Advisory Bullshit
It occurred to me again today how many people there are trying to tell us how to live our lives. Doctor Phil. The Dali Lama. Every inexperienced academic on the planet. The Federal Government. Oprah Winfrey. Fox News. John McCain. (okay, so those last two are telling us the same things) Cereal boxes. New age self-improvement books. Newspaper columns. Talk shows. Organized (and unorganized) religions. The Marketing Machine. Bloggers. The media in general. The “style” section in particular. Movies stars. Athletes. Everybody.
News flash. These people are all wrong.
They all have an ax to grind. They all want to look extra smart, or want some slice of your money, or want to exercise control over you, or just want to convince you that their way is the one true way. All of them are mouthing generalities which have nothing to do with you in particular and very little to do with human beings in general. They all want you to do things that are to their advantage and don’t even bother taking you into consideration.
You are the only one like you that there is. That uniqueness is much more than a platitude. The complexity and fine structure that makes up an individual human being is a truly awesome thing to behold, and is utterly impossible to fully comprehend. The best that the platitudes, old wives tales, and conventional “wisdoms” can do is try to play games with your mind for the advantage of the utterer. Pay them little mind.
There is a nugget of “truth” in all of them, if you are the “average” person. Of course, no one is average and there are no easy answers. If you’d like, have a look at what people have to say. If you have enough grains of salt, there is probably something to take away from everything anybody ever says. But that something is probably too general and too small to be of any real value for the specific you.
It should also be noted that looking endlessly at every platitude that comes into your field of vision is probably not a good thing. If you are looking for and at these things, you are probably trying to learn and improve yourself, which is an excellent objective. But the best that platitudes can do is set you to thinking about someone else’s truth and how it may apply to you, if at all.
The truth is, in order to improve yourself, you have to understand your own fine structure and not someone else’s. You need to study and understand yourself. There will never be time to compare yourself against everything. And even more importantly, you will need to actually do something to improve yourself. Pondering platitudes endlessly is an excellent way to waste the rest of your life. After some reasonable period of reflection, get off your butt and do something. If it’s wrong, learn from it and change what you do next accordingly.
Inaction leads only to more inaction. Only informed action leads to life. So stop reading this, right now, and go out and do something. 
The State of The World
The world seems always to have been full of petty dictators. If you will think back to your high school history, it was pretty much a parade of monarchist, fascist, socialist, communist, and other-ist dictators. They were everywhere, from ancient Greece to, well, modern Greece and beyond. Generally, those leaders with even a single altruistic quality were quickly gunned down in favor of someone much more self absorbed.
With very few exceptions (the United States was one until very recently) the world has been run by the greedy, the wealthy, the power-hungry, the corrupt, the heartless, the cruel, and the sadistic. Names such as Torquemada, Stalin, Trujillo, Hitler, Batista, Nero, Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon, Duvalier, Mussolini, Attila the Hun, King Herrod, Saddam Hussein, Chairman Mao, and George W. Bush roll trippingly from the tongue.
Without these people, history would have been a boring succession of scientific achievement and artistic glory set in flower-filled fields under puffy pink clouds. None of that for the human race, though! Not us! All that humans really need is a asshole in a uniform or clerical robes to follow into battle and half of us will be happy to be hewing pieces out of the other half with large iron swords while the gutters and oceans run red and all of the children and the elderly slowly starve to death in their caves.
History has made me the optimist that I am today.
How to Keep the Handicapped Away From Your Store
I made the mistake of venturing out today. So much for the Christmas spirit. All I wanted was a plate of noodles at Zen Zero, the wonderful Asian restaurant downtown. Drunken noodles, to be exact, medium hot with chicken, spicy brown sauce clinging to the wide Asian noodles, red peppers and onions mixed in, poetry on a plate for eight bucks. Of course, that was not to be. You may or may not be happy to know that my curmudgeonly nature is now back in full force.
Downtown was swamped, virtually gridlocked, a sea of cars from horizon to horizon. It quickly became apparent that half of Lawrence lives for today, when cheap wrapping paper and the really ugly Christmas tree ornaments go on sale for half price. They were hip deep on the sidewalks and every parking place within two counties was full and had a second SUV waiting behind it for another shopper to leave.
A Return to Curmudgeonry
It’s hard to be a curmudgeon at Christmas. That’s where I have been, you see, is having Christmas. I’ve been happy and upbeat, and spending times with friends and relatives that I like. That is to say, I have not been myself, so I have not been writing this column for a few days. I will admit to having the occasional curmudgeonly thought, but they were fleeting, even the ones about the over-commercialization of Christmas. I don’t involve myself in that part of it, so it’s not a big deal for me if I stay away from the television, which is also not a problem since I’m not thrilled about television.
So I have been a convivial curmudgeon for the last few days. That is not a particularly easy trick to pull off, but I think I managed. I noshed with the in-laws, and talked to my family on the telephone, and generally behaved like a normal person, at least to the degree that is possible. Occasionally, I pinched myself to see if perhaps I had expired and not noticed, but that proved to not be the case.
