The old-timers wink at one another and mutter something about the water. There’s something in the water.
But in Plymouth, that doesn’t seem to hold up.
What water are we talking about: saltwater, well water, town water? Clearly – in Plymouth at least, it’s not the water.
Maybe it’s something in the air.
Maybe it’s the nukes?
What can explain it?
What explanation is there – to cite just one example, for Selectperson Jean Loewenberg – a corporate attorney and otherwise intelligent woman, running around in the dark, uprooting political signs and tossing them into the woods?
Never mind that these signs were illegally placed on town property.
Never mind that every year for every local election the majority of political signs seemed to be placed on town, or state property.
Loewenberg must have known, in the corporate side of her brain, that what she was doing was bone-headed at best: but she could not control herself.
But what about the other local politicians – and/or their lackeys, who repeatedly ignore the town law regulating the placement of these signs?
You are only supposed to place signs on private property – with the permission of the property owners. This can be a laborious process – but, if followed, the end result would indicate actual support of a candidate.
As it is, if median strips could vote we’d have record turnouts!
But the abuse of the political sign bylaws is only one of many signs of the madness that affects Plymouth in the spring.
What about Karen Buechs?
What is it that induces Karen to run and run and run?
Honestly, I thought this was Karen’s year. I expected that – with no ballot issues to lure the locals away from their precious weekend barbeques and lawn work, Karen’s dedicated cadre of ‘Don’t Tread on Me” Anti-Tax, Pro-Mayor, semi-pro election workers would win the day.
She had quite a few signs, in more than one color (I think she may even have recycled some of her old signs, from previous campaigns).
Ms. Buechs even had several television shows on the local cable access channel, which she either produced or directed – on which normally self-absorbed hosts repeatedly urged people to vote for her.
But Plymouth has spoken, and once again they spoke a blend of Mandarin, Hip-Hop and Portuguese.
Karen is out, but Kenny is in?
Former Selectman Ken Tavares was ousted last year in the same election in which Ms. Buech’s efforts to move the town toward Mayoral government, were overwhelmingly repudiated at the polls.
And - in that same election, Tavares lost to an inexperienced candidate supported by Buechs.
That was of course, Sean Dodgson, who served only a few months on the board before he was arrested for – what he has said was, his own private investigation of online sexual predators.
Maybe that’s it – the source of this strange behavior: perhaps it’s not the water but, instead, our Internet stream that’s tainted with some kind of virus.
So last year Dodgson took Tavares’ seat on the board, and the ‘Open” slate (who Tavares strongly supported) was elected and – this year, Buechs is out and Tavares is back in?
Tavares actually received more votes than anyone running for a contested office this year, and will now occupy what will forever be known as the SDS (the Sean Dodgson Seat).
I’m confused but, in general, I think I’m happy with the results.
I didn’t really follow the campaigns of any of the candidates, so my votes were based on bias and political signs alone.
I was a big supporter of Mr. Luscz, largely because I couldn’t pronounce his name – at first. Driving through town, reading the signs out loud, I guessed it was ‘loots’ or ‘luge’ or ‘lux’. But then I received some of his campaign literature in the mail. On one of his cards it said, “How Duscz Pronounce His Name?”.
How can you not vote for a guy who says his name rhymes with fuzzy?
So Fuzzy Luscz got my vote – and lost.
I was generally unfamiliar with the candidates for School Committee, and hoped that inspiration would strike. In the booth I saw that Amy Heine’s full name – listed on the ballot, was Amy “Little” Heine.
I voted for Little Heine, and she lost too.
Beyond that I didn’t have much to go on.
Butch Machado seemed to have more signs than anyone else –at least in my neck of the woods, but I’d heard people say his candidacy was “Much Ado” about nothing. I didn’t vote for Butch – and he won.
The big winner, of the losers that is, was Jeffrey Simpson.
I don’t think he had any signs.
I don’t think he had any literature.
I didn’t vote for him and yet, somehow, he still lost, big.
With just 264 votes Mr. Simpson was the lowest vote getter of any candidate for any office.
I expect big things from Jeffrey.
Next year he’ll probably have signs on the highway, at the Pet Cemetery, on the roof of Wal-Mart and beyond.
And after that, who knows?
No one knows.
Isn’t it great!
Friday, May 18, 2007
Belated Anniversary Wishes
I forgot. Another anniversary has come and gone without my acknowledgement.
I try to remember – honest I do, but there’s something wrong with me: something missing from my brain, when it comes to birthdays, anniversaries and such.
I should also admit that I have a convenient philosophical objection, to what I think is the endless marketing of anniversaries to sell everything from candy to cars.
Anyway, that’s my excuse.
What’s yours?
From what I can tell, you missed it too.
And I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that this was really more your anniversary than mine.
It was you that made such a big deal of it in the first place.
It was you, wasn’t it, who put up those flags on the overpass?
It was you who overwhelmingly, unabashedly, unreservedly approved of the invasion of Iraq, right?
