good fortune of a few selected companies, are still declining.
Go ahead, read that again: Book sales are rising, but that’s only because of the popularity of something called adult coloring books.
We now have a population of adults who buy coloring books. For themselves. To color in. Because, I guess, real books are too hard? Chapter books are complicated? They need something to do while Netflix is buffering?
There’s lots of talk about the infantilization of grown-ups. Lots of talk about the “dumbing-down” of American culture.
But those verbs seem too passive to capture what’s really happening. Grown-ups are not being infantilized. They’re actively behaving — choosing to behave — like children. The culture is not being dumbed-down. People, Americans, of all shapes and sizes and colors and creeds are doing the dumbing. It’s self-cretinization at a massive scale.
And that isn’t Trump’s fault.
Published in General
I knew a guy whose phone doodles you’d pay money for.
Lol. Actually I color while listening to the podcasts.
I read comment 59, Claire, thinking of the old embroidered pictures hanging in my mother in law’s beach house. The elderly women who made them just stitched over marks on the cloth made by someone else. During WW2, they sewed in the evening while they listened to the radio.
It’s childlike to relax, and find out which color combinations we like more and less, by coloring in pictures. It’s childish to watch debates between candidates for the purpose of being entertained. The way we’ve changed is that we’re now less often childlike and more often childish.
My mom designed lace patterns for others to make, after reading 200 years of lace literature, and making countless more of her own.
Sad Note: The feminine folk arts are in total disarray.
with real cards?
That’s a truly perceptive observation.
No, too much effort. I’d have to clear off some space on a table top, physically shuffle the cards, etc. etc. etc. – Who wants to do all that?
Rob, I hate to disillusion you, but to most Ricocetti, every bad thing is Trump’s fault. He, personally, caused 35% of the Republican Party to become enraged at the establishment. Before Trump, all GOP voters were shiny, happy, people eager to line up on election day to vote for the establishment’s Certified Pre-Owned Moderate Border Weenie™. Then Trump came along and ruined everything.
He had the effrontery, the sheer gall to suggest that it might be a good idea to require foreigners entering the country to stop and get permission first. He raised the utterly horrifying spectre of cutting off the endless flow of cheap immigrant labor and forcing employers to pay a decent wage to Americans. He impertinently suggested that America’s trade deals might not have been good deals for working Americans. He even dissed Megyn Kelly, for God’s sake. Has he no decency?
At first the establishment dismissed him as a clown, a reality TV host who would get bored and drop out, or die the Death of a Thousand Gaffes. But primary season came around and he started winning, and worse, he drove establishment darling ¡Jeb! Bush from the race, and ¡Jeb!’s understudy Rubio into a distant third.
The GOP establishment has three demands which are not negotiable:
And we see who doesn’t read beyond the title …
And we see who didn’t read to the end of the post.
We get them for my 95 year old father. We put on music and he colors while we read or do crossword puzzles in the hour before he goes to bed. He toddles off at 8PM and the bourbon comes out.
Of course not! ;-) On my computer, so it’s easier to go on to the next podcast. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to i1.)