Gangnam Style, and the Gang-up on our National and Eternal Discourse

A Korean rapper posted his song on YouTube, which widespread, worldwide interest has fomented into nearly one billion hits. PSY has danced his way from South Korea, the land of the endless demonstration, to the White House. Reports reveal that in 2004, the South Korean sensation exhorted listeners to torture and kill Americans because of the United States military presence in Iraq. YouTube is hardly an arbiter for trends that delivers sense of meaning.

One of the first “most popular” YouTube clips was a cat playing the piano. A Tiger Tabby climbed up a piano bench and starting touching the keys. Then was another cat played the piano; that time, the owner moved the surly feline’s paws over the keys. The Orange Tabby “Keyboard Kitty” went from catnaps to  celebrity catnips in a matter of days. A few years later, CNN’s Anderson Cooper lamented the by-gone days of “Keyboard Kitty”, following the rise of accidents and personal bloopers which were dominating YouTube.

Musical talent has transformed YouTube into another commercial venue. Rihanna, Pitbull, and Justin Beiber dominate the YouTube charts. Language professors, political commentators, and all the television shows that you never got to see, you can now see at any time. Let’s not forget the infectiously annoying “Gummi Bear Song”. Yes, a singing gummibear dancing around in his (or its?) underwear has commanded a multi-viral following, along with some baby in a bumblebee costume in a bathroom. . . .

This YouTube Boob-Tube explosion wars against the serious and ignores the eternal.

First, stirring yet stalling political problems do not get the press as they deserve. Instead, the younger generation listens to the same stupidity over and over. How many times freshmen in a computer class watched fat people fall down stairs – I neglect to recall. The disturbing number of gang-fights recorded online is a call for discretion still unheeded. Everyone wants to be a star, but the mediocrity of millions of “fifteen minutes of fame” reduces the light years of brightness in the sky.

One example of the dominance of the unserious: the 2012 Berman-Sherman Congressional race. The tussle for the newly-drawn California 30^th Congressional District drew national endorsements. One YouTube clip focused on the last five minutes of a Berman-Sherman debate at Pierce College. The “elder” (not necessarily “mature”) statesman taunted the younger Democrat Brad Sherman. Bad idea, since Sherman has a notoriously rough reputation, with the high turnover of Congressional staff to prove it. “You wanna get into this?!” Sherman grabbed Berman, getting in the older incumbent’s face. The sheriff stepped in, and all was well. They had debated pressing issues, but the only segment impressed on the rest of us was a schoolyard altercation.

In March, the “Joseph Kony” documentary went viral. Kony the Ugandan warlord heads the “Lord’s Resistance Army”, replete with child soldiers and humanitarian atrocities. The activist group which filmed the thirty-minute expose, U.S. organization Invisible Children, harnessed the attention of high school youth and ABC political correspondent George Stephanpoulos. Just one week after the worldwide attention, Kony remains at large and lethal, the YouTube Documentary has peaked at 90,000,000 hits, and the documentary director’s indecent exposure led to a meltdown, both of which practically stole the show from his own show.

The second concern, one of eternity, could just as well reference identity. What has propelled Korean popstar PSY into YouTube NumberOne-dom? An artificial interest on behalf of a globally-connected community to reach an Internet milestone. Here, the frivolous intersects with an unrealized yearning for the infinite. Everyone wants to be a “big deal”, and playing a little part of making a big deal even bigger is quite appealing.

Yet the ancient King and prophet had already discovered the quest, the question, and the answer deepened into this electronic hub-bub:

“He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” (Ecclesiastes 3: 11)

A more recent translation reveals the greater meaning reveling of this verse:

“He made everything appropriate in its time. He also placed eternity within them—yet, no person can fully comprehend what God is doing from beginning to end.” (New International Version)

Man is looking for something that he must receive by revelation. All the YouTube hits, the numbers, the outlying celebrity, all of it shrinks to nothing, like adding anything to infinity. The noise, the bells, the whistles, and we are left with the emptiness of many hits on a YouTube clip. The serious remains uncertain, and the celebrated does not last, like the wind which never stops, never stays, yet ever flows.

The world is looking for the eternal. Our hearts demand it, yet as much as we cut, paste, film, and make haste to find it and share it, these efforts ignore the importance of the men and women around us, while making something of nothing, yet ever still we yearn from anything to be “something more”.