This is a weird stream of consciousness thing that is both me critically reflecting on Ghostbusters in 2023, and also sort of reinventing it with a proposed infomercial. Why this all rushed into my head this afternoon I’ll never know.
“Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters” is a catchy lyric and a fun in-universe slogan for the freelance ghost catchers, but it’s also a truncated set-up and punchline. “Uh oh I have [crazy problem x]! I know, I’ll call [crazy problem x]busters!” It’s a goof on what crazy times we live in, and how New York City really is the city that has EVERYTHING. As time goes on, the problems of the world get stranger and more unpredictable–new problems mean new solutions that can be sold for a premium… enter the Ghostbusters.
I started playing around with the set-up and punchline of Ghostbusters. Movies and TV shows about exorcisms and spiritual combat with the supernatural have been consistently HOT for the last 10 or 15 years. The Conjuring and Insidious movie series both come to mind. Even still, nobody else besides the Ghostbusters are out there doing Secular Humanist ghost removal. What if you’re not Catholic? What if it turns out that there aren’t as many rabbis trained to fight dybbuks as the movies would have you think? What if an exorcism is just too damned expensive?
Look man it’s taken me almost 30 years to figure out a fraction of who I am and maybe that’s an indicator of how slowly I learn or maybe that’s just how long it takes for us to rid ourselves of the toxic sludge adults filled our cups with as children but I will fill my own damn cup from here on out
Don’t let anyone make you feel like time is running out. You’ve got so much time to learn and change and grow and wither and rebirth reparent and repair yourself from all the wounds you survived and learn how to thrive for the first time
“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot
“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.
“you are functionally a conservative” is such a good and clarifying insult
Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women’s bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as “objectively terrible” and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn’t like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn’t like a light “unpopular opinion!” conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.
There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone’s mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.
Now I can’t find any adults who don’t hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, “well except for book X…”
Functionally conservative. It’s so important to have the language to express that.
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