It is time for us to make up some new legends that we can carry into the future with us, instead of wallowing in worn out fantasies with used-up icons. We are stuttering culturally, our mumblings becoming less revealing, less intelligible, and staler with every retelling. When a society runs out of ideas and can only repeat the same old stories over and over again until they have become meaningless, then we have become prisoners to our own lack of imagination and stifled creativity. We are like bored inmates who return to the same old slop bucket everyday to suck on tasteless familiarity because we know of nothing else. But we are neither nourished nor sustained.
We have worn out James Dean and Marilyn Monroe… we have worn out rock, hip-hop, reality TV, and broadcast news… we have worn out fast food, cars, manufactured celebrities, and Kardashians. We have worn out flying saucers and space aliens. We can think of nothing new. Unless we snap out of it, we will enter the cultural “death-zone”… but not on the peak of a summit: rather, in a pit filled with worn-out garbage.