Thanks for the excerpts from Warren's column on Into Great Silence. I'd gotten wind of it a while back, and I dearly hope it'll have at least a short run in Vancouver. It's sounds like the sort of movie best seen in a silent theatre.
"We tend to say that our society is driven by consumerism or greed but it's not true. Greed, consumerism, wanting to have a new Porsche, for example, is a disguise of pure fear. It's a near panicking society and that was difficult to accept."
This is unadulterated nonsense, a wild overgeneralization that shames the author and ought to provoke nothing but derision.
There are persons, beyond doubt, who use worldly goods as a buffer for their fears. But if I may trust my sense for the many thousands of persons I have known, those fearful ones are outnumbered greatly by persons who acquire worldly goods for the simplest of reasons: to improve the convenience, safety, and comfort of their lives. While it may be fashionable in some circles to denigrate acquisition and worldly pleasures, Groening's sort of sweeping dismissal is not and has never been accurate -- or fair.
Groening needs to learn perspective and humility. If he routinely offers characterizations such as the above, he's badly lacking in both.
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