Glorious oversight

ABOUT AMERICAN POP CULTURE FIXTURES AND PRIVILEGED WAY OF LIFE PRESENTED AS A REVIEW OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

- AVIKAL SOMVANSHI

MONGOLS ARE the Exception!” was the running gag in a 2012 YouTube series titled Crash Course World History. It was more ironical than funny because if the writers and producers of the show had actually understood world” history they would not have labelled Mongols as an exception but as continuation of a culture that developed in a markedly different а context and environment than the European empires. Why bring up this West-centric bias in understanding of the world here? The reason is John Green, the producer and anchor of the aforementioned well-produced, adequately hilarious, geopolitically unnuanced YouTube series, who has now labelled his musings about American pop culture fixtures and privileged way of life as review of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is Green's foray into non-fiction. He is otherwise famous as the author of the young-adult best-seller novel The fault in our stars. The book is collection of 44 personal essays that cover topics ranging from the mundane (“Sunsets”) to the topical (“Plague”) to the enigmatic (“Mountain goats”) to the alien, at least to the average Indian (“Diet Dr Pepper”).