"Pause"

Barry Blitt/New Yorker

Besides the good laugh I got out of this, I found Blitt’s latest remarkably suggestive.  A few questions that washed ashore for me:

1. Is there a tie-in here to the oil blowout or the Katrina anniversary? Is there a point here about global warming, or TV addiction, or getting off the grid?

2. Is there something uniquely American about this?

3. What’s with us and the ocean these days?

4. Given the title (“Pause”), do people really downshift anymore? Is it that we can no longer afford to? Or is it, in the face of the wired and consumer culture, most people just don’t know how?