Surely you couldn’t have forgotten, so soon, this important anniversary?
The end of the war in Iraq!
It’s been four years now, since ‘major combat operations’ ceased.
Don’t give me that sheepish grin.
You can pretend you missed the anniversary, but you can’t have forgotten that first celebration, four years ago, on an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego.
Banners waving, flags flying, the President dressed down in his flight suit.
A dictatorship overthrown, an army defeated, an historic capital city captured, weapons of mass destruction, democracy, shock and awe, salutes and speeches, yadda yadda yadda.
And it only took a few billion dollars and a little more than a hundred American lives.
A bargain!
There hasn’t been an occasion like that – excluding of course Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster production of Pearl Harbor - for more than four years.
So how did you forget it?
Where were you May 1st?
There were no parades, or solemn invocations – at least none that I heard of.
The day passed without fanfare, though later that same evening the President did make an appearance to talk about victory in Iraq, again.
Major combat operations ceased four years ago and, according to the President – any day now, victory will be in sight. In sight like the light at the end of the tunnel, I guess - a railway tunnel. Like a train bearing down on us.
I never thought that you could be nostalgic about war: but I really miss those days, those early days of peace in Iraq.
I miss all the fresh hype, the purple prose, the Country & Western Pop Star Propaganda. I miss the boyish antics of the President. The trips to the United Nations. The charts and graphs. The film footage of troops practicing getting into their biological warfare suits.
It was our own, 21st Century version of ‘duck and cover’.
Remember the ‘Axis of Evil’?
Remember ‘You can run, but you cannot hide’?
No, of course not: you’re quick on the draw, but a bit slow when it comes to the historical facts.
The Axis of Evil was Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, remember?
Today, after four years of what they are defining as ‘minor combat operations’, that Axis has grown.
What we have now, I suppose you might say, are Axes of Evil: a spider web of nations including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Indonesia, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Ethiopia, and a burgeoning terrorist underground.
A week doesn’t go by without a report – usually false, of a major Al Qaeda leader having been captured or killed. We used to have just ‘America’s Most Wanted” to look forward to: now we have “Today’s Top Ten Terrorists”.
A day doesn’t go by without reports of a car bomb, or a suicide bomber.
They have beheadings on YouTube and IED explosions on the Nightly News.
And a minute doesn’t go by without another government official admitting that the case for war was inflated, exaggerated, distorted or invented.
So, again, how could you have forgotten?
Where were you last Tuesday?
You didn’t even send a card, and they have such cute ones these days: cards for every occasion.
Here’s a few from the ‘Humorous Notes for the President’ section:
• “I know I said ‘Give Peace a Chance’”, written on the outside and, inside: “but I didn’t mean just one.”
• Or how about... “I believed you when you said, ‘Major Combat Operations have Ceased!” on the outside, and inside, “April Fools!”
• Or, “You’re not getting older” on the outside, and inside, “you’re just not as good a liar.”
• Or, “Let’s make it official”, on the outside, and inside, “you blew it.”
• Or just a simple “Belated Best Wishes on the Anniversary of the End of Major Combat Operations” on the outside. And inside a date that you can change to match the actual end of major combat operations.
Pick one out. Send it in.
It’s never too late to say you’re sorry.
I try to remember – honest I do, but there’s something wrong with me: something missing from my brain, when it comes to birthdays, anniversaries and such.
I should also admit that I have a convenient philosophical objection, to what I think is the endless marketing of anniversaries to sell everything from candy to cars.
Anyway, that’s my excuse.
What’s yours?
From what I can tell, you missed it too.
And I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that this was really more your anniversary than mine.
It was you that made such a big deal of it in the first place.
It was you, wasn’t it, who put up those flags on the overpass?
It was you who overwhelmingly, unabashedly, unreservedly approved of the invasion of Iraq, right?
Surely you couldn’t have forgotten, so soon, this important anniversary?
The end of the war in Iraq!
It’s been four years now, since ‘major combat operations’ ceased.
Don’t give me that sheepish grin.
You can pretend you missed the anniversary, but you can’t have forgotten that first celebration, four years ago, on an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego.
Banners waving, flags flying, the President dressed down in his flight suit.
A dictatorship overthrown, an army defeated, an historic capital city captured, weapons of mass destruction, democracy, shock and awe, salutes and speeches, yadda yadda yadda.
And it only took a few billion dollars and a little more than a hundred American lives.
A bargain!
There hasn’t been an occasion like that – excluding of course Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster production of Pearl Harbor - for more than four years.
So how did you forget it?
Where were you May 1st?
There were no parades, or solemn invocations – at least none that I heard of.
The day passed without fanfare, though later that same evening the President did make an appearance to talk about victory in Iraq, again.
Major combat operations ceased four years ago and, according to the President – any day now, victory will be in sight. In sight like the light at the end of the tunnel, I guess - a railway tunnel. Like a train bearing down on us.
I never thought that you could be nostalgic about war: but I really miss those days, those early days of peace in Iraq.
