I don't know how people like Andrew Sullivan or Ariana Huffington do it, how they write opinion about the state of politics day after day after day. I can still get my head around the idea of a print - including electronic print - reporter amassing and distilling facts from wire services and colleagues in the field to come up with 'Polls Show Prohibition Costing Hoover Crucial Votes' or 'Hearst Deal Likely to Solidify Roosevelt's Lead.' But as truly insane and lamentable as things (what things? nearly all of them! pick one, and just see if it's not insane and lamentable!) are now in this country, and this election, I am incredulous that anyone with an analytical, rational, or even humane bent can be calm enough to render opinion on all this obscenity. Admittedly, I don't get paid for it, which might well be a great tonic for wordlessness, but I'm verklempt. Vollständig. I can't begin to think about it properly in its entirety, let alone take an opinion.
That being said, as the Sarah Palin circus grinds on twenty-four hours a day, the one thing I am absolutely certain of is that I feel sick for her, and I also feel sorry (although more mitigatedly so) for McCain. When her nomination was announced, my first reaction was that it was patently a slick and dirty tactical move: the Democratic Convention seemed very successful, galvanizing millions of exhausted and angry voters. So the Republicans timed this bizarre announcement to take a bit of that attention away.
And that succeeded. She was a crazy pick, an unknown who had figured nowhere on McCain's short list. Plus, unlike those (Above-) Average White Guys McCain was considering, she was a woman, a (rather fertile) mother, a hottie, an elsewherian, and politically quite distinct from McCain. Like Reagan or Bush II, and unlike McCain, for Palin there is a set of ideas on which she will not compromise, and which undergird all her opinions, and which must always be beyond discussion or negotiation. We have seen that there are plenty of voters who can relate to that, if, admittedly, sometimes in the 'I don't know nothin bout art, but I know what I like' manner.
My first reaction was that, being ostensibly a tactical move, it would be short lived. It would serve its purpose of notoriety, exultation, hairstyle commentary and scandal, and then when the attention had died down in a couple weeks, the McCain campaign would find a way to release her back into the wilds of Alaska and settle down with a more predictable, truly marriageable partner. Rural grassroots support for Palin would carry over to the new VP candidate easily, provided a convincing exit narrative had been contrived and managed adroitly. The new candidate would continue to mention Mrs. Palin and her values, and she would continue to be a presence in the campaign, heroic, lionized, as though she had actually died for the struggle. He would promise to uphold her - and 'the American Public's - ideals as he took up her mantle. She would live on as a Photoshopped patron saint, her all-too-human imperfections fallen away effortlessly in post-mortem hagiography and cable-news apathy.
But that didn't happen. Or it hasn't happened yet. And while I do not for a second believe McCain should have picked her (nor that it was McCain who did), nor that she should have accepted, her precipitous rise to stardom based, apparently, on looks, maternity, domestic oil production, and an antagonistic relationship to northern fauna, has, in addition to showing how little news is actually possible to unearth on a 24-hour news station, catapulted this very average madonna-executive into the vicious world of international sarcasm. Every aspect of Sarah Palin to which we have access has been vilified ad nauseum. Even her pregnant daughter and her jock boyfriend/sudden fiance are global laughing-stocks. I may find the boyfriend an atrocious little boy personally, but that is of course irrelevant for very many reasons (just to start, neither of them are running for anything except cover, and neither are responsible for the choices of their elders, let alone the Republican Party), and I would have known nothing about him, his (18-year-old's) stance on matrimony, his sporting preferences, his measurements, his academic record, his misogyny, or his apparent willful ignorance had McCain's handlers not proposed this wild scheme to Palin, nor she accepted. We are all idiots, sinners, bad friends, worse enemies, and only cautious good-doers: that two average rural high-school students are now in the position of being lampooned and excoriated globally for being two average rural high school students is disgusting, and something that should trouble us all.
***Break in the middle of this long post: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Atlantic said something similar and different here, so if you are tired with my position, or my crappy way of expounding it, you can go there, and have a different exposition of a different argument which comes out to a similar injunction: to not be so bloody mean. Or something. Close.
Part of my point is that we're all imperfect, and we all do stupid things, immoral things, and tasteless things. The majority of us are fortunate in that usually only about twenty other people know about them. And while I do not think Mrs. Palin is without culpability in any of this - she is an adult; she could have said no - whatever it is that motivated her assent does not mean that what she is experiencing now, as arguably the most famous person on earth, is to be relished. It is as lamentable as the rest of the heretofore unimaginable crap which daily assaults us.
For me, it was terrible to see her with Katie Couric. She looked at times like she was going to cry, and she was so nervous that even with her notes she frequently couldn't form complete sentences. Instead, she strung together repetitive dependent clauses and catch-phrases that had nothing to do with the question asked. For me it wasn't sport; it was rather like canned hunting. She may be a nice lady, or she may be an execrable human; she may be bright, and she may be utterly incurious; she may be both, always, at the same time. And it may be the case that it was nothing but hubris and a thirst for self-aggrandizement at any cost that drove her to accept the nomination. Manifestly, however, whatever her innate and cultivated aptitudes, and however much one agrees with or loathes her values, she is not ready for Vice- or real Presidency.
McCain is old enough to have said,' What, wait: --who??' and insist that the Party let Palin's family, her political experience, and her global curiosity mature a decade or so before inviting her into national politics. And McCain, as the Presidential candidate for the Party, the person who would have to work with the Vice-President for up to eight years, would, under ideal circumstances, have been able to, expected to, and insistent upon, personally vetting all potential candidates. She, likewise, could have reiterated the famous 'thanks but no thanks' and gracefully suggested that she had a few years more of study, and a few family matters to attend to, before taking the national stage. But, as fame now consistently outscores looks, smarts, and likability in polls of what Americans would prefer to have, her acceptance of the nomination is well within the bounds of normal American behavior. It may be sad, but it is hardly counter-cultural.
And it is because of that fact, the fact of her more strident, obvious, palpable, and less Photoshoppable humanity (especially as versus 30-year political veterans) - not because I agree with her on international or domestic issues, not because I see myself in her womanhood or motherhood, not because I, too, have a complex family, have made mistakes or misjudgments, have succeeded at some things at the expense of others, or have neglected to cultivate parts of myself - that I deeply empathize with her and her family right now, being the brunt of jokes no normal person (even a gorgeously postmodern, outlandishly cynical, Liberal one) could ever have never imagined, every detail of her life scrutinized in absurd fashion, her sartorial choices alternately mimicked and lampooned, her marginal, symbolic, token, silent role as envisioned, extrapolated to its (not entirely illogical) end as potential Ruler of the Last Great Empire.
I hate the whole thing. She shouldn't be there. She is suffering, her family is suffering, friends of friends of her family are suffering. And the country, all the millions and millions of us who are doing no-so-very-well-thank-you-at-the-moment-already will suffer tremendously should someone of so little curiosity and rationality end up as head cook, let alone Captain, of this blighted Narrenschiffe. -- Look, Margaret Thatcher was unique. Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto, Tansu Ҫiller, and Megawati Sukarnoputri were unique, and I'm only picking up the notable notables. There doesn't have to be a woman, or a black guy, or a gay guy, or an ex-bishop, or a prole, or relative of a prole, or a person with a disability, or a person with a large family, or no dependents, or a preference to baklava over awamat -- or a Poodle-studding business or a temporary obsession with lapidary. There just has to be a truly exceptional, historically grounded, ethically centred, utterly visionary, multiply capable, unfailingly prudential and unwaveringly calm individual of whatever genetic or gonadic makeup.
Do I think it was a brilliant cynical move? Sure: it got them what they wanted, which was attention. Do I think we all suffer when those in power think tactically rather than strategically, and of Party rather than country or world? You bet. And I'll see you in Paraguay!
Showing posts with label inanity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inanity. Show all posts
Monday, September 29, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
A Wretch Like Me
In the Weekend Journal, Lee Siegel gave a much more dignified and historical view of the U.S. 'culture wars' than I ever do, blinded as I am by the undignified results of the historical process he outlines. In his piece Siegel asserts that part of the communication gap is the product not solely of the two sides' differential weighting of 'culture' in their political reckonings, but their distinct ways of defining it. For Liberals, culture is a Vermeer or a Mahler symphony, while today's Conservative cannot but view culture, as Siegel says, in the anthropological manner, as 'the practice of getting through life.' Culture is thus what you do with your season tickets for Liberals, and how you live your life for Conservatives. While the Left has long asserted that 'everything is political,' it might now be equally true to claim that for the Right 'everything is cultural.' I'd say the two mean the same thing, but I can't hear myself think over the blaring Shostakovich or the stream of messages from church about the fundraising.
I suspect I agree with Mr. Siegel's view of the two sides' perception, or definition, of culture, but disagree with any hint that culture, however construed, does not markedly influence our political stance or voting decisions. For example, liberal or conservative, 21st century or 18th, certain values are implicit in Western culture. Those values then condition not merely our decisions, but what questions we are even capable of asking en route to taking decisions on one issue or candidate. If this is true, not knowing who Mahler is does not invalidate the many shared assumptions, or cultural inheritance, the non-Mahler-knowing individual has in common with his operagoing, Irigaray-reading, International-Herald-subscribing counterpart.
And this brings me to a post I aborted when it went off in so many directions. One of my points was going to be about the insipidity of the Left's unceasing plaint that the Right always want to 'legislate morality.' In the name of all that is Magna Carta, children, that's what laws do! We may believe that a given legislation legislated morality wrong, or that a candidate poses a threat to what we believe is right, but to the extent that we are not in fact discrete, isolated monads but rather members of a polity - a culture, perhaps, even - with assets, concerns, needs, streetlights, highways, and social institutions (and whatever else you want to throw in there) in common, proscribing first-degree murder or grand larceny has rather more in common with the Decalogue than with a text on descriptive economics.
