links for 2010-08-07

Common culture is going away because the internet is so big and so full of shiny things pulling at our attention that it’s now extremely difficult to get everyone’s eyes on the same thing at anything like the same time. We exist in a state of cultural fracture, and the cracks are slowly but surely reaching through everything. It became TV’s turn to start coming apart a while back.

In noting the Pentagon’s Ramadan celebrations and a Qur’an reading at a 9/11 memorial service one month after the attack, Elliott points out that “no one has ever heard about Muslims praying at the Pentagon — let alone cared.” “It’s almost as if the entire ‘ground zero mosque’ controversy was whipped up out of nothing by a right-wing tabloid and politicians in search of a wedge issue,” he said.