I miss all the fresh hype, the purple prose, the Country & Western Pop Star Propaganda. I miss the boyish antics of the President. The trips to the United Nations. The charts and graphs. The film footage of troops practicing getting into their biological warfare suits.
It was our own, 21st Century version of ‘duck and cover’.
Remember the ‘Axis of Evil’?
Remember ‘You can run, but you cannot hide’?
No, of course not: you’re quick on the draw, but a bit slow when it comes to the historical facts.
The Axis of Evil was Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, remember?
Today, after four years of what they are defining as ‘minor combat operations’, that Axis has grown.
What we have now, I suppose you might say, are Axes of Evil: a spider web of nations including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Indonesia, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Ethiopia, and a burgeoning terrorist underground.
A week doesn’t go by without a report – usually false, of a major Al Qaeda leader having been captured or killed. We used to have just ‘America’s Most Wanted” to look forward to: now we have “Today’s Top Ten Terrorists”.
A day doesn’t go by without reports of a car bomb, or a suicide bomber.
They have beheadings on YouTube and IED explosions on the Nightly News.
And a minute doesn’t go by without another government official admitting that the case for war was inflated, exaggerated, distorted or invented.
So, again, how could you have forgotten?
Where were you last Tuesday?
You didn’t even send a card, and they have such cute ones these days: cards for every occasion.
Here’s a few from the ‘Humorous Notes for the President’ section:
• “I know I said ‘Give Peace a Chance’”, written on the outside and, inside: “but I didn’t mean just one.”
• Or how about... “I believed you when you said, ‘Major Combat Operations have Ceased!” on the outside, and inside, “April Fools!”
• Or, “You’re not getting older” on the outside, and inside, “you’re just not as good a liar.”
• Or, “Let’s make it official”, on the outside, and inside, “you blew it.”
• Or just a simple “Belated Best Wishes on the Anniversary of the End of Major Combat Operations” on the outside. And inside a date that you can change to match the actual end of major combat operations.
Pick one out. Send it in.
It’s never too late to say you’re sorry.
A Bucket of Soldiers
I need to have more faith in my children, and their world.
I need to believe that they too, will overcome the crap – there is no other word for it: the effluvia, the waste, the trash, the sugar-dipped, deep-fat fried flotsam and jetsam that is spewed their way by our pay-as-you-go society.
I think – to be fair, that they are entitled to more time, to get down to ‘brass tacks’ as my parents might have said.
We don’t come to responsibility – naturally: it has to be grafted onto our genetic predisposition to flee from danger.
Primitive man formed the original habit – run or be eaten, and then added on other reasons for moving on: drought, fire, pestilence, greener pastures, wanderlust, and the cute girls in the tribe just over the hill. And so on.
Thousands of years later we still instinctively follow the path of least resistance: but thousands of years later it is not necessarily in our best interest to do so.
Travel is nice, but it does not necessarily make you a better person.
What we all need – is real experience. We need challenges. We need situations in which we have to – to use another cliché, ‘put up or shut up’. But nowadays it is far harder to find those kinds of experiences.
So we send our kids to camp, or sign them up for football, or make them mow the lawn – and are surprised when, at 18, or 20, or 25, they still seem clueless as to what it takes to make their own way in life.
And seeing that lack of maturity, we over-react – I think, to the elements of their existence that we find most alien to our generation. We scapegoat television and video games, and the toys that – in the absence of real responsibility, take up so much of their lives.
That’s where this diatribe comes from, by the way – from trying to understand what it is about today’s toys that our children find so appealing.
This column comes out of a few minutes before bedtime spent listening to my son excitedly tell me about Decepticons and Autobots.
Otherwise known as, the Transformers!
I didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
From my adult perspective, they seemed a complete waste of time, and money.
I thought I knew all the relevant information: which is that Transformers are large, often expensive, very complicated toys that ‘transform’ back and forth between machine and humanoid.
To put it briefly: the Autobots are good, the Decepticons (deceivers?) bad.
It began with a few simple Transformers - originally introduced over 30 years ago, and since that time has grown into a literal empire of toys.
What really bothers me about Transformers, and many of the other toys sold to our children today, is the ‘back-story’ that they all come with. To justify each and every new Transformer that comes onto the market, the manufacturers have created an elaborate fictional universe.
Though usually you also have to buy the book, batteries, and take adult education classes in electrical engineering to put them together, the modern toy does not require imagination: it comes complete with its own universe, its own heroes and villains.
Transformers are not just a series of toys, but a toy religion.
When you purchase these toys, in a real sense, you are asked to believe, to buy in to their often stilted, illogical, violent world views.
That’s a far cry – I thought at first, from the simple toys I had as a child. Those toys didn’t usually come with elaborate stories, invented universes, or their own television shows and feature films. They came in buckets, or boxes, with little if any instructions.
You took them out, set them up, and used them until they wore out or you lost interest in them.
But then again, thinking of the buckets of toy soldiers I owned as a child – I wonder if it wasn’t the same challenge?