Laws against murder, theft, rape, and child abuse reflect legislators' and governments' (and, we hope, under a representational system, their constituents') moral stances on those issues. (Yes, they are also expedients toward a society's stability, security, and continuity, and it wasn't in hopes of cultivating a God-fearing, Republican citizenry that Hammurabi promulgated his set of suggestions) but when Liberals assert that single, low-income mothers should have access to social services, medical care, parenting resources and financial assistance, they are as much taking a moral stand about a society's responsibility toward bettering mothers', poor peoples', and childrens' lives as are religious Conservatives with regard to the same society's responsibility toward embryos and fetuses when they argue that we as a society have some responsibility for the unborn. Either is an attempt to 'legislate morality' just as is enacting laws against domestic violence or armed robbery.
Obviously the Left has come to grasp this to a greater extent than Siegel gives them credit for: in many states as fully as at the national level, a candidate from either major party with any hope of winning must, for example, trot out his religious credentials and attempt to convincingly portray his personal friendship with Jesus Christ as the most important and influential relationship in his life (I don't remember sola φιλíα from any theology I've ever studied, but that's politics for you!). He must conjure up a spiritual rags-to-riches story to entrench the narrative of the relationship in voters' minds not only as the bedrock of his views, obviously, and as guarantor of good, clean, ethical behavior if elected (his party represents God, after all, and he is the current incarnation of his party), not to mention proof of his just-like-us faith, falls, and redemption (literally, too, for those of you somehow outside the reach of American media), but also as an arc that will be replicated in his saving us and the country, as well, just as he through grace was able to save himself. Religion becomes theatre, however heartfelt it might actually be in some candidates, and we end up with a bunch of agnostic aspirants and speech-writers falteringly inserting Martin Luther alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. into word-heavy but content-free campaignspeak.
I suspect I agree with Mr. Siegel's view of the two sides' perception, or definition, of culture, but disagree with any hint that culture, however construed, does not markedly influence our political stance or voting decisions. For example, liberal or conservative, 21st century or 18th, certain values are implicit in Western culture. Those values then condition not merely our decisions, but what questions we are even capable of asking en route to taking decisions on one issue or candidate. If this is true, not knowing who Mahler is does not invalidate the many shared assumptions, or cultural inheritance, the non-Mahler-knowing individual has in common with his operagoing, Irigaray-reading, International-Herald-subscribing counterpart.
And this brings me to a post I aborted when it went off in so many directions. One of my points was going to be about the insipidity of the Left's unceasing plaint that the Right always want to 'legislate morality.' In the name of all that is Magna Carta, children, that's what laws do! We may believe that a given legislation legislated morality wrong, or that a candidate poses a threat to what we believe is right, but to the extent that we are not in fact discrete, isolated monads but rather members of a polity - a culture, perhaps, even - with assets, concerns, needs, streetlights, highways, and social institutions (and whatever else you want to throw in there) in common, proscribing first-degree murder or grand larceny has rather more in common with the Decalogue than with a text on descriptive economics.
Laws against murder, theft, rape, and child abuse reflect legislators' and governments' (and, we hope, under a representational system, their constituents') moral stances on those issues. (Yes, they are also expedients toward a society's stability, security, and continuity, and it wasn't in hopes of cultivating a God-fearing, Republican citizenry that Hammurabi promulgated his set of suggestions) but when Liberals assert that single, low-income mothers should have access to social services, medical care, parenting resources and financial assistance, they are as much taking a moral stand about a society's responsibility toward bettering mothers', poor peoples', and childrens' lives as are religious Conservatives with regard to the same society's responsibility toward embryos and fetuses when they argue that we as a society have some responsibility for the unborn. Either is an attempt to 'legislate morality' just as is enacting laws against domestic violence or armed robbery.
Obviously the Left has come to grasp this to a greater extent than Siegel gives them credit for: in many states as fully as at the national level, a candidate from either major party with any hope of winning must, for example, trot out his religious credentials and attempt to convincingly portray his personal friendship with Jesus Christ as the most important and influential relationship in his life (I don't remember sola φιλíα from any theology I've ever studied, but that's politics for you!). He must conjure up a spiritual rags-to-riches story to entrench the narrative of the relationship in voters' minds not only as the bedrock of his views, obviously, and as guarantor of good, clean, ethical behavior if elected (his party represents God, after all, and he is the current incarnation of his party), not to mention proof of his just-like-us faith, falls, and redemption (literally, too, for those of you somehow outside the reach of American media), but also as an arc that will be replicated in his saving us and the country, as well, just as he through grace was able to save himself. Religion becomes theatre, however heartfelt it might actually be in some candidates, and we end up with a bunch of agnostic aspirants and speech-writers falteringly inserting Martin Luther alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. into word-heavy but content-free campaignspeak.
Monday, July 28, 2008
'Dear Prudence
And in the tradition of Sunday posts wherein WNYC's 'On the Media' on the way home from church always seems to relate directly to whatever I had been thinking earlier in the day, here goes:
'On the Media' was on the Internet today. Well, it's always on the Internet if you want to find it, at http://www.onthemedia.org, but this time it was on the subject of the Internet. Here is the link for 'On the Media' on the Internet, on the Internet.
The show was an exploration of aspects of 'digital democracy,' in which such issues as maturity, anonymity, restraint, tolerance, hate, and even my old stand-by, compassion, arose. Surely our print selves, even with name attached and bound in book form, are not identical to our living, feeling, physical, social selves; the relationship between the two is, in many cases, increasingly tenuous the further away from the nexus of social reality, relationships, name, and reputation the writer gets. And anonymous comments on the Internet are about as void of social context as anything could be.
Some people cleave to politeness and consideration regardless of venue. On the other hand, while Ira Glass on the show told of vicious, hurtful things written anonymously to the subjects of a sad and deeply personal vignette on the 'This American Life' comments section, I've seen shockingly and unconscionably mean postings on web forums about religious life and vocations, in which troubled individuals pour out their hatred by calling non-habited religious, or religious of this or that community, all sorts of disgusting things. In the latter case, I should think the self-selection involved, in which all readers are presumably hoping for and working toward the same thing, would have precluded such puerile and nasty behavior.
And yet anonymity, and by extension all the Web, seem to offer an unlimited license to let the Id run free, to discard normal conventions and even ethics in pursuit of untrammeled expression of whatever caliber. I don't know that it's gotten worse in general, or that there are simply so many more people using it, but it does seem like now a greater number of rational arguments than before in every type of venue quickly degenerate into 'You're just stupid,' to which the counterargument these days runs, succinctly, 'F- you!'
...greet the brand new day.'
'On the Media' was on the Internet today. Well, it's always on the Internet if you want to find it, at http://www.onthemedia.org, but this time it was on the subject of the Internet. Here is the link for 'On the Media' on the Internet, on the Internet.
The show was an exploration of aspects of 'digital democracy,' in which such issues as maturity, anonymity, restraint, tolerance, hate, and even my old stand-by, compassion, arose. Surely our print selves, even with name attached and bound in book form, are not identical to our living, feeling, physical, social selves; the relationship between the two is, in many cases, increasingly tenuous the further away from the nexus of social reality, relationships, name, and reputation the writer gets. And anonymous comments on the Internet are about as void of social context as anything could be.
Some people cleave to politeness and consideration regardless of venue. On the other hand, while Ira Glass on the show told of vicious, hurtful things written anonymously to the subjects of a sad and deeply personal vignette on the 'This American Life' comments section, I've seen shockingly and unconscionably mean postings on web forums about religious life and vocations, in which troubled individuals pour out their hatred by calling non-habited religious, or religious of this or that community, all sorts of disgusting things. In the latter case, I should think the self-selection involved, in which all readers are presumably hoping for and working toward the same thing, would have precluded such puerile and nasty behavior.
And yet anonymity, and by extension all the Web, seem to offer an unlimited license to let the Id run free, to discard normal conventions and even ethics in pursuit of untrammeled expression of whatever caliber. I don't know that it's gotten worse in general, or that there are simply so many more people using it, but it does seem like now a greater number of rational arguments than before in every type of venue quickly degenerate into 'You're just stupid,' to which the counterargument these days runs, succinctly, 'F- you!'
...greet the brand new day.'
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
But Mochi Doesn't Wear Loincloths!
I have only two things to say.
One is: 'Diplomacy is not synonymous with talking,' and the other is:
Diplomacy ≠ Talking? Diplomacy ≥ Talking? Diplomacy < Talking?
Alright, children, bubble tea is not synonymous with tapioca; religion is not synonymous with faith; politics is not synonymous with guanxi; and cole slaw in Kotzebue is not synonymous with Matanuska Valley cabbage. But I would expect to encounter a fair bit of the latter in any of these cases should I find myself confronted with the former.
I understand (perhaps) (in the most gracious reading) that what Ms. Rice meant to say was something like 'Diplomacy is not coextensive with talking,' mixed with a more minatory something akin to 'We have reconceived the notion of diplomacy such that a range of things from threats to preemptive strikes can now be put in the overlappy middle bit of a Diplomacy/War Wenn diagram.' She just didn't think Americans would understand 'coextensive,' 'reconceived,' or 'Wenn diagram.'
And more power to her: we don't. But I assume the esteemed Secretary did fairly well on her GRE, and even if it were more years ago than her youthful looks would imply, putting that zingy soundbite in the lamentable form she chose makes one want to ask, 'If not synonyms, then what are they? You've juxtaposed them; it seems you've counterposed them. Now tell us the nature of their relationship, if it is not one of synonyms. Diplomacy is to Talking as _________ is to what, Ms. Rice?'
To help her and us out, here are some choices of sample GRE analogy questions from this site.
COLOR: SPECTRUM::
a. tone: scale
b. sound: waves
c. verse: poem
d. dimension: space
e. cell: organism
HEADLONG:FORETHOUGHT::
a. barefaced: shame
b. mealymouth: talent
c. heartbroken: emotion
d. levelheaded: resolve
e. singlehanded: ambition
SEDATIVE: DROWSINESS::
a. epidemic: contagiousness
b. vaccine: virus
c. laxative: drug
d. anesthetic: numbness
e. therapy: psychosis
I don't want to sound unduly cynical, but I suspect Ms. Rice is hinting that for the departing administration it may be that
diplomacy: talking :: gladiator: kagami mochi.
