The Osbornes, The Ashlee Simpson Show, Britney and Kevin, or Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie in The Simple Life.

“All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players.”

Don’t make the mistake of thinking about all this as just entertainment. These shows capitalize on our culture’s questions and contradictions about ourselves and the nature of reality.

CONFUSION: We believe that gender is socially constructed at the same time that we want to assert the distinction between and the uniqueness of the male and the female.

CONFUSION: We want to see ourselves as the product of our own wills, yet at the same time we want to see ourselves as natural beings beyond the distorting and alienating effects of civilization.

Why do so many popular television shows, films, and music nourish themselves on a clash of anxiety?

And why do so many artists—from Coldplay to Tori Amos to Tom Wolfe—feel compelled to give it expression?

Tonight we’ll ask Eduardo Velasquez, author of A Consumer’s Guide to the Apocalypse, who uses examples of contemporary artists Coldplay, Tori Amos, and Dave Matthews and the fiction of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons to explain the cultural phenom that has our society’s roles in a state of confusion.

Velásquez teaches political philosophy, science and the arts, literature, and popular culture at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. He received his BA from the University of California at Santa Barbara and his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago, all in political science. He is the editor of Love and Friendship: Rethinking Politics and Affection in Modern Time and Nature, Woman, and the Art of Politics.

Click the button below to join me at 9 p.m. est — The Chat Room will be alive.

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