Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea?

In the trailer for the new Jay Leno show, Jay is doing his "Jaywalk" asking people questions. "Who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?" he asked a woman. She didn't know. "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?" he asked. "Spongebob Squarepants," she said, with a big smile. A nice woman, cheerful, pleasant but ignorant, like a lot of us.

Spongebob, Jimmy Neutron and Futurama are creative and funny. Stewart and Colbert aren't. But a democracy of nice, cheerful, pleasant but ignorant people isn't a democracy at all. It's a made-to-order consumer society attracted and repelled at will by media, politicians, public relations and propaganda. The more pushed and pulled we are, the more cynical we get, the more appealing Stewart and Colbert become, and the less creative and cheerful things seem.

At the bottom of the pile are the "Oh just screw it" druggies, using everything from pot to Prozac, totally the effect of their environment and the chemicals in their pill bottles and crack pipes. As the society rattles down the tubes and flops into the basement you get California's bill to legalize marijuana, you get an avalanche of ads for anti-depressants, "male enhancement" products, etc. And like Spongebob -- "absorbent and yellow and porus are we."