One is: 'Diplomacy is not synonymous with talking,' and the other is:
| Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
 61° F | 47° F 16° C | 8° C | 61° F | 49° F 16° C | 9° C |  61° F | 49° F 16° C | 9° C |  63° F | 50° F 17° C | 10° C | 63° F | 50° F 17° C | 10° C |
| Mostly Cloudy | Mostly Cloudy | Rain Showers 70% chance of precipitation | Chance of Rain 50% chance of precipitation | Chance of Rain 30% chance of precipitation |
Diplomacy ≠ Talking? Diplomacy ≥ Talking? Diplomacy < Talking?
Alright, children, bubble tea is not synonymous with tapioca; religion is not synonymous with faith; politics is not synonymous with guanxi; and cole slaw in Kotzebue is not synonymous with Matanuska Valley cabbage. But I would expect to encounter a fair bit of the latter in any of these cases should I find myself confronted with the former.
I understand (perhaps) (in the most gracious reading) that what Ms. Rice meant to say was something like 'Diplomacy is not coextensive with talking,' mixed with a more minatory something akin to 'We have reconceived the notion of diplomacy such that a range of things from threats to preemptive strikes can now be put in the overlappy middle bit of a Diplomacy/War Wenn diagram.' She just didn't think Americans would understand 'coextensive,' 'reconceived,' or 'Wenn diagram.'
And more power to her: we don't. But I assume the esteemed Secretary did fairly well on her GRE, and even if it were more years ago than her youthful looks would imply, putting that zingy soundbite in the lamentable form she chose makes one want to ask, 'If not synonyms, then what are they? You've juxtaposed them; it seems you've counterposed them. Now tell us the nature of their relationship, if it is not one of synonyms. Diplomacy is to Talking as _________ is to what, Ms. Rice?'
To help her and us out, here are some choices of sample GRE analogy questions from this site.
COLOR: SPECTRUM::
a. tone: scale
b. sound: waves
c. verse: poem
d. dimension: space
e. cell: organism
HEADLONG:FORETHOUGHT::
a. barefaced: shame
b. mealymouth: talent
c. heartbroken: emotion
d. levelheaded: resolve
e. singlehanded: ambition
SEDATIVE: DROWSINESS::
a. epidemic: contagiousness
b. vaccine: virus
c. laxative: drug
d. anesthetic: numbness
e. therapy: psychosis
I don't want to sound unduly cynical, but I suspect Ms. Rice is hinting that for the departing administration it may be that
diplomacy: talking :: gladiator: kagami mochi.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Ess, Bench, Sei a Mensch!
And while we are on the subject of stupidity, I would like to expatiate a bit on one of my long-held peeves: use of the content-free, yet so perniciously, routinely, and vacuously turned-to word 'classy.'
Now, I hear you rustling in your chair, getting ready to object, 'It can't be content-free, since I know what it means!' And I see your point (somewhat): there is a meaning, to some extent. My problem is that that meaning is now predicated on air, which is a bad thing to predicate most things on, unless those things are respiration, or flying.
I say now because things have changed a great deal in the past few centuries. These days it's harder to find a daimyo, serf, lady-in-waiting, knight errant or invigorating pas d'armes than it is a suburban mother of three driving a sensible mid-size sedan. First it was that whole business with Gutenberg, then Diderot, Condorcet, Rousseau, Kant. The Church, King, and God got disentangled, and Man with his Declaration of Rights stepped into the vacuum. Then came Marx, Lincoln, child labor laws, compulsory education, corporations, self-made men, literate freedmen and chimney sweeps.
(And et cetera.)
Add in the First World War, department stores, film, dance halls, television, and ascendant America, and what remains in the 'developed world' is demotic American culture writ large. Class distinction is a monetary distinction only, no longer rightly carrying with it connotations of difference in education, refinement, or taste in amusements. Popular culture, now the prevailing cultural expression, filters 'up' from the masses or out from the advertising industry and routinely influences 'high' art. Meanwhile, in countries where there still exist aristocracies, their scions grow up listening to the same rap and rock as do most other teenagers worldwide.
In the U.S., having taken the Enlightenment seriously, or at least the parts of it we felt applied to men of European ancestry, we wanted no truck with hereditary title, and sought instead to create a sort of meritocracy and a culture of opportunity. A poor man could through industry become rich, and some did. And then they realized that they weren't acting as they imagined rich people to. They hadn't the training. They hadn't acquired any acquired tastes. They didn't know a cantata from a canticle, couldn't tell Burne-Jones from Botticelli. So rich boys were sent away to learn Latin and Greek and history and politics as their European (economic) counterparts did, while rich girls learned ladylike arts and comportment at finishing school, the better to resemble people with money who had a family history of being people with money.
But it is all quite different now. We still have a robust tradition of philanthropy amongst the very wealthy in this country, and of that we should be proud. But with regard to 'class' being a reliable predictor of erudition, conduct, diction, taste, or 'classiness,' I need only point to George W. Bush and Paris Hilton as two notable examples among many with regard to which that is patently not true. Examples pertaining to either of these two admittedly egregious cases are too numerous to mention, obviously, but I think Bush's question to Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso in 2001, 'Do you have blacks, too?' (drawn from a conversation they were having about difficult race relations in the two countries, according to Cardoso), is just as
good as any I might pick, as it is nicely multilayered in its resignation to (optimistic reading), or embrace of (more realistic version), ignorance, insularity, ineptitude, and indelicacy.
And perhaps that is where the problem lies. On the one hand, there is nothing to aspire to. On the other, the major cognitive divide in society is between youth and age. Both categories are fluid and subjective, but since 'youth' is widely believed to be a 'state of mind' rather than chronological fact, it can be learned, attained, much in the manner of adulthood in days past. The youthful demotic is now normative. Being young is what the old aspire to.
Fame is what matters, and it is viewed as simply Popularity on a much larger scale. Bush is the Homecoming King because he is in the White House; Ms. Hilton the Queen because her images, flattering or otherwise, are everywhere. He enacts variously the role of the sitcom buffoon, the warrior-hero, the rodeo cowboy, and the child king eternally under the tutelage of this or that éminence grise.
He is under no obligation to behave with the 'dignity befitting his position,' as his position is Star. He is the Captain of the Football Team; what he does or says is cool, or, more alarmingly, correct, by virtue of his having done or said it. His imprimatur is sufficient. The same with Ms. Hilton or other celebrities, or by virtue of the fact that a particular item is sold at a particular store. There is no global warming because George Bush says it is a fiction; I must buy these shoes (or a cheap knockoff of the style) because Saks says they are desirable. I must listen to Phish, or go to Burning Man, because (at 40, or 50, or 60) the kids I think look 'coolest' (or is it more comprehensible, and more as I envision my youthful self?) do...
In any of these three cases, I think the root problem is the same: immaturity, a symptom of which is the inability to think for oneself. This willful ceding of all higher-level though to the monarch and to Madison Avenue, which would have scandalized the thinkers of the last few centuries had they been forced to witness it, is routine for us now. Second nature. Nearly ineluctable. This tendency is evidenced in our pandemic of not voting as well as in our voting, as noted previously, for people we fancy we would 'like' were we to encounter them in a social situation. It is also apparent in our decisions about where we live, why, and what criteria we routinely turn to when meeting others.
But more on that then. Time for bed and books and sweet dreams,
so whatever it was I was going to say about Lautréamont with regard to all this, and whatever Grand Pronouncements I was hoping to get to about stupidity, cupidity, faux anything, the unconquerable vacuity of the newly rich and poorly educated, and the few (very few) defensible occasions on which one might wear a tweed jacket (I know, I knooooow, and it hurts me far worse than it does you, but some people simply don't listen to their clothing consciences!) will simply have to wait.
Now, I hear you rustling in your chair, getting ready to object, 'It can't be content-free, since I know what it means!' And I see your point (somewhat): there is a meaning, to some extent. My problem is that that meaning is now predicated on air, which is a bad thing to predicate most things on, unless those things are respiration, or flying.
I say now because things have changed a great deal in the past few centuries. These days it's harder to find a daimyo, serf, lady-in-waiting, knight errant or invigorating pas d'armes than it is a suburban mother of three driving a sensible mid-size sedan. First it was that whole business with Gutenberg, then Diderot, Condorcet, Rousseau, Kant. The Church, King, and God got disentangled, and Man with his Declaration of Rights stepped into the vacuum. Then came Marx, Lincoln, child labor laws, compulsory education, corporations, self-made men, literate freedmen and chimney sweeps.
(And et cetera.)
Add in the First World War, department stores, film, dance halls, television, and ascendant America, and what remains in the 'developed world' is demotic American culture writ large. Class distinction is a monetary distinction only, no longer rightly carrying with it connotations of difference in education, refinement, or taste in amusements. Popular culture, now the prevailing cultural expression, filters 'up' from the masses or out from the advertising industry and routinely influences 'high' art. Meanwhile, in countries where there still exist aristocracies, their scions grow up listening to the same rap and rock as do most other teenagers worldwide.
In the U.S., having taken the Enlightenment seriously, or at least the parts of it we felt applied to men of European ancestry, we wanted no truck with hereditary title, and sought instead to create a sort of meritocracy and a culture of opportunity. A poor man could through industry become rich, and some did. And then they realized that they weren't acting as they imagined rich people to. They hadn't the training. They hadn't acquired any acquired tastes. They didn't know a cantata from a canticle, couldn't tell Burne-Jones from Botticelli. So rich boys were sent away to learn Latin and Greek and history and politics as their European (economic) counterparts did, while rich girls learned ladylike arts and comportment at finishing school, the better to resemble people with money who had a family history of being people with money.
