Are you not entertained?

What an irony that the title of this entry is a line from a movie! Who remembers the scene from Gladiator: Maximus (general-turned slave-turned gladiator) enters the arena surrounded by screaming, cheering onlookers. He is attacked from all sides and very quickly, almost easily, he dispatches all his opponents. In fury and disgust, he yells to the crowd, "Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?" They quiet down briefly, then erupt in even greater cheering as Maximus walks away.

Let me throw some numbers out here:

Earlier this year, Super Bowl XLV drew a viewership roughly equivalent to half of the U.S. population. That's right, 1 in 2 Americans sat down and tuned in to watch two groups of men in extremely tight pants and helmets struggle epically over a bladder of inflated leather. The players in these two groups, by the way, earn a total of about a quarter-billion dollars per year to play their game. Each 30-second commercial slot (during breaks in the breathless action) cost the advertiser a cool $3-million. An estimated 6 million pizzas were ordered from national chains and delivered (hopefully during a commercial break or halftime) to American households while the contest played out on the TV.

Facebook, that ubiquitous social-networking site that everyone seems to be on these days (because, well, they are), surpassed Google as the most-visited website in the U.S. In fact, almost 10% of all page hits in this country went to Facebook, a staggering number. If you combine total time spent per day on the next 5 most-visited sites (Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft/Bing, Wikipedia), you still won't approach Facebook. It has been called the Web's Ultimate Timesink. Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target now sell Facebook Credit gift cards ($5, $10, $25 or $50) to purchase accessories or virtual goods within games such as Farmville. So-called micro transactions (such as purchasing a wishing well for your farm) have evolved into a multi-million dollar industry.

Doritos tortilla chips come in literally dozens of flavors, including All-Nighter Cheeseburger, Last Call Jalapeno Popper, and Tacos At Midnight.

Are you not entertained?

Look around you for a minute. How many items within sight serve the sole purpose of offering something fun to do? A diversion? Entertainment? How much of your day do you spend pursuing nothing more valuable, useful or beneficial than simply filling your time with amusement?

Back to the title of this little entry. I see it as an irony in that one of the entities that I'm weakly railing against here offers the best metaphor for what I'm trying to argue. Who said that: "The medium has become the message" or "The medium has become the metaphor"? Whatever. Something like that. It just helps to show the depth in which I myself am buried in this noise. Believe me, I am no less susceptible to the subtle and not-so-subtle call of our culture of entertainment. Hours (days? weeks? months?) of my life have undoubtedly been sucked away in pursuing worthless modes of dully occupying my brain.

Of course, I can't equate wasting hours online with watching men kill each other for sport. But I can't help but be struck by the passionlessness with which we pursue our lives. In comparison, ancient Rome was barbaric and cruel, and their forms of entertainment clearly demonstrated that. What does it say about us that our entertainment includes online avatars, virtual fishtanks and Jersey Shore?

Who has read Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell? Remember the bleak picture it presents of the future world, a world in which the State controls everything and keeps the public in line through violence, mind control, and constant surveillance? How many in our country today still hold that we are going down this path, that the government is seeking nothing but total control over us as a people? Such a future seemed likely back in 1949 when the book was published, and some would say is closer now than it's ever been.

There was another novel about future times published almost twenty years before Orwell's work: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. His vision of the future is much different, and (in my mind) disturbingly similar to where we find ourselves today. Huxley paints a picture of a world not crushed under tyranny, not tortured and embattled into submission, but amused to death. Where no one needs to ban books for the control of minds because the minds couldn't care less about questions of morality or value systems; they are too busy pursuing their own appetites. Where valuable knowledge isn't kept hidden, but is washed out, drowned in a raging river of endless, useless information. Where the greatest virtue is the neverending search for what titillates the senses, what seems best for #1. As Huxley remarked, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions'. And so mankind is trampled not by power and conquest, but by his own selfish desires.

This has been fun, hasn't it? I want to end with another story from a Roman arena, this time the Coliseum. It is recorded that a gladiator fight was taking place when an old man walked out onto the floor and told those battling to the death to stop and have mercy, "in the name of Christ". The man's name was Telemachus, a monk, and he lost his life as he stood for what he knew was right. Accounts differ as to how he was killed - some say that one of the gladiators ran him through with his sword, some say that the crowd (angry at being so rudely interrupted in their sport) stoned him to death right then and there. Whatever the case, his death awoke the slumbering conscience of Rome and marked the end of Gladiatorial Contests.

Are we awake? Am I awake? Aware of the noise surrounding us, aware of my great desire to while away the time doing nothing in particular, wasting the precious moments that God has given me until I have used them all up? Will we stand up and say "no" to these things, set them aside and pursue "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things." (Philippians 4:8)

Just askin'.