GORETZKI ON TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LIFESTYLES (NON-COMPREHENSIVE)

Fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much, regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week); getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries; at ease, eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats); a patient, better driver, a safer car (baby smiling in back seat); sleeping well (no bad dreams), no paranoia; careful to all animals (never washing spiders down the plughole); keep in contact with old friends, enjoy a drink now and then; will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in the wall); favours for favours, fond but not in love, charity standing orders; on Sundays, ringroad supermarkets; no killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants; car wash (also on Sundays); no longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows, nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate, nothing so childish; at a better pace, slower and more calculated, no chance of escape; now self-employed, concerned (but powerless), an empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism); will not cry in public; less chance of illness; tyres that grip in the wet [shot of baby strapped in back seat]; a good memory; still cries at a good film; still kisses with saliva; no longer empty and frantic, like a cat tied to a stick that’s driven into frozen winter shit; the ability to laugh at weakness; calm, fitter, healthier, and more productive; a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics  

***

So, we saw the defeat of feminism and glimpsed at what post-feminism begets (stripping and wearing horns on hen nights to show, well, that you’re horny); now it’s time to look at Other Tales of Everyday Twenty-First Century Middle-Class Life, Goretzki’s wry look at several (tenuously connected so let’s call them bourgeois) problems, many touching on our personal health and well-being, affluence attempting to conceal and insulate us from our central existential drama, that damn death-fear – O, Thanatos! – that grows and grows as our sophisticated technologies of the body promise more and more. Beautiful fucking progress. Götterdämmerung.  

If anyone objects – and I can feel it already – that these cartoons don’t form a single category, please write an email to reversesweeper [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk, and state your case. Conversely, don’t fucking bother; just get over it... 

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