Though you could buy toy solders by the thousands, and set them up anyway you liked, perhaps the rules of play that we were supposed to abide by were not so different, and were equally as confining, as modern toys.
While the Transformers creators spent a great deal of time and effort – and money, to establish a story line for their toys, the manufacturers of the toys of my childhood simply took their ‘story lines’ for granted.
Boys played war games – tossing clods of dirt at opposing armies, or gunning down ‘Indians’. Girls were given far less exciting toys to play with – and almost all of them focused on the domestic environment that it was assumed lay ahead for them.
In many ways the ‘story lines’ of the toys of my youth were as stifling to the imagination as those of today’s toy companies – or worse.
And didn’t we overcome those assumptions?
It’s a question worth asking.
I’d like to think that, despite all the time I spent digging in the dirt, positioning my tanks and bazooka-men for the big battle, that I was able to imagine a world without constant warfare.
I’d like to think that despite my love for the simple game of marbles, that I am able to handle the complexities of the real world.
There is very little about Transformers, or many of the similar toys and games that occupy so much of our children’s lives, that I find appealing. They are wonderfully engineered, but that’s about it.
I would rather my son do a hundred other things with his time, before he gets out his Cybertrons, or his Pokemon cards, or his Game Boy.
I will do anything, and everything I can, to make sure he knows he has other options, options that won’t just eat up the hours and ruin his eyesight.
But I need to have more faith that, in the end – given time and patience, he will be able to overcome the artificial, be able to see through the superficial, understand that there are better things to do with his time, better ways to live his life.
Maybe that’s how Transformers work.
After all the time spent putting the things together, snapping in the batteries, and reading the instruction you find yourself looking for better ways to help your children play, learn, and mature.
Cool!
I need to believe that they too, will overcome the crap – there is no other word for it: the effluvia, the waste, the trash, the sugar-dipped, deep-fat fried flotsam and jetsam that is spewed their way by our pay-as-you-go society.
I think – to be fair, that they are entitled to more time, to get down to ‘brass tacks’ as my parents might have said.
We don’t come to responsibility – naturally: it has to be grafted onto our genetic predisposition to flee from danger.
Primitive man formed the original habit – run or be eaten, and then added on other reasons for moving on: drought, fire, pestilence, greener pastures, wanderlust, and the cute girls in the tribe just over the hill. And so on.
Thousands of years later we still instinctively follow the path of least resistance: but thousands of years later it is not necessarily in our best interest to do so.
Travel is nice, but it does not necessarily make you a better person.
What we all need – is real experience. We need challenges. We need situations in which we have to – to use another cliché, ‘put up or shut up’. But nowadays it is far harder to find those kinds of experiences.
So we send our kids to camp, or sign them up for football, or make them mow the lawn – and are surprised when, at 18, or 20, or 25, they still seem clueless as to what it takes to make their own way in life.
And seeing that lack of maturity, we over-react – I think, to the elements of their existence that we find most alien to our generation. We scapegoat television and video games, and the toys that – in the absence of real responsibility, take up so much of their lives.
That’s where this diatribe comes from, by the way – from trying to understand what it is about today’s toys that our children find so appealing.
This column comes out of a few minutes before bedtime spent listening to my son excitedly tell me about Decepticons and Autobots.
Otherwise known as, the Transformers!
I didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
From my adult perspective, they seemed a complete waste of time, and money.
I thought I knew all the relevant information: which is that Transformers are large, often expensive, very complicated toys that ‘transform’ back and forth between machine and humanoid.
To put it briefly: the Autobots are good, the Decepticons (deceivers?) bad.
It began with a few simple Transformers - originally introduced over 30 years ago, and since that time has grown into a literal empire of toys.
What really bothers me about Transformers, and many of the other toys sold to our children today, is the ‘back-story’ that they all come with. To justify each and every new Transformer that comes onto the market, the manufacturers have created an elaborate fictional universe.
Though usually you also have to buy the book, batteries, and take adult education classes in electrical engineering to put them together, the modern toy does not require imagination: it comes complete with its own universe, its own heroes and villains.
Transformers are not just a series of toys, but a toy religion.
When you purchase these toys, in a real sense, you are asked to believe, to buy in to their often stilted, illogical, violent world views.
That’s a far cry – I thought at first, from the simple toys I had as a child. Those toys didn’t usually come with elaborate stories, invented universes, or their own television shows and feature films. They came in buckets, or boxes, with little if any instructions.
You took them out, set them up, and used them until they wore out or you lost interest in them.
But then again, thinking of the buckets of toy soldiers I owned as a child – I wonder if it wasn’t the same challenge?
Though you could buy toy solders by the thousands, and set them up anyway you liked, perhaps the rules of play that we were supposed to abide by were not so different, and were equally as confining, as modern toys.
While the Transformers creators spent a great deal of time and effort – and money, to establish a story line for their toys, the manufacturers of the toys of my childhood simply took their ‘story lines’ for granted.
