Johnny
jumped off a bench becomes Johnny jumped off a balcony, which becomes Johnny
jumped off of the roof, which becomes Johnny flew off of the roof, which
becomes Johnny is a witch.
Wonderful.
Could
this perhaps be the reason for mass hysteria?
People do want to believe in crazy things. Take a look at magazines. Brad Pitt and Channing Tatum walking down a
street would become, “Are these Hollywood superstars secretly GAY?”
No, I’m
quite certain they’re not, and I’m also quite certain I did a bad job of
creating the headline for a magazine article, but I’m not planning on making a
career out of that. Staying on topic,
however, according to the magazines, that’s “what the people want,” and to some
extent it is. We’re more likely to watch
a movie about Abraham Lincoln depicting him as some Civil War era superhero
than we are to just watch a documentary about him. That’s the flat out truth, unless of course
you’re interested in documentaries (which I, planning to major in history, don’t
find weird at all). But we can’t deny
that if someone tells us something crazy we’re going to want to believe it
simply because crazy is awesome. We have
a need for crazy. The people at the
Salem Witch Trials wanted to believe in witches because, well, what about their
life was crazy? Nothing! They were random Puritans in a random place
doing whatever the heck they needed to do to get by. Somebody got a little itchy and made some
crazy. The same goes for the George
Zimmerman case. Some kid gets shot and
nobody knows the real story, so you get people who want some crazy and decide
Zimmerman’s a cold-blooded murderer and start rioting in the streets. Well at least we didn’t hang anyone this
time.
So that’s
about it I guess. Crazy.
Do people want crazy or different? I mean, I totally get what you're saying, but if we lived in a super crazy world, would we try to make somthing normal? Take fashion for example. Basically, things get larger than life: outrageous colors and prints, everyone wears it until we want something more subdued. What's popular now? Yoga pants and uggs? What's crazy about that? I'm just saying the opposite to play devil's advocate. I basically pretty much kinda maybe agree with assertion...a little.
ReplyDeleteHaha i guess thats one way to look at it. They live in a really boring place with a boring lifestyle and just wanted to change things up. But still I dont think it is safe to assume that the salem witch trials happened because the Puritans were bored.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the sarcastic tone throughout the piece, especially the introductory "Johnny is a witch" train of thought. And I thought it was an interesting and pretty accurate observation that the Puritans wanted to break free of the rigid laws of their society through a crazy, new, and exciting witch-hunt. Perhaps this was part of the reason McCarthyism was such a big thing in the 40s and 50s where cookie-cutter conformity defined society...
ReplyDelete