But it is all quite different now. We still have a robust tradition of philanthropy amongst the very wealthy in this country, and of that we should be proud. But with regard to 'class' being a reliable predictor of erudition, conduct, diction, taste, or 'classiness,' I need only point to George W. Bush and Paris Hilton as two notable examples among many with regard to which that is patently not true. Examples pertaining to either of these two admittedly egregious cases are too numerous to mention, obviously, but I think Bush's question to Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso in 2001, 'Do you have blacks, too?' (drawn from a conversation they were having about difficult race relations in the two countries, according to Cardoso), is just as
good as any I might pick, as it is nicely multilayered in its resignation to (optimistic reading), or embrace of (more realistic version), ignorance, insularity, ineptitude, and indelicacy.And perhaps that is where the problem lies. On the one hand, there is nothing to aspire to. On the other, the major cognitive divide in society is between youth and age. Both categories are fluid and subjective, but since 'youth' is widely believed to be a 'state of mind' rather than chronological fact, it can be learned, attained, much in the manner of adulthood in days past. The youthful demotic is now normative. Being young is what the old aspire to.
Fame is what matters, and it is viewed as simply Popularity on a much larger scale. Bush is the Homecoming King because he is in the White House; Ms. Hilton the Queen because her images, flattering or otherwise, are everywhere. He enacts variously the role of the sitcom buffoon, the warrior-hero, the rodeo cowboy, and the child king eternally under the tutelage of this or that éminence grise.
He is under no obligation to behave with the 'dignity befitting his position,' as his position is Star. He is the Captain of the Football Team; what he does or says is cool, or, more alarmingly, correct, by virtue of his having done or said it. His imprimatur is sufficient. The same with Ms. Hilton or other celebrities, or by virtue of the fact that a particular item is sold at a particular store. There is no global warming because George Bush says it is a fiction; I must buy these shoes (or a cheap knockoff of the style) because Saks says they are desirable. I must listen to Phish, or go to Burning Man, because (at 40, or 50, or 60) the kids I think look 'coolest' (or is it more comprehensible, and more as I envision my youthful self?) do...
In any of these three cases, I think the root problem is the same: immaturity, a symptom of which is the inability to think for oneself. This willful ceding of all higher-level though to the monarch and to Madison Avenue, which would have scandalized the thinkers of the last few centuries had they been forced to witness it, is routine for us now. Second nature. Nearly ineluctable. This tendency is evidenced in our pandemic of not voting as well as in our voting, as noted previously, for people we fancy we would 'like' were we to encounter them in a social situation. It is also apparent in our decisions about where we live, why, and what criteria we routinely turn to when meeting others.
But more on that then. Time for bed and books and sweet dreams,
so whatever it was I was going to say about Lautréamont with regard to all this, and whatever Grand Pronouncements I was hoping to get to about stupidity, cupidity, faux anything, the unconquerable vacuity of the newly rich and poorly educated, and the few (very few) defensible occasions on which one might wear a tweed jacket (I know, I knooooow, and it hurts me far worse than it does you, but some people simply don't listen to their clothing consciences!) will simply have to wait.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
I hear, yet say not much, but think the more.
Shakespeare, Henry VI, Pt. 3, IV, 1
I was going to get my nails done today, but problematically I took a nap that lasted until 22:30. That also precluded following through on any evening plans. Not that I'm saying I had any. Also not to mention sabotaging any hope of a regular bedtime or waking. Not that I'm divulging what those normally are, or even that I am so rigid as to adhere to a pattern.
I was going to steam the rugs, too. Not that I wish to indicate that I have access to water.
Although I feel a tremendous sense of liberation as to what I can or cannot say now, and while I still hope the point of writing a Personal Weblog in the first place is not having to worry about whether or not one sounds snarky, the fact remains that there will always now be a chill in the air as I imagine someone scrutinizing every post for Signs.
Which of course there aren't. And I sometimes start things and finish them later, and only then try to decide whether they should be dated as 'then' or 'now.' Although I admit that the Blackwater entry was something I encountered that same day I posted it.
No, this won't do. I really don't want this to become a blog concerned solely with the antics of the neighbor's cat and Internet snippets I find amusing or tragic. Or an extended apologia for my belief that there truly is something in between, that I do believe in a middle -- in fact a big, hearty one like the Average American Middle, and that, further, it is in that middle that I imagine most things to reside.
It's just that the middle isn't that entertaining.
For example, today I did not get stuck in any particularly egregious traffic. I missed it, in other words, both coming and going. I was moderately pleased by McCain's moderate success and what it might or might not portend, and likewise mildly bemused by Clinton's lack of the foregone-conclusion landslide. I had the intent to steam some clothes, but was slightly saddened that I had left the water in the steamer too long and came to the mildly disheartening realization that, while agitation with white vinegar inside the chamber helped a bit, a proper cleaning would require the purchase and application of a baby-bottle-sort-of brush, the undertaking of which I with the vaguest sense of resignation felt better left to another day.
I likewise awoke from my tranquil yet perhaps excessive nap with a middling discomfort surrounding the realization that tomorrow I will possibly have a marginally puffy face. This minor regret as regards the conjectured effects of my temporary intemperance in matters of adhering to strict diurnality was offset by the realization that I could simply hold bags of frozen spinach up to one eye with my arm-thigh while using the other eye to assist the fingers of one hand in painting those of the other. If the need to atone for my indolence should arise (understanding that the odds of such an arising are nearly nil), I could strap, if I wished, the bag of spinach over alternating eyes with an aromatherapeuticized silk scarf while steaming the carpets, thus rendering any discussion or internal dialogue as to the effects of my negligible profligacy on either the productivity or cosmetic arenas nil.
In addition, I was suffused by low-grade joy when the neighbor's cat came to call, as well as by his choosing to lay on my stomach. He has not, as of this writing, yet done anything to cause either consternation or ecstatic exuberance, nor has he engaged in any overtly comical 'antics.' He was a bit miffed about the weather, but did not tremble, jump on things, or make unsettling sounds, so pathos, too, is out.
I ate a mostly nutritious dinner but did not go overboard. That is to say, it was at the same time high-fat as well as accompanied by yogurt and the vegetable-seaweed condiment/nutritional powder. It was tasty, but not excessively so. And I ate a shellfish-shaped Belgian chocolate after. I did feel the merest tinge of regret that I neither had on hand a bottle of the sort of wine one would not regret popping open for just one and leaving largely undrunk, nor had sufficient motivation to go to a store and procure just such a mediocre and moderately-priced selection. I then effaced that tinge when I realized that even one glass would likely enhance rather than diminish the sleep-disturbing effects of the long nap, which realization conduced to a subtle relief commingled with a vague joy. When, later, the appropriate dose for my weight of melatonin succeeded in creating the appropriate measure of somnolence at a reasonable hour, I was pleased, but not to an extent that would have adversely affected my newfound sleepiness.
In addition, somewhere in there I bathed, and styled my hair. I did not take an extravagant Bubble Bath, or fill the tub with milk or rose petals, but I did change the blade on my razor, resulting in a closer shave than my last. As I did not use a lot of Products in the styling of the hair, it felt and looked silkier than at other times, but not, it not being four feet long, frighteningly glossy, just moderately, somewhat attractively so. And I chose a black sweater set for the day's sweater set, not out of melancholia, mind you, but because it is a bit thicker, softer, and cozier than some of the others.
See? That won't do. Who cares? I certainly don't; I can't imagine you do, either. But that is the reality of most people's days; most are fairly good, which means fairly prosaic, which means fairly unwritable. I you want something to write about daily life, you must either realistically portray, or exaggerate, or invent some kind of Challenge or Crisis for the hero to encounter and struggle against and sometimes surmount. And Proust, were he here, would no doubt be able elegantly to make my lily-of-the-valley soap evocative of much, much more than cleanliness and nice packaging, and tie it in handily and subtlely with the tiny cheap lily-of-the-valley perfume sets I used to insist, as a child, that I be given when we encountered them in 'gift shops' on family 'road trips' -- but I'm no Proust, and it genuinely felt and smelled simply like a bar of soap to me. There was very little Evocation going on in the bath, very little recherche, very little thought of any sort, frankly, other than 'which leg shall I start with this time?' A question, by the way, which I answered the same way I always do, with 'the same one I always do.'
Hardly worth the paper it's written on.
(Update 06.12.08: Still not, dear.)
I was going to get my nails done today, but problematically I took a nap that lasted until 22:30. That also precluded following through on any evening plans. Not that I'm saying I had any. Also not to mention sabotaging any hope of a regular bedtime or waking. Not that I'm divulging what those normally are, or even that I am so rigid as to adhere to a pattern.
I was going to steam the rugs, too. Not that I wish to indicate that I have access to water.
Although I feel a tremendous sense of liberation as to what I can or cannot say now, and while I still hope the point of writing a Personal Weblog in the first place is not having to worry about whether or not one sounds snarky, the fact remains that there will always now be a chill in the air as I imagine someone scrutinizing every post for Signs.
Which of course there aren't. And I sometimes start things and finish them later, and only then try to decide whether they should be dated as 'then' or 'now.' Although I admit that the Blackwater entry was something I encountered that same day I posted it.
No, this won't do. I really don't want this to become a blog concerned solely with the antics of the neighbor's cat and Internet snippets I find amusing or tragic. Or an extended apologia for my belief that there truly is something in between, that I do believe in a middle -- in fact a big, hearty one like the Average American Middle, and that, further, it is in that middle that I imagine most things to reside.
It's just that the middle isn't that entertaining.
For example, today I did not get stuck in any particularly egregious traffic. I missed it, in other words, both coming and going. I was moderately pleased by McCain's moderate success and what it might or might not portend, and likewise mildly bemused by Clinton's lack of the foregone-conclusion landslide. I had the intent to steam some clothes, but was slightly saddened that I had left the water in the steamer too long and came to the mildly disheartening realization that, while agitation with white vinegar inside the chamber helped a bit, a proper cleaning would require the purchase and application of a baby-bottle-sort-of brush, the undertaking of which I with the vaguest sense of resignation felt better left to another day.
I likewise awoke from my tranquil yet perhaps excessive nap with a middling discomfort surrounding the realization that tomorrow I will possibly have a marginally puffy face. This minor regret as regards the conjectured effects of my temporary intemperance in matters of adhering to strict diurnality was offset by the realization that I could simply hold bags of frozen spinach up to one eye with my arm-thigh while using the other eye to assist the fingers of one hand in painting those of the other. If the need to atone for my indolence should arise (understanding that the odds of such an arising are nearly nil), I could strap, if I wished, the bag of spinach over alternating eyes with an aromatherapeuticized silk scarf while steaming the carpets, thus rendering any discussion or internal dialogue as to the effects of my negligible profligacy on either the productivity or cosmetic arenas nil.