Boys played war games – tossing clods of dirt at opposing armies, or gunning down ‘Indians’. Girls were given far less exciting toys to play with – and almost all of them focused on the domestic environment that it was assumed lay ahead for them.
In many ways the ‘story lines’ of the toys of my youth were as stifling to the imagination as those of today’s toy companies – or worse.
And didn’t we overcome those assumptions?
It’s a question worth asking.
I’d like to think that, despite all the time I spent digging in the dirt, positioning my tanks and bazooka-men for the big battle, that I was able to imagine a world without constant warfare.
I’d like to think that despite my love for the simple game of marbles, that I am able to handle the complexities of the real world.
There is very little about Transformers, or many of the similar toys and games that occupy so much of our children’s lives, that I find appealing. They are wonderfully engineered, but that’s about it.
I would rather my son do a hundred other things with his time, before he gets out his Cybertrons, or his Pokemon cards, or his Game Boy.
I will do anything, and everything I can, to make sure he knows he has other options, options that won’t just eat up the hours and ruin his eyesight.
But I need to have more faith that, in the end – given time and patience, he will be able to overcome the artificial, be able to see through the superficial, understand that there are better things to do with his time, better ways to live his life.
Maybe that’s how Transformers work.
After all the time spent putting the things together, snapping in the batteries, and reading the instruction you find yourself looking for better ways to help your children play, learn, and mature.
Cool!
Don't Mention It
“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences, and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.” The Plague, by Albert Camus
The Egyptians may have had it right.
If Pharaoh, or anyone of prominence in ancient Egypt, did something really stupid – all record of their existence was obliterated.
Whether their name had been inscribed on a hundred granite obelisks, or a forty foot likeness had been carved into a cliff of stone, certain deeds were punished by absolute, eternal obscurity.
Their names were rubbed out.
Their statues toppled.
Their tombs filled with sand.
Of course eternal obscurity is not something you cannot guarantee. Historians and archaeologists have managed to piece together the names – and stories, of those the ancients tried to obscure.
But still, I think they had the right idea – and it wasn’t the obscure notion of a ancient culture: it was a basic emotional instinct that, I think, needs to be re-awoken in so-called modern man.
We have got to stop erecting monuments to evil.
Of course we don’t have obelisks, anymore – at least no one in my circle of friends does: but we do have many new ways in which notoriety is achieved.
The digital world is a kind of earth-sized board game, where with a roll of the electronic dice, it seems, anything can happen.
You Tube, Face Book, blogs, and the traditional media serve as a kind of fractured magic mirror in which our bloated vanity is reflected – though often it is only ourselves who care to look.
Still, there is at least the illusion of a digital democracy – and, as a result, the widespread fantasy that what is most often bad poetry, or amateur photography, or misbegotten philosophy, exists on the same level as that of the famous poet, the brilliant photographer, and the renowned philosopher.
And, at most, it is simply that – an illusion, or perhaps, a personal delusion: pathetic perhaps, but usually harmless.
Harmless, that is, until the kid with the cell phone, or the untalented starlet, or the so-called radio personality steps over the line. At which time their questionable beliefs and talent-free creations are metaphorically attached to a cable, pulled aloft, and dragged across the horizon where they cannot be ignored.
Stupidity, brutality, vanity: instead of guaranteeing obscurity, for those that perform an action that contains an over-abundance of any one of those attributes, they can expect fame and even fortune, instead.
The worse the action – the larger the monument we erect.
We have got things bass ackward!
I’m not suggesting we create laws which re-institute the digital equivalents of the stocks, or flogging, or corporal punishment, to try and impede certain behavior. But I am saying that we have to do more than ‘understand’ (as some media giants offer up as an excuse) that notoriety is a real reward, a real motivation.
Anna Nicole was a lousy mother, whose ditzy, drugged out behavior was rewarded time and time again, and who – when she died of an overdose of every pill she could lay her hands on, was turned into a Movie of the Week!
Cross her out!
Imus was a foul-mouthed, ex-drug addict, talk show host whose only excuse was that he was an equal-opportunity offender.
Turn him off!
And now the mentally ill man at Virginia Tech – whose name I refuse to mention, who lived only as long as it took him to plan and execute his media extravaganza.
Erase his name!
Stop giving these pathetic individuals attention.
Stop giving these idiots hours and hours of so-called ‘news coverage’.
Don’t put their faces on magazine covers.
Delete their web sites.
Don’t pay people who knew them, for telling us what they were like before they made the big time.
The only reasonable, human reaction to the murder of nearly three dozen members of the Virginia Tech community, was stunned shock.
The only reason for television cameras on the Virginia Tech campus after this crime, was to witness the grief.
The only commentary that we should have heard from the talking heads that flocked to Blacksburg like vultures to a carcass, was silence.
The first thing we need to do is expunge every public mention of the sad little man who wanted so badly for someone to notice him.
Let the historians have him. Let the psychologists have him.
But for the rest of us, erase him from the papers, the television, and the internet. To do otherwise is to trivialize tragedy, and encourage imitation.