I am feeling small tendrils, however, of curmudgeon-ness slowly creeping in among the ganglia and synapses in my brain. I assume this means a return to normal, or at least normal for me. I would therefore expect to be a steaming pit of negativity, pessimism, and cynicism as early as tomorrow. When the timing is right, I shall strike. You will know it when a curmudgeonly column appears in this space.
A Christmas Meme
The West Virginia Blogger tagged me with a meme that simply requires that I answer some questions about Christmas and me. I can do that.
- Wrapping or gift bags? We don’t buy many gifts anymore, as a sort of a protest against commercialization. But those that we do buy, we wrap. I love to wrap!
- Real or artificial Tree? My wife is a granola. Having an artificial tree allows us to help save the Earth. Or so the hope goes. We have a pink one. ;o) Read more
Lew Perkins Fires Hank Booth
It looks like another era is passing this week in Lawrence, and at KU. Hank Booth, a very popular local radio announcer has been off work for a week or so as the Jayhawks men’s basketball announcer at Allen Fieldhouse due to an injury. It looks like Lew Perkins is taking the opportunity to replace him with one of his people, Eric Danielson, who has been doing the women’s basketball games. Booth is an icon in Lawrence, a very public-minded, intelligent, and gifted man who has been in the radio business in Lawrence for many years as a station owner, executive, and announcer.I would imagine, and I have heard rumors, that Booth would not kowtow to Perkins, who is as intent on growing his power base as he is on anything. So Hank Booth seems to have worn out his welcome with the transplanted Easterner Perkins, a man who has been in Lawrence less than ten percent of the time that Hank Booth has. He has a reputation for running roughshod over anything that preceded his tenure as King of the KU Athletic Department, and he has proven that true again today.
The Fifth Season
Yesterday’s column was about the seasons, but I was just thinking then about the normal four seasons. You know, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. It would appear that my part of the central US is about to experience the fifth season: Ice. The “pink weather” phenomenon has become more common as global temperatures have increased. I do not recall having this much ice and sleet at this latitude even ten years ago.Much of Oklahoma is without power, and the storm is moving towards me from there. A friend in Southern Kansas has had to suspend part of his business operations because of power problems. The National Weather Service seems very confident that my little corner of Kansas is likely to get an inch of ice tonight, and another inch of ice tomorrow. That is a lot of ice. We are told to expect “widespread power outages.”
Seasons
It is difficult to believe in global warming when the weather is so cold and dank, but I will persevere. ;o) I have always been of two minds about the seasons. Each of them has its merits, and there is something of beauty about all of them. The rebirth of Spring, the green of Summer, the riot of Autumn colors, and the austere beauty of Winter. There is something magical about that cycle.Then again, you could think of it as the floods and mud of Spring, the mosquitoes and flies of Summer, the hay fever of Autumn, and the ice and sleet of Winter. ;o) I lived for 25 years or so in the San Francisco Bay Area, always near the water, and the seasons there can often be described as being only two: Perfect and Near-Perfect. It was also nice to have that stately march of beautiful days, rarely too hot, rarely too cold, not many insects, and not usually too much rain. There’s a lot to be said for constancy.
The Younger Generation
A blog post by Kouros reminds me that we all sometimes think that the current generation of children is taking us to hell. I believe that all older people may have thought that from time immemorial. As I wrote as a section header in one of my novels:All grandfathers, since the dawn of the human era, have looked upon their grandchildren and shaken their heads sadly. Each successive generation appeared, to its immediate ancestors, as if they were spiraling out of control and would come quickly to a dreadful end. Along the entirety of that historical tapestry, the grandfathers had been mostly wrong.
However, as the twenty-first century finally got the wind into its sails and charted a course, it began to appear as if the most recent generations of grandfathers had been correct, though not precisely so. It was not the latest generation that was leaping en masse into the hand-basket to hell; it was everyone.
Society, which had been semi-selectively building the new upon the shoulders of the old for thousands of years, was at long last beginning to sag under the accumulated weight of human frailty, accrued errors, and conventional wisdom. No one activity or situation could be singled out as that tragedy that would begin the downfall of mankind. Rather, humanity had finally constructed weapons, technology, and social systems of sufficient complexity that any one or two among thousands of critical factors could put the entire species on the slippery road to extinction.Since I finished that novel, I have considered that there may be another element to the issue. It would seem that all things are on a pendulum, swinging back and forth from extreme to extreme. As an example, my father was a son of the Great American Depression. He taught me to value hard work, small rewards, and to care for the things and people that were important to me.
Is My Cell Phone Going To Be Liberated?
I wrote a column a while back bemoaning the fact that Verizon does not let me control my own phone. I had wanted use MP3 files, recorded by friends and family, as person-specific ring tones on my phone. The idea was, when Fred called, to have my phone announce (in Fred’s voice), “Hey, this is Fred! Pick up, will ya!” But, alas, Verizon disabled my ability to moved files on and off my Motorola Razr, requiring that I use their proprietary V Cast service instead.Now I read that Verizon has decided to open their cell phone system to developers, and even allow subscribers to use cell phones from other companies on their system. All of this is supposed to take place by the first quarter of 2008, which is coincidently when I should be getting a new phone under Verizon’s New Every Two Plan. There may be some chance that I will be able to have my ultra-geeky ring-tones yet!
