“Which Classic Disney Movie is Most Like Your Life?” “Which Decade do you Actually Belong in?” “Who Were You in a Past Life?” “Which Spongebob Character Are You?”
These are just a sampling of “quizzes” on one website or another, mostly Buzzfeed, and I see them trickle down my Facebook Newsfeed. They all share two features: They reference pop culture, and they draw us into thinking about our favorite topic: ourselves. Who WOULDN’T Want to know at least some of these! I mean, they’re about ME and how I attach to those around me, my culture, my world, and of course, my friends on FB because the point isn’t to KNOW, but to SHARE. Share thyself: the mantra of the Selfie Generation.
These little quizzlets are fun, they’re appealingly designed, and you can take the same “quiz” over and over again, seeing if picking a different color, for example, will change the Decade you “actually belong in.” Because, of course, color, right?
Brilliant.
So in my constant pursuit of new ways to alert people to the fact that most of what they know isn’t true, as long as they’re getting their worldview from just about anything Hollywood, academia and the mainstream media disseminates, I had a flash of inspiration: Create a Buzzfeed-like quiz about their factual knowledge, and point their ignorance back to their being misinformed. We would lure them in stealthily – the title would NOT be “How WRONG are you because of the LYING MEDIA?” No, that wouldn’t be the way to do it. It would have to be subversive like:
And that’s where I got stuck. Because if we actually do dumb it down to the level of “How Obsessed with Disney Are You?” is there anything left? How subversive can we actually be before it becomes meaningless? And really, let’s be honest. If most people really don’t care (and they don’t) we might get one shot at attracting their attention but when they see it’s actually, gasp, relevant, well, boom, game over.
Plus it has to be about THEM and something they’d be proud to share. So it can’t really be the kind of thing that actually judges your familiarity with events, leading to something like “You clearly have gone out of your way to remain as ignorant of world issues as you were the day you were born. We salute you, Ignorant American, for being a perfect pawn of today’s culture of disinformation and if you are in fact able to function in the world, you only do so despite being staggeringly clueless about anything of importance. Getting your news from Saturday Night Live may seem like a good idea, but it’s time to grow up, big boy, and find out what’s REALLY going on.”
No, that won’t fly.
“Which Disney Princess would be your favorite news Anchor?” Oh heavens no. “news?” “anchor?” oy! Never. But the Disney Princess part? totally.
How about something backhanded?
“How much smarter than corporate media are you?”
Now, that one has potential. But this one is probably better.
“Which Superhero Are You? “
Yeah, that’ll do it.
We think there’s a lot of potential here actually. But when “progressives” put their minds to impose “progress” on us, to where even considering that information and knowledge might be good things is pretty much laughable, fighting the erosion of our cultural foundations is pretty damned difficult. The very idea of relevant knowledge has been thrown away, if we spend more time thinking about Dancing with the Stars than the motivation behind why President Putin is encroaching on former Soviet nations. What is relevant anymore? Is relevance even relevant? It feels pretty Sysiphean, fighting this fight.
But as with all superheroes, adversity is what makes us stronger and helps reveal our “superpowers.” In the battle of good vs. evil, the Superheros win only as long as they don’t give up.