Published Wednesday, July 27, 2011 2:56 PM
Updated Wednesday, July 27, 2011 2:57 PM
Way too much TV, methinks …?The days of doing business on a handshake seem to be long gone, to be replaced by a contract that contains more pages than Churchill’s “History of the English Speaking Peoples.” We demand explanations, then play dumb when we know better. We want information, but don’t know what to do with it. We’ve been taught that we don’t have to “take that” from anyone, yet life is full of “that,” and much of living life, in fact, is all about how we manage “that.”?It occurs to me that for many the ultimate goal is to position ourselves to be able to say “kiss off,” and other such sentiments to people and institutions who loom higher in our daily lives than we believe they should. The sentiment is well-summed up by Bill Murray’s sleazy championship bowler character in the movie “King Pin,” when he ?wins the $2 million dollar National Bowling Championship – “Woohoo! At last, Big Ernie is completely above the law!”?My personal goals? To be an island. To be answerable only to me. To need no one or nothing, to be left well enough alone. Rules shall not apply to me, and the enforcement thereof shall be practiced elsewhere, on pain of serious retribution against anyone who would attempt to do otherwise.?Failing that, a cabin in the mountains would be nice, someday.?In other words, I, like everyone else, am pretty comfortable with my God complex. Yet at the same time, I’m cognizant -- and only slightly angry and/or wistful -- that most of these are unreachable and unreasonable ambitions.?But the messages we get bombarded with sell exactly that -- teenage fantasy disguised as inherent rights -- and they are so common and so frequent they become nearly subliminal. Television commercials constantly bash parents, bash institutions, bash honesty, bash basic goodness. Inexperienced, Id-driven children are always right and parents are so ?woefully wrong as to be completely negligible.?Don’t believe me? Watch five minutes of commercials without cutting down the volume, getting up for a beer, or surfing channels. ?The people responsible for these abominations should be severely caned.?Then there’s the weather. Hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes and floods all lined up and ready to flush us right out to sea.?Add a Byzantine, unending mess in places like the Middle East and a thousand other little ?diplomatic nightmares and the world becomes scarier every moment. No wonder we continue to advance democracy at gunpoint.
Still, nothing much has really changed in a thousand or so years, except maybe in our technical ability -- and secret desire -- to kill each other off in droves. That and we have a lot more information than we used to; we’re downright overloaded. No wonder people are making money off the ever-idiotic genre of reality TV. Why worry about the end of the world when you can get personally involved in the melodrama of some sawed-off trash princess from Jersey just by Twittering??This is a weird little nut hatchery we're living in these days. Makes me wonder how we got here, anyway. The natural desire, of course, is to point fingers first. Someone -actually that shadowy mob known as “they” – is responsible for all this. “They” did it. “They” mowed down the rain forest and put up a Walmart. “They” commit all the crimes, ruin all the neighborhoods, marry all the farm animals – you name it and “They” do it.
If only I could figure out who “They” really are.?Michael Stipe may have said it best back in '88: “Come ya fwoomie Jehann,” -- no, wait, he said, “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.” And he could have been right.?Or as I am fond of saying in extrapolation, “When the rapture comes, can I have your car?”