In addition, I was suffused by low-grade joy when the neighbor's cat came to call, as well as by his choosing to lay on my stomach. He has not, as of this writing, yet done anything to cause either consternation or ecstatic exuberance, nor has he engaged in any overtly comical 'antics.' He was a bit miffed about the weather, but did not tremble, jump on things, or make unsettling sounds, so pathos, too, is out.
I ate a mostly nutritious dinner but did not go overboard. That is to say, it was at the same time high-fat as well as accompanied by yogurt and the vegetable-seaweed condiment/nutritional powder. It was tasty, but not excessively so. And I ate a shellfish-shaped Belgian chocolate after. I did feel the merest tinge of regret that I neither had on hand a bottle of the sort of wine one would not regret popping open for just one and leaving largely undrunk, nor had sufficient motivation to go to a store and procure just such a mediocre and moderately-priced selection. I then effaced that tinge when I realized that even one glass would likely enhance rather than diminish the sleep-disturbing effects of the long nap, which realization conduced to a subtle relief commingled with a vague joy. When, later, the appropriate dose for my weight of melatonin succeeded in creating the appropriate measure of somnolence at a reasonable hour, I was pleased, but not to an extent that would have adversely affected my newfound sleepiness.
In addition, somewhere in there I bathed, and styled my hair. I did not take an extravagant Bubble Bath, or fill the tub with milk or rose petals, but I did change the blade on my razor, resulting in a closer shave than my last. As I did not use a lot of Products in the styling of the hair, it felt and looked silkier than at other times, but not, it not being four feet long, frighteningly glossy, just moderately, somewhat attractively so. And I chose a black sweater set for the day's sweater set, not out of melancholia, mind you, but because it is a bit thicker, softer, and cozier than some of the others.
See? That won't do. Who cares? I certainly don't; I can't imagine you do, either. But that is the reality of most people's days; most are fairly good, which means fairly prosaic, which means fairly unwritable. I you want something to write about daily life, you must either realistically portray, or exaggerate, or invent some kind of Challenge or Crisis for the hero to encounter and struggle against and sometimes surmount. And Proust, were he here, would no doubt be able elegantly to make my lily-of-the-valley soap evocative of much, much more than cleanliness and nice packaging, and tie it in handily and subtlely with the tiny cheap lily-of-the-valley perfume sets I used to insist, as a child, that I be given when we encountered them in 'gift shops' on family 'road trips' -- but I'm no Proust, and it genuinely felt and smelled simply like a bar of soap to me. There was very little Evocation going on in the bath, very little recherche, very little thought of any sort, frankly, other than 'which leg shall I start with this time?' A question, by the way, which I answered the same way I always do, with 'the same one I always do.'
Hardly worth the paper it's written on.
(Update 06.12.08: Still not, dear.)
Saturday, December 8, 2007
A Little Less Conversation
Some of you will recall my earlier jeremiads about drug ads for potions to stop brittle bones and stave off penile-implant surgery. Those of you who don't, and those of you who for your own unfathomable reasons wish to relive the horror, can click on 'Sally Field' or 'flaccidity' in my Labels list to the right and share in my pain of many months ago.
Let me begin by saying I don't watch television all that much. I have a very small set, and it is hard to see from where I usually am, which is at my computer desk, ordering antique perfume bottles off Ebay or once again struggling to come up with ideas for a seasonal dish in the cold and stormy heart of winter that does not involve turnips or kale. And since I generally turn the sound off when it is on, I seldom have any idea what anyone is saying, since I can't read the subtitles at all from thirty feet away. Still, occasionally, I have both the television and the television audio on simultaneously, and when this baleful combination of phenomena occurs, it is rare that I do not regret it subsequently.
Recently I was foolhardy enough to press 'power' without 'mute' before walking over to the vanity to select the day's fragrance, whereupon I was wrested from my tranquil toilette to stand agape and aghast at the horror that flickered before my widening eyes. For it seems that now Viagra has a new campaign, worse than all the rest, and while I hold no particular affection for any Elvis song or film from the 1960s, it does seem that using Viva Las Vegas to hawk erection pills diminishes substantively whatever charm or cachet that song can be said to have once possessed.
Not that it wasn't full of macho swagger, boastful virility, and the desire for unbridled hedonism -- if, admittedly, less than artfully put by the crack songwriting team of Messrs. Pomus and Shuman. But that's just it (well, part of it): the ad is using the universally-recognized song to evoke that libertinous 'I'm just a devil with love to spare' strut in the back of the viewer's mind, while the new lyrics, by contrast, kick the unsuspecting rogue in his pants. Not to mention his cerebellum.
Firstly, let me say that I understand Cialis is doing well, and has done well marketing itself as the flaccidity fixer for men who already have women to have sex with. It has advantages Viagra does not, including more rapid and longer-lasting effects. That's hard to battle, and simply whining, 'Heeey, remember us? We've got one, too. And it's kinda the same' is clearly insufficient. If New Coke had done well, its competitor would have had to strive to position some new product of its own as being similar, and similarly delicious. So Viagra finds itself wanting to declare that even married men who want to have sex with their wives will find it useful.
Of course, Pfizer (or their ad agency) could have said that. Explicitly, and in uncloying language. Instead, we are given the image of a group of early-middle-aged men in the widest assortment possible of casual wear (so that you, whoever you are, will surely be able to find one to 'identify' with: is it the plaid-shirt guy? the rakishly-untucked one? or are you really the bandanna'ed motorbike rider in your heart?) who got together in a bartenderless roadside tavern in the middle of the day to turn Elvis Presley songs into paeans to Erectile Dysfunction drugs and sex within the bonds of marriage.
How do I know they're married? Could I not just be leaping to conclusions for the sake of being able to hate all these ads equally (and by the way, I have never yet seen a single ad for Levitra, and for all I know they could be as bad or worse, but if we fall in love, you and me, and you find you're having a bit of a problem, and I still haven't seen any, please do the right thing and support Bayer/GlaxoSmithKline)? No, I know they are married because I was subjected to first-year-film-school clunky closeups of wedding bands on left hands playing various instruments, and because my brain was fried by having the following lines imprinted on it, forever:
Let me begin by saying I don't watch television all that much. I have a very small set, and it is hard to see from where I usually am, which is at my computer desk, ordering antique perfume bottles off Ebay or once again struggling to come up with ideas for a seasonal dish in the cold and stormy heart of winter that does not involve turnips or kale. And since I generally turn the sound off when it is on, I seldom have any idea what anyone is saying, since I can't read the subtitles at all from thirty feet away. Still, occasionally, I have both the television and the television audio on simultaneously, and when this baleful combination of phenomena occurs, it is rare that I do not regret it subsequently.
Recently I was foolhardy enough to press 'power' without 'mute' before walking over to the vanity to select the day's fragrance, whereupon I was wrested from my tranquil toilette to stand agape and aghast at the horror that flickered before my widening eyes. For it seems that now Viagra has a new campaign, worse than all the rest, and while I hold no particular affection for any Elvis song or film from the 1960s, it does seem that using Viva Las Vegas to hawk erection pills diminishes substantively whatever charm or cachet that song can be said to have once possessed.
Not that it wasn't full of macho swagger, boastful virility, and the desire for unbridled hedonism -- if, admittedly, less than artfully put by the crack songwriting team of Messrs. Pomus and Shuman. But that's just it (well, part of it): the ad is using the universally-recognized song to evoke that libertinous 'I'm just a devil with love to spare' strut in the back of the viewer's mind, while the new lyrics, by contrast, kick the unsuspecting rogue in his pants. Not to mention his cerebellum.
Firstly, let me say that I understand Cialis is doing well, and has done well marketing itself as the flaccidity fixer for men who already have women to have sex with. It has advantages Viagra does not, including more rapid and longer-lasting effects. That's hard to battle, and simply whining, 'Heeey, remember us? We've got one, too. And it's kinda the same' is clearly insufficient. If New Coke had done well, its competitor would have had to strive to position some new product of its own as being similar, and similarly delicious. So Viagra finds itself wanting to declare that even married men who want to have sex with their wives will find it useful.
Of course, Pfizer (or their ad agency) could have said that. Explicitly, and in uncloying language. Instead, we are given the image of a group of early-middle-aged men in the widest assortment possible of casual wear (so that you, whoever you are, will surely be able to find one to 'identify' with: is it the plaid-shirt guy? the rakishly-untucked one? or are you really the bandanna'ed motorbike rider in your heart?) who got together in a bartenderless roadside tavern in the middle of the day to turn Elvis Presley songs into paeans to Erectile Dysfunction drugs and sex within the bonds of marriage.
How do I know they're married? Could I not just be leaping to conclusions for the sake of being able to hate all these ads equally (and by the way, I have never yet seen a single ad for Levitra, and for all I know they could be as bad or worse, but if we fall in love, you and me, and you find you're having a bit of a problem, and I still haven't seen any, please do the right thing and support Bayer/GlaxoSmithKline)? No, I know they are married because I was subjected to first-year-film-school clunky closeups of wedding bands on left hands playing various instruments, and because my brain was fried by having the following lines imprinted on it, forever:
- This lonesome toad is sick of the road/Can't wait, can't wait to get home
- At the end of the day/I'm not a guy who'll stray/'Cause she's my heart's desire
Friday, December 7, 2007
'And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.'
Can't Celine Dion just stop? Soon? Now-ish? Can no one make it end? How can this possibly be happening, and why are we all so powerless to stop it?
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
How Stupid Are We, Really?
Or is it lazy? Please see Michael Bywater's excellent _Big Babies, or Why Can't We Just Grow Up?_ for a sobering exegesis on media and government infantilization of We the People. For a less-well-written rant, however, I offer up my enduring nausea at a long-running commercial for an osteoporosis medication, starring the presumably brittle-boned Sally Field.
