Over at Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson offers an impressive—and, to be honest, convicting—defense of liking stupid things. “Not everything that exists in the time of Donald Trump has to be a metaphor for Donald Trump,” he writes, “and not every silly trinket produced by capitalism is evidence of our decline in intellectual vigor.”
He’s talking about recent criticism of the fidget spinner. And he’s just getting started:
“I’m particularly irritated by this kind of cultural criticism because it embodies one of the most unfortunate tendencies in left-ish political thinking: the need to spoil everybody’s fun by finding some kind of problem with everything. There is enough serious human misery in the world for the left to point out; there’s no need to problematize the fidget spinner as well.”
Then there’s this:
“Fun is important, and sometimes people have fun by playing tiddlywinks or spinning a top or finding one of the myriad of other trivial diversions that keep us from having to face the full horror of our mortal existence.”
Robinson’s piece is a necessary corrective to the spate of finger-wagging we’re seeing lately. You should read the entire thing. Right now.