To do otherwise is to build another monument to evil.
The Egyptians may have had it right.
If Pharaoh, or anyone of prominence in ancient Egypt, did something really stupid – all record of their existence was obliterated.
Whether their name had been inscribed on a hundred granite obelisks, or a forty foot likeness had been carved into a cliff of stone, certain deeds were punished by absolute, eternal obscurity.
Their names were rubbed out.
Their statues toppled.
Their tombs filled with sand.
Of course eternal obscurity is not something you cannot guarantee. Historians and archaeologists have managed to piece together the names – and stories, of those the ancients tried to obscure.
But still, I think they had the right idea – and it wasn’t the obscure notion of a ancient culture: it was a basic emotional instinct that, I think, needs to be re-awoken in so-called modern man.
We have got to stop erecting monuments to evil.
Of course we don’t have obelisks, anymore – at least no one in my circle of friends does: but we do have many new ways in which notoriety is achieved.
The digital world is a kind of earth-sized board game, where with a roll of the electronic dice, it seems, anything can happen.
You Tube, Face Book, blogs, and the traditional media serve as a kind of fractured magic mirror in which our bloated vanity is reflected – though often it is only ourselves who care to look.
Still, there is at least the illusion of a digital democracy – and, as a result, the widespread fantasy that what is most often bad poetry, or amateur photography, or misbegotten philosophy, exists on the same level as that of the famous poet, the brilliant photographer, and the renowned philosopher.
And, at most, it is simply that – an illusion, or perhaps, a personal delusion: pathetic perhaps, but usually harmless.
Harmless, that is, until the kid with the cell phone, or the untalented starlet, or the so-called radio personality steps over the line. At which time their questionable beliefs and talent-free creations are metaphorically attached to a cable, pulled aloft, and dragged across the horizon where they cannot be ignored.
Stupidity, brutality, vanity: instead of guaranteeing obscurity, for those that perform an action that contains an over-abundance of any one of those attributes, they can expect fame and even fortune, instead.
The worse the action – the larger the monument we erect.
We have got things bass ackward!
I’m not suggesting we create laws which re-institute the digital equivalents of the stocks, or flogging, or corporal punishment, to try and impede certain behavior. But I am saying that we have to do more than ‘understand’ (as some media giants offer up as an excuse) that notoriety is a real reward, a real motivation.
Anna Nicole was a lousy mother, whose ditzy, drugged out behavior was rewarded time and time again, and who – when she died of an overdose of every pill she could lay her hands on, was turned into a Movie of the Week!
Cross her out!
Imus was a foul-mouthed, ex-drug addict, talk show host whose only excuse was that he was an equal-opportunity offender.
Turn him off!
And now the mentally ill man at Virginia Tech – whose name I refuse to mention, who lived only as long as it took him to plan and execute his media extravaganza.
Erase his name!
Stop giving these pathetic individuals attention.
Stop giving these idiots hours and hours of so-called ‘news coverage’.
Don’t put their faces on magazine covers.
Delete their web sites.
Don’t pay people who knew them, for telling us what they were like before they made the big time.
The only reasonable, human reaction to the murder of nearly three dozen members of the Virginia Tech community, was stunned shock.
The only reason for television cameras on the Virginia Tech campus after this crime, was to witness the grief.
The only commentary that we should have heard from the talking heads that flocked to Blacksburg like vultures to a carcass, was silence.
The first thing we need to do is expunge every public mention of the sad little man who wanted so badly for someone to notice him.
Let the historians have him. Let the psychologists have him.
But for the rest of us, erase him from the papers, the television, and the internet. To do otherwise is to trivialize tragedy, and encourage imitation.
To do otherwise is to build another monument to evil.
Spring Fever, 2007
Forget NASCAR.
Forget the Kentucky Derby.
Forget the Sadie Hawkins Day Race.
Forget the rush to the hardware store for plywood and duct tape when the weatherman says a hurricane is headed your way.
The camera crews may miss it, and it rarely makes the nightly news, but there is no greater mad dash in America than that which takes place in New England when we get a sunny Saturday in April.
April showers bring May flowers is a cute little weather cliché that does little to mask the madness that spreads like a brushfire when we get one good day out of 30 at this time of year.
You would think we would know what’s coming by now, and organize ourselves ahead of time. There are those among us who have their mowers tuned up, their fertilizer bags stacked, and the Tiki lamps fueled and at the ready well before the end of March – but they are still not immune to the fever.
It seems to sneak up on us, every year.
Leading up to this past Saturday, April had been typically murky. The drabness of the weather even seemed bearable, especially in consideration of the way the recently departed winter had wimped out – at least ‘round here.
But make no mistake, the cold, the gray, and the occasional snow had still taken a toll, psychologically, on all of us, and we were more than ready - in fact well beyond eager - we were actually chomping at the bit (or on the remote control if a bit wasn’t readily available) for a chance get off the couch and do something, anything, as long as we were doing it under a shining sun.