This advertisement haunts me when I see people dawdling in the fruit section of the supermarket, when I zip past cars barely going the speed limit, and each and every time I approach getting more than six hours of sleep. Why? Not because of its insipidity and absurd premise, but because, as Ms. Fields makes clear in her first-person my-story closeup, we are very, very busy people these days, and it wasn't until she had a sit-down with a 'girlfriend' about time-management and its relation to this enfeebling condition that this woman was able to reclaim those seven seconds per day (calculation mine and approximate) she had previously needed to devote not only to ingesting a pill, but to swallowing the liquid necessary to washing it down.
As Field laments, her 'girlfriend,' like so many others, had to 'set aside time' every day (stress hers, not mine) to engage in this laborious - and manifestly wasteful - activity. Now, with this new monthly medication, her lucky friend can use those spare two hundred or so seconds she accrued for other activities, for which, one hopes, she does not have to 'set aside time.' Perhaps drinking a whole glass of liquid. Perhaps bemoaning (briefly) her misspent youth. Perhaps rubbing in a skin cream on one-half of her face, or filing one nail, or ironing one cuff.
How stupid? I don't know. I can't imagine anyone for whom this ad would make sense. Of course anyone would rather take a pill once a month over once a day, and once a day over seven times a day -- but 'set aside time?' The imagination is beggared to imagine that taking a pill cannot reasonably, in most people's thinking, be combined with, for example, spontaneous, or at least natural and necessary, consumption of liquid. One could even be reading, or on the telephone, or contemplating one's misspent youth -- and neither the taking of the pill, nor the swallowing of the liquid, would interrupt any of these.
Unless I am wrong.
This advertisement haunts me when I see people dawdling in the fruit section of the supermarket, when I zip past cars barely going the speed limit, and each and every time I approach getting more than six hours of sleep. Why? Not because of its insipidity and absurd premise, but because, as Ms. Fields makes clear in her first-person my-story closeup, we are very, very busy people these days, and it wasn't until she had a sit-down with a 'girlfriend' about time-management and its relation to this enfeebling condition that this woman was able to reclaim those seven seconds per day (calculation mine and approximate) she had previously needed to devote not only to ingesting a pill, but to swallowing the liquid necessary to washing it down.
As Field laments, her 'girlfriend,' like so many others, had to 'set aside time' every day (stress hers, not mine) to engage in this laborious - and manifestly wasteful - activity. Now, with this new monthly medication, her lucky friend can use those spare two hundred or so seconds she accrued for other activities, for which, one hopes, she does not have to 'set aside time.' Perhaps drinking a whole glass of liquid. Perhaps bemoaning (briefly) her misspent youth. Perhaps rubbing in a skin cream on one-half of her face, or filing one nail, or ironing one cuff.
How stupid? I don't know. I can't imagine anyone for whom this ad would make sense. Of course anyone would rather take a pill once a month over once a day, and once a day over seven times a day -- but 'set aside time?' The imagination is beggared to imagine that taking a pill cannot reasonably, in most people's thinking, be combined with, for example, spontaneous, or at least natural and necessary, consumption of liquid. One could even be reading, or on the telephone, or contemplating one's misspent youth -- and neither the taking of the pill, nor the swallowing of the liquid, would interrupt any of these.
Unless I am wrong.
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
Wrack and Pillion
Right, so if we accept the fact that I have no market, that I am, in the voice of my scratchy-tee-shirt-creating friend's blown-up Times New Roman scream 'INCOMPATIBLE' in an elegantly intransitive way, what am I supposed to do? If there is, as I am increasingly persuaded is the case, exactly no demographic for the Product that is me, then how many cats should I ultimately have, and at what age is it most seemly to start acquiring them?
I mean, here's the deal. Dating is, for good or ill - and I do have my opinions on this, but they do not matter in the slightest - the process of advertising what it is one thinks to be his or her greatest selling points to those individuals s/he has deemed to be within his or her market demographic, while simultaneously assessing the claims of desirability proferred by that same population. Maybe you need to marry a fellow Jew, maybe your spouse must have attained at least a Master's degree, maybe you just really like blondes. The gravity of these necessary or desirable characteristics varies. It has, moreover, become clear to me during my brief sojourn into Internet dating that how wide the pool of potential partners individuals believe themselves to be drawing from varies significantly, as well. In other words, some people will not waste their time with anyone who is not a Libran Lutheran real-estate developer with grey hair and green eyes on a raw-foods diet who prefers Scrabble over poker and Bakhtin over Baudrillard. Others, by contrast, hope to find a non-leprotic member of the opposite sex who does not immediately try to kill them.
There are a million variables that go into deciphering - not the Ideal, because that's easy (6'2" and above, shaved and pleasingly-shaped head, cow eyes, PhD in Continental Phil or a Doctor of Divinity who nonetheless passionately appreciates the performing arts, well-toned arms the better to drape my delicate ones over, collects and rides vintage Indians, emotionally adroit and verbally fearsome, wears work clothes non-self-reflexively, tans easily and seldom burns, is possessed of a North African nose and fullish lips, owns neither 'polo shirts' nor 'flipflops,' and whether or not he has one speaks never, ever, ever, of an 'avid yoga practice') - but rather the Desirable and, failing that, the Minimum Acceptable. Moreover, when it comes to dealing with actual people, whatever variables and emphases one has placed in either of these two categories tend to be more fluid in practice than they had seemed initially in the Excel chart. You may find it possible for Jane's industriousness at lovemaking to compensate for her apathy as regards housemaking, or you might eventually stop noticing John's weak chin after listening to him drunkenly recite ten Shakespeare sonnets consecutively. It ends up not being very scientific for most people in the end.
I guess that's 'chemistry,' and I couldn't be bothered. I can't get to the Chemistry Phase because I can't stand anyone long enough to endure the phases leading up to it. The Irrelevant and Hyperbolic Flattery Phase, the Self-Aggrandizement via Recountings of Accomplishments I Could Not Even in an Alternate Universe Care About Phase, the Surely It's Time by Now Groping Phase and, my least favorite, the I Really Thought We Had Something Special There What's Wrong with You Girl Phase.
And I think we all, and I for my part certainly do, make accommodations. In deft acts of self-deluding algebra we optimistically cube portents of 'affability' or 'gentleness' or 'emotional intellect' while dividing by their square roots all behavioral auguries of 'unreflective,' 'melancholic,' or 'rash.' When we find something we like, we naturally focus on that and allow the low-level nasty things to recede in our consciousness. This is how you end up a year later being shocked when your boyfriend 'does the mature thing' and 'opens up' to 'share his emotions' -- and the only 'emotion' he sees fit to share is the one where it's not about you, you're really wonderful really, and pretty and untiringly kind, as well, but it's just that there's a feeling of loss he can't seem to shake, and he really thinks he should address this, should tuck in and knuckle down and take care of it, this bereftness he and his inner child now feel that before getting entangled with you he failed to 'play the field' sufficiently to preclude his daily longing for that idyllic field now...
But leaving aside both the past and bald Gauloises-smoking retired Jesuits turned art critic social workers with a sideline in oldschool philology and research on the Generation of '27 not to mention lofty ethics and ancient but shiny motorbikes, we end up, yet again, here. Which, presumably, since I don't have the twenty-seven cats yet, is not nearly as horrific as what's to come. Which is irrelevant, of course, since I don't even want the twenty-seven cats; the twenty-seven cats are a sop, or a consolation prize, or a hideous metonym for What I Can't Have, What Ever Eludes Me, All That I'll Never Ever Ever Get But Keep Wanting Until I Fill the Hole With Felids. And perhaps as well with a set of long-discontinued China that I spend decades laboriously accumulating piece by piece. If all goes as I fully expect it to, at some point in my dotage I'll revert indeliberately to 'Miss' and the circle will be completed, no more cards will need to be read, and the cats, bless them, will in their hunger pick my (brittle, since I couldn't afford the meds) bones clean once I'm no longer opening the Friskies for us to share, having long ago spent what few shekels remained of my oisive jeunesse à tout asservie, back when I still believed I should or could or would date, or fall in love, or engage in even a vague simulacrum of what I then considered to be 'meaningful conversation' before I descended the mountain (or in this case the creaky stairs of my tenement) one last time and admitted that Yes, par délicatesse I had indeed perdu ma vie.
I mean, here's the deal. Dating is, for good or ill - and I do have my opinions on this, but they do not matter in the slightest - the process of advertising what it is one thinks to be his or her greatest selling points to those individuals s/he has deemed to be within his or her market demographic, while simultaneously assessing the claims of desirability proferred by that same population. Maybe you need to marry a fellow Jew, maybe your spouse must have attained at least a Master's degree, maybe you just really like blondes. The gravity of these necessary or desirable characteristics varies. It has, moreover, become clear to me during my brief sojourn into Internet dating that how wide the pool of potential partners individuals believe themselves to be drawing from varies significantly, as well. In other words, some people will not waste their time with anyone who is not a Libran Lutheran real-estate developer with grey hair and green eyes on a raw-foods diet who prefers Scrabble over poker and Bakhtin over Baudrillard. Others, by contrast, hope to find a non-leprotic member of the opposite sex who does not immediately try to kill them.
There are a million variables that go into deciphering - not the Ideal, because that's easy (6'2" and above, shaved and pleasingly-shaped head, cow eyes, PhD in Continental Phil or a Doctor of Divinity who nonetheless passionately appreciates the performing arts, well-toned arms the better to drape my delicate ones over, collects and rides vintage Indians, emotionally adroit and verbally fearsome, wears work clothes non-self-reflexively, tans easily and seldom burns, is possessed of a North African nose and fullish lips, owns neither 'polo shirts' nor 'flipflops,' and whether or not he has one speaks never, ever, ever, of an 'avid yoga practice') - but rather the Desirable and, failing that, the Minimum Acceptable. Moreover, when it comes to dealing with actual people, whatever variables and emphases one has placed in either of these two categories tend to be more fluid in practice than they had seemed initially in the Excel chart. You may find it possible for Jane's industriousness at lovemaking to compensate for her apathy as regards housemaking, or you might eventually stop noticing John's weak chin after listening to him drunkenly recite ten Shakespeare sonnets consecutively. It ends up not being very scientific for most people in the end.
