Short videos of the tic-tic variety have become popular though much maligned. They have been said to shorten attention span and create further degradation of general thinking. This sort of pop humor, a mixture of vulgarity, stupidity and stereotypes actually has a long history. George Orwell described the artist Donald McGill who produced postcards in the twenties, usually having a salacious, double entendre style of humor, with oversexualized women, acting out and feckless males, and much innuendo. Harmless enough in small doses, they do provide some low-brow entertainment, in the same way as modern tic toc videos. They were the humor of the working class then, and probably now as well trying to show as much intellectual noblesse oblige as possible.
Luis N Zumarraga
A psychiatrist in Panama City, Florida, recently died, I was very sorry to hear. I was an intimate part of the mental health community in Panama City from the mid-eighties to 2020. Attrition of old friends and mentors and acquaintances proceeds at an accelerated pace after 60, and the normalcy of the subjective experience, over time, if that is what it is, rather than a sort of numbing, is one of the strangest adaptive qualities of older age. The world's structures, rules, and mores stay roughly the same, but it is peopled with a new set of actors. In any case, I was very sorry to hear of Dr. Zumarraga's death. He was a kind and competent individual from the Philippines, and one aspect of our friendship was that my Dad had served in Manilla during the forties, during the conflagration of that city. At the same time, Dr. Zumaragga was a youngster there. I first met Dr. Zumarraga at the Life Management Center in 1986. He attended weekly meetings to provide psychiatric coverage....
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