The worst thing about writing the back-page column for a political magazine is having to keep things breezy when the news cycle is at its bleakest. If you think that sounds like a boo-hoo, “How can I possibly finish all of this champagne?” sort of problem, you might be right. Still: try finding something light-hearted to say about assassinations, for example, or looking at the cheery side of what is going on in Gaza. It’s like being asked to be the dance critic for a circa-1350 performance of “Ring Around the Rosie,” or agreeing to cover one of those Mesoamerican soccer tournaments where severed heads were used as balls strictly from the sports-desk angle.

It doesn’t help, of course, that as far as I can tell nobody else wants to have a good time either. As of last month, a record-high number of Americans say they consume no alcohol. Sex is going the way of cigarette smoking, which is going the way of the dodo. Increasingly even college students report not getting it on. It would be one thing if this was because they were all applying themselves to their studies—homotopy type theory, Ishkashimi grammar, and so on—but no. Instead, as far as I can tell, they mostly ask robots to do their homework for them, which leaves them with more time to ask robots to pretend to be their girlfriends. Can they ask robots to streak across the lawn and puke for them in front of the 19th-century statue of the mutton-chopped dean too?

Anyway, so much for the youth. We oldsters are still trying our best. Despite my well-known opposition to compulsory “fun,” I recently thought about going to the local cinema for only the second time this decade to see the new Leonardo DiCaprio picture. The trailer suggests that it has guns, cars, bombs, helicopters, chase scenes, nunchaku, and even a tasteless joke about pronouns. But Twitter tells me that I am better off staying home. The movie “HATES CONSERVATIVES.”

Let’s bracket the question of whether a film as opposed to its director or stars can have feelings as such. I am more concerned with the future of being right-wing outside of fine publications like this one. My guess is that it looks more or less like the world of YouTube movie reviewing circa 2012. The only difference is that instead of a girl with lavender hair making a four-part video takedown of microaggressions in a cartoon series in which characters from the Star Wars franchise are represented by Lego toys, it will be a bald guy shouting for 10 agonizing minutes that Avatar 8 has too many seed oils.

Up to this point I have deliberately avoided the subject of mass meme shootings or LARP thrill killings, whatever it is we’re doing now. One reason, apart from their anti-humor potential, is that the stories have become so wearyingly familiar. But even I have to admit to being astonished to learn that the maniac who shot up an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas had apparently spent 17,500 hours playing video games. Folks, that’s 725 days or nearly two years straight—more realistically three years if you assume that even when they are unemployed these people occasionally stop for five minutes for sleep, bathing, micturition (a big if, that). Could this actually be fun? Is pathology ever fun?

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Speaking of pathologies, the other thing these murderers tend to have in common is the use of cannabis, another alleged source of amusement and, apparently, psychosis. (You win some, you lose some.) There are, of course, roughly a billion arguments against the legalization of marijuana, but one of the most obvious is on strictly aesthetic grounds. In my home state pot billboards have colonized every foot of highway space between here and all three of our Canadian border crossings. The “dispensaries” all have anodyne pseudo-pastoral names like “The Flower Bowl” or  “Dunegrass” or “Lettuce.” Their advertisements are in garish colors, with equally hideous fonts, and tend to feature unbelievably lame puns. 

Compare this with the universes effortlessly conjured up by classic tobacco advertisements: the Marlboro Man, a desperado pushing his handcart up a mountain road, or else on horseback framed against a John Ford sunset; the jean-jacket drifter who looks like the Brawny paper towel man’s cooler, stronger older brother crouched at a campfire, not noticeably perturbed by the wolves watching from the tree-line; the high-gloss woman from a Virginia Slims spread, her soul whispering to you out of a cyberpunk dystopia; the 1950s domestic tableaux in which Mom and Dad light up together after carving the roast. Even the menthol crowd got their stylized glaciers and polar bears. (I could do without the anthropomorphic dromedary playing jazz piano, however.) One is a world where you pretend that smoking weed makes you a woodland elf with a coupon code; the other is a world where you get to be some kind of cowboy-cum-yachtsman whose wife is a cross between Elizabeth Taylor, a gourmet chef, and a spy. Both are absurd fantasies, of course, but which one would you prefer to see come true?

Regular readers will recall that in my last column I mentioned the shuttering of our favorite local spot. Despairing of another place to watch the occasional primetime football game when we can find a sitter, my wife and I finally hit upon the bowling alley as a substitute. Who would have guessed that it’s the hottest ticket in town? There is almost no parking, and securing a lane, especially while the leagues are playing, is harder than getting a reservation at Alibi. Who said that Americans were bowling alone?