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There's a Seeker Born Every Minute (2024)
Colin Marshall reviews Jeremy Braddock’s “Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums.”
The first time I received such a publicly transmitted message for Fireheads’ ears only occurred in my senior year of high school, when my English teacher dropped the line “Squeeze the wheeze; many people like to.” (He later introduced us to Jorge Luis Borges, whose 1942 story “Death and the Compass” was adapted by the Firesigns on Radio Free Oz in 1967.) During the long sixties that extended into the mid-seventies, “church-going was falling in inverse relationship to the rise in television ownership.” At the same time, “socially liberating post-war affluence conspired with a cocktail of scientific innovations too potent to resist: TV, satellite communications, affordable private transport, amplified music, chemical contraception, LSD, and the nuclear bomb.” from a society weakly held together by a decaying faith to a rapidly desocialising mass of groups and individuals united by little more than a wish for quick satisfaction; from a sheltered assumption of consensus, hierarchy, and fixed values to an era of multiplying viewpoints and jealously levelled standards; from a naive world of patient deferral and measurable progress to a greedy simultaneity of sound-bite news and thought-bite politics; from an empty and frustrating moral formality to an underachieving sensationalism.
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