And then of course – perfect timing, a massive storm began moving through the country – left to right, with the weathermen gleefully promising that we would soon be swimming in it, literally, for days.
If you had forgotten, you realized then that April showers, in fact, bring flooded basements, turn charming country roads into boulevards of mud, and seem to carry with them more than their fair share of viruses that had – my theory, lay dormant in the cold soil until this time of the year.
And so – along with the normal chorus of sneezes and sniffles, a wave of panic swept from house to house, from Bangor to Hartford, as everyone realized at the same time that “this might be the last sunny Saturday for weeks!”
The race was on!
At Lowes and Home Depot the stainless steel gas barbeques were lined up like storm troopers, for as far as the eye could see – and soon began boarding a thousand oversized SUVS.
At a dozen or so lawn and garden stores, endless trays of flowers were teased into bloom and pushed out the door faster than burgers at a fast food joint.
That vibration you felt underfoot as you tentatively tread your soggy lawn for the first time in several months, wasn’t a minor earthquake, it was Roto-Tillers by the hundreds, turning the earth inside out.
That buzzing sound you heard wasn’t the long awaited Killer Bees, finally moving north from Texas; it was fertilizer companies in their cute little pastel trucks, swarming into your suburban enclave.
Were there games being played at the town’s ballfields? Not really. But the recreations areas were crowded with aspiring Little League coaches who sought to prove their mettle by wheeling load after load of loam onto the ballfields, which the weather, a day or so later, licked off the base paths like frosting off a cake.
According to statistics gathered by my crack team of crank callers:
1673 new mailboxes were installed on this sunny Saturday.
45,555 pounds of weed and feed were spread, in clumps and clods and the occasional fine spray of pellets.
Though there was no precipitation it still rained - buckets of mulch.
1104 moldy plastic pieces of deck furniture were rescued from sheds, carefully evaluated, and then taken to the dump.
1773 new pieces of plastic deck furniture were rapidly purchased and promptly put on the deck where the expected rainfall would soon begin to lay the foundation for new mold and mildew.
Enough charcoal was sold to power the space shuttle, and men braver than me stood out in the cold that evening, in short sleeves, talking to themselves, waving tongs and knives in the air, under the delusion that they were having a summer barbeque.
Liquor stores reported that beer purchases were way, way, up, but – according to my friend Dan, with temperatures in the high 40’s consumption lagged.
Baseball gloves sold like hotcakes, while hotcake sales were slow.
In order to accommodate the madness, the Cape Cod Tunnel was open to all, and the Red Sox played with the dome open.
Rome wasn’t built in a day – the saying goes, but New Englanders took their best shot at it this past Saturday.
Forget the Kentucky Derby.
Forget the Sadie Hawkins Day Race.
Forget the rush to the hardware store for plywood and duct tape when the weatherman says a hurricane is headed your way.
The camera crews may miss it, and it rarely makes the nightly news, but there is no greater mad dash in America than that which takes place in New England when we get a sunny Saturday in April.
April showers bring May flowers is a cute little weather cliché that does little to mask the madness that spreads like a brushfire when we get one good day out of 30 at this time of year.
You would think we would know what’s coming by now, and organize ourselves ahead of time. There are those among us who have their mowers tuned up, their fertilizer bags stacked, and the Tiki lamps fueled and at the ready well before the end of March – but they are still not immune to the fever.
It seems to sneak up on us, every year.
Leading up to this past Saturday, April had been typically murky. The drabness of the weather even seemed bearable, especially in consideration of the way the recently departed winter had wimped out – at least ‘round here.
But make no mistake, the cold, the gray, and the occasional snow had still taken a toll, psychologically, on all of us, and we were more than ready - in fact well beyond eager - we were actually chomping at the bit (or on the remote control if a bit wasn’t readily available) for a chance get off the couch and do something, anything, as long as we were doing it under a shining sun.
And then of course – perfect timing, a massive storm began moving through the country – left to right, with the weathermen gleefully promising that we would soon be swimming in it, literally, for days.
If you had forgotten, you realized then that April showers, in fact, bring flooded basements, turn charming country roads into boulevards of mud, and seem to carry with them more than their fair share of viruses that had – my theory, lay dormant in the cold soil until this time of the year.
And so – along with the normal chorus of sneezes and sniffles, a wave of panic swept from house to house, from Bangor to Hartford, as everyone realized at the same time that “this might be the last sunny Saturday for weeks!”
The race was on!
At Lowes and Home Depot the stainless steel gas barbeques were lined up like storm troopers, for as far as the eye could see – and soon began boarding a thousand oversized SUVS.
At a dozen or so lawn and garden stores, endless trays of flowers were teased into bloom and pushed out the door faster than burgers at a fast food joint.
That vibration you felt underfoot as you tentatively tread your soggy lawn for the first time in several months, wasn’t a minor earthquake, it was Roto-Tillers by the hundreds, turning the earth inside out.
That buzzing sound you heard wasn’t the long awaited Killer Bees, finally moving north from Texas; it was fertilizer companies in their cute little pastel trucks, swarming into your suburban enclave.
