Swine Flu is the least of our worries because a cheap thrills culture of self-maiming that produces such things as “Bagel Heads of Japan” or eyeball tattoos or any of a number of exhibitionist fixations we seem to relish these days will make it such that a bout of the plague might come as a relief. Tokyo has a major head start amongst industrial nations. They’ve been at this deflation-”lost decade” declining expectations thing for going on 20 years now and the feverish ennui, combined with their tendency of taking cultural expressions to an extreme is producing all manner of picturesque mania the likes of which we have yet to dream of but surely will. One of my favorites is the “Ganguro”…young girls who dress up in Minstrel Face by tanning and tanning make-up in order to..well, I don’t quite know what they are up to. Another is the offshoot of Manga called Kawaii and the Lolita wing of that cult of the cute. Here, the “Salaryman” spends his lunch half hour lined up at the comic book stalls leering at cartoons of adolescent girls with 38D’s and surgically rounded eyes. Once in a while, they eagerly line up to get their picture taken with an 8 year old Kawaii girl dressed in a Kimono..for a substantial fee. Kawaii is not all Lolita though, Americans might know of the “Hello Kitty” brand…the thing that is sweetly malevolent and but one of many outcomes of that bomb we dropped called “FatBoy”.

The culture will increasingly create all manner of idle plagues and “end of the world” fixations balanced by sentimental weirdities in order to offset the emotional upset of all the networks following a balloon with no boy in it or some terror lurking everywhere.

Now, did Skinner ever do any studies of rats with a box including an escape hatch?

Given where this post starts, where it ends may be somewhat surprising. At least it is surprising to me. Sometimes my mind wanders while I compose and I end up with writing like this. I have worked on this for several days and every time I revise, i…