I guess that's 'chemistry,' and I couldn't be bothered. I can't get to the Chemistry Phase because I can't stand anyone long enough to endure the phases leading up to it. The Irrelevant and Hyperbolic Flattery Phase, the Self-Aggrandizement via Recountings of Accomplishments I Could Not Even in an Alternate Universe Care About Phase, the Surely It's Time by Now Groping Phase and, my least favorite, the I Really Thought We Had Something Special There What's Wrong with You Girl Phase.
And I think we all, and I for my part certainly do, make accommodations. In deft acts of self-deluding algebra we optimistically cube portents of 'affability' or 'gentleness' or 'emotional intellect' while dividing by their square roots all behavioral auguries of 'unreflective,' 'melancholic,' or 'rash.' When we find something we like, we naturally focus on that and allow the low-level nasty things to recede in our consciousness. This is how you end up a year later being shocked when your boyfriend 'does the mature thing' and 'opens up' to 'share his emotions' -- and the only 'emotion' he sees fit to share is the one where it's not about you, you're really wonderful really, and pretty and untiringly kind, as well, but it's just that there's a feeling of loss he can't seem to shake, and he really thinks he should address this, should tuck in and knuckle down and take care of it, this bereftness he and his inner child now feel that before getting entangled with you he failed to 'play the field' sufficiently to preclude his daily longing for that idyllic field now...
But leaving aside both the past and bald Gauloises-smoking retired Jesuits turned art critic social workers with a sideline in oldschool philology and research on the Generation of '27 not to mention lofty ethics and ancient but shiny motorbikes, we end up, yet again, here. Which, presumably, since I don't have the twenty-seven cats yet, is not nearly as horrific as what's to come. Which is irrelevant, of course, since I don't even want the twenty-seven cats; the twenty-seven cats are a sop, or a consolation prize, or a hideous metonym for What I Can't Have, What Ever Eludes Me, All That I'll Never Ever Ever Get But Keep Wanting Until I Fill the Hole With Felids. And perhaps as well with a set of long-discontinued China that I spend decades laboriously accumulating piece by piece. If all goes as I fully expect it to, at some point in my dotage I'll revert indeliberately to 'Miss' and the circle will be completed, no more cards will need to be read, and the cats, bless them, will in their hunger pick my (brittle, since I couldn't afford the meds) bones clean once I'm no longer opening the Friskies for us to share, having long ago spent what few shekels remained of my oisive jeunesse à tout asservie, back when I still believed I should or could or would date, or fall in love, or engage in even a vague simulacrum of what I then considered to be 'meaningful conversation' before I descended the mountain (or in this case the creaky stairs of my tenement) one last time and admitted that Yes, par délicatesse I had indeed perdu ma vie.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Uncanny is human existence and still without a meaning
Well, it's not a terribly interesting admission on the face of it, but I went on a date. Not as uninteresting as it sounds though, when I say I actually wanted to, and still less so when I say I blew it quite roundly.
I talked a bunch of crap, for starters. I don't know what crap, or I'd tell you, but I was so nervous that I ran on at the mouth about anything that came up. Well, not anything, as I at least had very little to say about Fibonacci spirals or stochastic finite-state machines, but don't let that stop you from thinking I'm an idiot.
So that was unfortunate. It was more unfortunate the day after, when the physiological effects of alcohol withdrawal commingled torturously with regret, embarrassment, and after-the-fact recalculations of what I might better have said when ____. Adrenaline, clams, and unassuming French reds are a bad, bad combination.
And if it is surprising that I had anxiety or nerves about this rather than merely my usual dread and stalwart pessimism, it was because I thought there was Potential. Which never happens usually so I should have known. But known what? If you have optimism, you don't know anything. That's the point, the beautiful, delicate, feather-soft, unpointy point of it, of looking up at the billowy clouds and the V of geese flying in for the summer and the budding branches softly waving in the sifted sunlight rather than straight ahead at the flaccid, factual mundanity of things. Hope doesn't spring eternal, at least not after the first time a daunting third-grader steals your favorite doll and puts her head in the toilet, but we do at least hold out some expectation that it will visit us from time to time and allow us the fleeting luxury of seeing what we wish to see.
We hope for hope, we have faith in hope, and, as Unamuno asserts, we believe what we hope for. The ingratiating Spaniard also admits that, beauty being the goal of hope, hope is perhaps in its essence irrational (_Tragic Sense_ cheap Dover English Ed., p.205). And, indeed, hope regarding the mundane world does amount at some level to a rejection of reality, or at least a refusal to read the small print on parts of reality from the correct perspective or distance. It is a failure of exegesis, a problem with literacy: if we had our thinking caps on instead of the baseball ones and the correct prescription for our invisible-line bifocals, we'd accept that it's broken, all of it -- and move on.
But we don't, of course. We're stuck here, presbyopia, lisps, stutters, and all. There is nothing to read and nothing to say in this dissolving, insubstantial pageant. And we're big, strong Derrideans or Lacanians or situationists or even deviously retro hardcore structuralists, so we can do what Unamuno couldn't, and eschew eschatology and with it the only real reason for hope, and stare once again from our poorly-upholstered fold-up chair at the proscenium arch in the half-light, crank the pot to 10 on our collective ingenuousness and convince ourselves that we're dying to know if that Ariel gets set free in the end.
Which has very little to do with my date, really, since there were no pretend-shipwrecked actors pretending to be actors in a pretend shipwreck. It was just my date and me, with little distraction from the 'pressure' (what pressure? it was a bloody date, girl, not the Kyoto negotiations!) other than my adrenaline-fueled, disordered thoughts -- and the wine.
But that pressure, I suppose, was the problem. If I could see no potential whatsoever beforehand, I wouldn't go out with someone, so there is no pressure in that case. And if at some point on a first or subsequent date it becomes clear I wouldn't wish to spend another hour with him ever, let alone the rest of my life, involitionally I pull back a bit, relax, and it feels like I'm talking to a friend of my brother's visiting from elsewhere: no risk, no investment, no stress... It doesn't matter, then, that he spends the remainder of our time together droning on about how early he got Microsoft stock or with how many wives he had to suffer inside before he came into his own, listened to himself, trusted himself and his inner voice, and finally accepted his heart's true desire for a Ferrari.
And most men in my purported demographic seem these days to have some kind of 'Ferrari' lurking around. They wear oddly casual clothes either always or at unexpected moments; they decided at the midcentury mark to grow their hair; all presets on their car stereo are rock stations of varying descriptions; they have convertibles, jukeboxes, $5,000 beer dispensers, leopard print, baseball cards, 'flip-flops' beneath their chinos at dinner in restaurants, bubble gum, sports caps for sunscreen, labels, vintages, iPods with Avril Lavigne and Nickleback and Matchbox 20, 'Tuscan' toilets, knockoff watches that can't tell time but do what they're meant to, season tickets, McMansions and McBungalows, plastic and MDF 'craftsman' everything, and soul-sucking careers...
So it should not be surprising or unforgivable if I feel a frisson when someone diverges. When I encounter someone who has read a book from other than the self-help section. Who doesn't once reference the Food Network, the next big arena show he's going to, what he's currently 'listening to' 'inside himself,' how early he got in on Google ( Really, IPO? Wow. You must be ____ --- what, able to listen to the radio, numbskull???) , 'soft jazz,' books about wine, magazines about wine, food intolerances, any business located in a strip mall, and why he doesn't stay at the Sheraton anymore when he is in Paris.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Those whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes angry.
Which naturally brings me to the vast and at times soul-eating downside of Internet dating. True, I don't need to spend four hours with you, or even two seconds with your profile, if what you said in your introductory letter was so insipid as to put me off even oatmeal and soda water for a week. And I stand by the handy listing of facts in many ways: I think seeing 'does not want children ever' in literal black and white makes it seem a bit realer, even (or so I baselessly hope) to the sort of people who seem always to aspire to change their loved ones in significant ways. If one has the sort of goal which ostensibly can only be met by dating, those things about this type of dating are good.
But there is so much more that is unsettling, disturbing, maddening, and wrong. Take stalking, for example. I have been stalked in real life, and I admit that some chucklehead writing me desperate notes wondering if I'm okay because I wrote to him twice before and now haven't returned his letters in over two days! absolutely pales. I am in no danger, for one, which is a big difference, if there ever were one. It is irritation rather than terror, and even I am not cynical or misanthropic -- or passionate -- enough to prefer the latter. But it is extreme irritation, and I am not paying in hopes of receiving even a low-grade variety.
I think at some level perhaps many people unknowingly feel that each email in some way constitutes the equivalent of a discrete conversation in real life. So, if I have written you two, and you have written me nineteen, then we are, or could reasonably be supposed to be, as close as we would be had we met twenty-one times in the physical plane.
Which is patently not so. But email engenders an interpersonal comfort and fluidity that talking to a stranger while waiting for a cab does not. It as well inspires people to reveal things or be more candid (again, even without an in-person meeting) than they would while hitting on chicks in the wine bar. You think we have something we do not. That's scary. Really. Because someone who actually lives on my block and fancies himself to be engaged in a relationship with me of which I am unaware would be considered crazy. Were he to act on it, he would quickly be considered locked up.
Not so online. Not only due to the well-documented and seemingly inherent characteristics of email as a medium, but for other reasons, as well. One is the simple fact, generally ignored, that I and my interlocutor do not, in fact, know each other. You read my words, sure (and that this itself is a charitable assumption I can attest from personal experience), but you give them your own meaning. I am a newfresh electronic tabula rasa, the more rasa the prettier I appear. By even responding with thanks for a compliment I run the risk of 'proving' to you I want to meet you. By my not responding, you become by turns pleading, petulant, accusatory, and apologetic.
And I still don't know you.
But, you want to plead, we've shared so much! In many cases not realizing that it was really you doing the sharing and me the one refusing even to open any more missives from that address. Of course you can't see that, since you're not at my house, as you've never been to my house, since we have never met...
