Every so often, a Twitter thread comes along that perfectly encapsulates the degeneracy of our age.
Such a thread drew notice in counterculture circles for blowing the lid off the Pop Cult icons known as FunkoPops.
Read the whole depressing thread.
All their claims of material objectivity and evidence-based secular rationality notwithstanding, the bugmen have not in fact excised the religious impulse from their small souls. They have instead invested the piety once reserved for sacred objects in disposable lumps of branded plastic.
In this way, Pop Cultists fall below noble pagans who actually believed the gods could intervene on his behalf. He has even degraded himself more than primitive animists who believed every tree, stream, and rock held conversant spirits. The bugman acknowledges nothing transcendent. Instead of using ritual, totems, and icons to comport his life with his people’s self-defining myths, he uses fetish dolls to project himself into focus-grouped narratives woven by megacorps around Big Brand X.
That is the final tragedy of the bugman. Like the addict who pushes away anyone who could help him conquer his addiction, he builds a cell out of meaningless corporate product to make sure his his starved soul never tastes the meaning it craves.
Reject Pop Cult icons. Feed your soul on truth. Don’t give money to people who hate you.
Back when I was a kid (about a half a century ago) we called these things toys. They had names like GI Joe and Major Matt Mason. You played with them until they broke, then harassed your parents until they bought other toys. The toys were never revered or worshipped. They were just something you used to burn through your play time.
Granted, there was a certain exuberance on Christmas morning or birthdays when the toy was revealed, but that never lasted more than a few days. Pretty soon the great toy was just another part of the mess in your room you needed to clean up. Eventually, said toy was unceremoniously placed in the trash, never to be thought of again. Of course all this happened at a time when there was a clear line of separation between childhood and adulthood. Now we are all supposed Peter Pan.
Pop icon worship is just another way of doing that. As adults we tend to give these things more meaning because we have to justify to ourselves why we are spending the kid’s college fund money on such things. So yeah, it’s a religious thing. Empty lives are going to worship something, so Baby Yoda it is.
50 years ago, America was close to 90% Christian. Now it’s 65%. Human nature abhors a vacuum.
If Funko teased a joke figure of St. Augustine of Hippo and his background for April Fools, how would Funko’s patrons react? Would they forget that it were April Fools and burn down the Funko headquarters, or would they develop a weird fetish for St. Augustine by virtue of his association with Funko?
It wouldn’t happen. That’s not a copout. Funco’s whole operation is making graven images of PopCult idols for cultists to worship. They’d no sooner announce a St. Augustine bobblehead than the chief rabbi of Jerusalem would advocate displaying a Madonna and Child icon at Passover.
We also need to keep in mind that many of Funco’s customers are heathens who haven’t the faintest idea who Augustine of Hippo is.
Given the public’s reaction to when SQLite adopted the Rule of St. Benedict, the title of “Saint” should be enough to send most of Funko’s customers into media tantrums. But SQLite didn’t have the addictive appeal of a Funko Pop, so this is what I like to call the “pop cult question.” Does the pop cultist’s hatred of holiness outweight his addiction to mass produced plastic?
You also have to remember that there are heathens and lapsed Christians who fashion pornographic or otherwise blasphemous images of our Lord and our Lady. It will be easy to think that Funko will never release Christ-related merchandise until an “IT GETS BETTER” rainbow figure of Jesus becomes all the rage.
Since things are finally opening up, I’m coming into contact with friends and relatives that I haven’t seen for about a year. And I’m realizing how many of them are pop cult devotees. All they want to talk about is the newest show on Netflix, Amazon Prime or Disney Plus, and they get insulted when I tell them I don’t have any of those things.
It’s not that they are just TV nerds. If I try to find common ground by discussing old TV shows that I know they have watched and were fans of in the past, they lose interest. If it’s over five years old it practically doesn’t exist (unless there’s a reboot, in which case they will talk about how the old version isn’t as good as the new one).
They also have really poor impulse control. When I was visiting one of my pop cult friends he constantly took out his phone to order random bits of pop memorabilia related to whatever show was being discussed (though thankfully not Funko Pops).
If I can ask a personal question, exactly what good comes of hanging around those people?
Well, one is my brother. I’m not going to be the one to turn my back on him, though he’s threatened to do so to me several times (and he did actually stop talking to me for half a year when I didn’t condemn the sad puppies campaign).
Another one is my oldest childhood friend, who is now a military vet with many health problems to the point that he doesn’t leave the house and rarely sees anyone in person other than myself (and basically no in person over the last year since he freaked out about COVID-19.) In his case too I can’t really turn my back on him. And while it is true that with both him and my brother the conversation almost always starts with tons of TV shows I don’t care at all about (or worse, gets into some big of woke politics), if I stick things out long enough we often do get to talking about shared memories from the old days, or just general shooting the breeze.
But outside of those two I don’t know if I have a good answer to the question.