Voted Most Popular
Another aspect that is a definite downside for me and yet I suspect not so much so for others is having a bunch of random people think they like me. In my case, the only people I want to 'like' me are people whom I know and respect and whom I like in return. However, my profile accurately states that I am not overweight and have no children. This, I think, makes me very, very likable.
However, it also accurately says a bunch of other things which one would quite reasonably imagine would scare off nine-tenths of the male dating population -- but no matter, as I also have a picture up, and I'm not ugly, and a picture of an unugly girl trumps all concerns about religion, politics, personal finance, decor schemes, reading choices, musical tastes, medical problems and food allergies. Translated into action, this means you don't have to read my profile then: you just have to know I'm pretty. "'Yes, you've entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime is filled with you'" at that point. Not to mention the lack of 'baggage' represented by the lack of both children and excess weight. You can't bear not to write.
Of course Rilke also said that Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, but don't let that concern you. It's not Beauty you are after, anyway; it's 'pretty.' It's 'reasonable,' and 'good enough,' and 'companionship' -- not to mention the candlelight, walks on the beach, and 'good times.' And because I am a pretty blank slate, I am the pretty blank slate of your deepest, most deeply prosaic, dreams.
But there is so much more that is unsettling, disturbing, maddening, and wrong. Take stalking, for example. I have been stalked in real life, and I admit that some chucklehead writing me desperate notes wondering if I'm okay because I wrote to him twice before and now haven't returned his letters in over two days! absolutely pales. I am in no danger, for one, which is a big difference, if there ever were one. It is irritation rather than terror, and even I am not cynical or misanthropic -- or passionate -- enough to prefer the latter. But it is extreme irritation, and I am not paying in hopes of receiving even a low-grade variety.
I think at some level perhaps many people unknowingly feel that each email in some way constitutes the equivalent of a discrete conversation in real life. So, if I have written you two, and you have written me nineteen, then we are, or could reasonably be supposed to be, as close as we would be had we met twenty-one times in the physical plane.
Which is patently not so. But email engenders an interpersonal comfort and fluidity that talking to a stranger while waiting for a cab does not. It as well inspires people to reveal things or be more candid (again, even without an in-person meeting) than they would while hitting on chicks in the wine bar. You think we have something we do not. That's scary. Really. Because someone who actually lives on my block and fancies himself to be engaged in a relationship with me of which I am unaware would be considered crazy. Were he to act on it, he would quickly be considered locked up.
Not so online. Not only due to the well-documented and seemingly inherent characteristics of email as a medium, but for other reasons, as well. One is the simple fact, generally ignored, that I and my interlocutor do not, in fact, know each other. You read my words, sure (and that this itself is a charitable assumption I can attest from personal experience), but you give them your own meaning. I am a newfresh electronic tabula rasa, the more rasa the prettier I appear. By even responding with thanks for a compliment I run the risk of 'proving' to you I want to meet you. By my not responding, you become by turns pleading, petulant, accusatory, and apologetic.
And I still don't know you.
But, you want to plead, we've shared so much! In many cases not realizing that it was really you doing the sharing and me the one refusing even to open any more missives from that address. Of course you can't see that, since you're not at my house, as you've never been to my house, since we have never met...
Voted Most Popular
Another aspect that is a definite downside for me and yet I suspect not so much so for others is having a bunch of random people think they like me. In my case, the only people I want to 'like' me are people whom I know and respect and whom I like in return. However, my profile accurately states that I am not overweight and have no children. This, I think, makes me very, very likable.
However, it also accurately says a bunch of other things which one would quite reasonably imagine would scare off nine-tenths of the male dating population -- but no matter, as I also have a picture up, and I'm not ugly, and a picture of an unugly girl trumps all concerns about religion, politics, personal finance, decor schemes, reading choices, musical tastes, medical problems and food allergies. Translated into action, this means you don't have to read my profile then: you just have to know I'm pretty. "'Yes, you've entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime is filled with you'" at that point. Not to mention the lack of 'baggage' represented by the lack of both children and excess weight. You can't bear not to write.
Of course Rilke also said that Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, but don't let that concern you. It's not Beauty you are after, anyway; it's 'pretty.' It's 'reasonable,' and 'good enough,' and 'companionship' -- not to mention the candlelight, walks on the beach, and 'good times.' And because I am a pretty blank slate, I am the pretty blank slate of your deepest, most deeply prosaic, dreams.
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.
So Internet dating. It is worse. It is different. The latter is less amusing than the first, so I'll start there.
It is, I admit, different in some ways that do not markedly suck. One convenient aspect is that we both are at least openly owning our desire to find someone. Maybe you just want to 'date,' while I am looking for something heady and deep -- but at least we both know the other is looking for something. This shared knowledge makes first steps far less awkward -- and far more likely to succeed -- than finally acting after months of worshipping from anear the hot blonde in the next office, about whose romantic life you may still know nothing. That part I think is handy.
So, too, do I think the upfrontness of other aspects of it is convenient. If I breed dogs and you hate them, I don't even need to 'talk' to you: I can just read it on your profile page and move on, before being wounded by this damning knowledge long after we've bared our electronic souls. Almost every reasonable 'fact' gets out there, up front, disclosed. Of course there might be lies, but let's assume there aren't: I know you have six kids, you know I am a millwright, you subscribe to Boating World and I make wine. It can sometimes be the details, the minutiae, of everyday life that kills or sustains things in that real life, so having some vague idea from the start as to how this person lives his or her days is not to be dismissed.
But.
On the other hand, we are all so terribly complex. Data don't make a person. And you certainly don't need to share the same, say, reading resume or hobby list, to fall deeplymadlypassionately. Moreover, I can read you off some version of my biography and you still will have no idea of who or what I am. Obviously, culture has its profound effects, but it is not the whole story of what constitutes an individual.
Still, though, I think this deliberateness and candor can act as a helpful filter, and sometimes people who meet first in person do not bother with enough factual information but rather rely on emotional information, which is arguably better turned to later in the relationship, when there is more to go on and a baseline has been set. If there really are things I don't want, such as your six kids, better to know that now than discovering it after I've been smitten with your raffish charm and muzzle-loader collection.
As well, too.
Additionally, it's different because it is cheap and low risk. This is not wholly in the positive column, but there are benefits. It is cheap because you don't even have to pay for a cup of coffee before hard-dropping someone after a series of emails that took a strange or scary turn, and it's low risk because you don't actually know any of these people (well, not usually, and I would hate that). So, if you can manage it, you can cultivate a different set of ethics that doesn't force you to humor fools or spend time with dullards out of a too-expansive sense of politesse. Unlike with acquaintances, friends, or lovers, you can set the exact second of the end of contact. For real, not just in vain hope of it remaining so. (Unless you happen to meet in real life after pushing 'block,' and I would hate that even more.)
It is also cheap because these people really adore coffee shops! Maybe they are all really just alcoholics, and scared that one glass of wine will lead to nine, at which point they will be once more sobbing in the arms of a stranger about the cat and couch they lost in their last ill-starred amour, but more likely it is because it is much easier to figure out how to divide the cost of one Darjeeling and one Oolong than it is a Delmonico, some scallops, an appetizer, a salad, an aperitif, a digestif, and an uneven distribution of glasses of wine. Plus, coffee shops are better lit than romantic restaurants, and the means of egress thus more easy to hold in one's sights.
It is, I admit, different in some ways that do not markedly suck. One convenient aspect is that we both are at least openly owning our desire to find someone. Maybe you just want to 'date,' while I am looking for something heady and deep -- but at least we both know the other is looking for something. This shared knowledge makes first steps far less awkward -- and far more likely to succeed -- than finally acting after months of worshipping from anear the hot blonde in the next office, about whose romantic life you may still know nothing. That part I think is handy.
So, too, do I think the upfrontness of other aspects of it is convenient. If I breed dogs and you hate them, I don't even need to 'talk' to you: I can just read it on your profile page and move on, before being wounded by this damning knowledge long after we've bared our electronic souls. Almost every reasonable 'fact' gets out there, up front, disclosed. Of course there might be lies, but let's assume there aren't: I know you have six kids, you know I am a millwright, you subscribe to Boating World and I make wine. It can sometimes be the details, the minutiae, of everyday life that kills or sustains things in that real life, so having some vague idea from the start as to how this person lives his or her days is not to be dismissed.
But.
On the other hand, we are all so terribly complex. Data don't make a person. And you certainly don't need to share the same, say, reading resume or hobby list, to fall deeplymadlypassionately. Moreover, I can read you off some version of my biography and you still will have no idea of who or what I am. Obviously, culture has its profound effects, but it is not the whole story of what constitutes an individual.
Still, though, I think this deliberateness and candor can act as a helpful filter, and sometimes people who meet first in person do not bother with enough factual information but rather rely on emotional information, which is arguably better turned to later in the relationship, when there is more to go on and a baseline has been set. If there really are things I don't want, such as your six kids, better to know that now than discovering it after I've been smitten with your raffish charm and muzzle-loader collection.
As well, too.
Additionally, it's different because it is cheap and low risk. This is not wholly in the positive column, but there are benefits. It is cheap because you don't even have to pay for a cup of coffee before hard-dropping someone after a series of emails that took a strange or scary turn, and it's low risk because you don't actually know any of these people (well, not usually, and I would hate that). So, if you can manage it, you can cultivate a different set of ethics that doesn't force you to humor fools or spend time with dullards out of a too-expansive sense of politesse. Unlike with acquaintances, friends, or lovers, you can set the exact second of the end of contact. For real, not just in vain hope of it remaining so. (Unless you happen to meet in real life after pushing 'block,' and I would hate that even more.)
It is also cheap because these people really adore coffee shops! Maybe they are all really just alcoholics, and scared that one glass of wine will lead to nine, at which point they will be once more sobbing in the arms of a stranger about the cat and couch they lost in their last ill-starred amour, but more likely it is because it is much easier to figure out how to divide the cost of one Darjeeling and one Oolong than it is a Delmonico, some scallops, an appetizer, a salad, an aperitif, a digestif, and an uneven distribution of glasses of wine. Plus, coffee shops are better lit than romantic restaurants, and the means of egress thus more easy to hold in one's sights.
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