Were there games being played at the town’s ballfields? Not really. But the recreations areas were crowded with aspiring Little League coaches who sought to prove their mettle by wheeling load after load of loam onto the ballfields, which the weather, a day or so later, licked off the base paths like frosting off a cake.
According to statistics gathered by my crack team of crank callers:
1673 new mailboxes were installed on this sunny Saturday.
45,555 pounds of weed and feed were spread, in clumps and clods and the occasional fine spray of pellets.
Though there was no precipitation it still rained - buckets of mulch.
1104 moldy plastic pieces of deck furniture were rescued from sheds, carefully evaluated, and then taken to the dump.
1773 new pieces of plastic deck furniture were rapidly purchased and promptly put on the deck where the expected rainfall would soon begin to lay the foundation for new mold and mildew.
Enough charcoal was sold to power the space shuttle, and men braver than me stood out in the cold that evening, in short sleeves, talking to themselves, waving tongs and knives in the air, under the delusion that they were having a summer barbeque.
Liquor stores reported that beer purchases were way, way, up, but – according to my friend Dan, with temperatures in the high 40’s consumption lagged.
Baseball gloves sold like hotcakes, while hotcake sales were slow.
In order to accommodate the madness, the Cape Cod Tunnel was open to all, and the Red Sox played with the dome open.
Rome wasn’t built in a day – the saying goes, but New Englanders took their best shot at it this past Saturday.
Celebrity Cannibal
At bath time, for no particularly reason, we used to tell my youngest son the story of Virgil the Worm, who ate his entire family.
It wasn’t a Jeffery Dahmer tale, full of ghastly, ghoulish monsters.
It was just your usual, harmless child’s fable – with cannibals and frightening metamorphoses.
One day, the story goes, Virgil went to kindergarten and the teacher, somewhat insensitively, remarked on his diminutive stature.
Actually, when you tell this story you’re supposed to say that the teacher said – in a kind of childish, toothless voice, “Virgil, how come you’re so small?”
In the story Virgil just shrugs, indifferent to his stature at first. But on the way home that day he starts to think about the teacher’s comment and, before the bus arrives at his stop, he vows to grow by any means necessary: (there is no dialogue to that effect, but it is implied by the action that follows).
The next day Virgil goes to school again - a changed worm, and the teacher remarks, “Virgil, how’d you get so big?”
While you’re telling this, you use your hands to indicate that Virgil is now, ‘this much bigger’.
And Virgil replies: “I ate my little sister.”
Suffice it to say that each day Virgil gets bigger, as he eats his way through his entire family: little sister, little brother, big sister, big brother, and so on and so on.
You can make the story as long as you like: just add or delete family members on the way.
The punch line, of a sort, is that after eating his mother and father and growing to over a yard in length (‘this big!’), the very next day Virgil shows up at school at his original, puny, inch and three-quarters length.
And when his teacher asks him what happened, he replied… “I burped”.
My God, Bobby loved that story.
I am not sure if it was the notion of eating all available relatives, rapid growth, or the slapstick image of Virgil ‘burping’ up his entire clan, but when the punch line was delivered he would practically go limp with laughter, sliding down into the tub like a trained seal.
I started thinking about that old story this week, when I heard the latest Keith Richard’s fable.
‘Keef’, the story goes, snorted his father’s ashes – mixed in, of course, with a little of the old Kickapoo Joy Juice.
I don’t believe the story and, in fact, Keef now denies it too. It seems he was having a bit of fun with journalists who would like nothing better than for him to admit such things.
People are going to make these things up about him anyway, so why not get in on the action. It is almost an obligation of the famous, to regularly astound us with their normalcy – which is, to say, their stupidity.
‘Keef’, the eager journalist asks, ‘where’d you learn to play guitar’?
“I snorted Chuck Berry”.
‘Keef’, the next in line queries, ‘where’d you learn to play that lick’?
“I snorted Jimi Hendrix”.
It’s nice, isn’t it, to have celebrities around to ridicule, when we’re feeling blue, but the truth, I think, is that WE are the cannibals. We are the ones who, given the opportunity, would snort up starlets and sports stars and anyone who was somehow famous, and do it without any kind of ‘chaser’. We are the ones, who everyday arrive at school, or work, wearing the designated designer clothes of our favorite soap store, the baseball caps of our famous team, the tee shirt with our favorite band’s logo, the tattoos that reveal our desired tribal affiliation.
Whatever happened to, so-called, individuality?
At one time, in the not too distant past – there was at least a token nod given to being an individual – with all of the quirks and eccentricities that come with going your own way. But perhaps it was naive to think that individuality stood a chance in this, or any age.
And perhaps our worship – our devouring of everything allegedly famous, is our last gasp attempt to be unique, by being anything but who we are.
You might argue that individuality today, is the sum of our desires.
And that may work - for now at least.
But as we watch, science is bridging the gap between who we desire to be, and who we appear to be.
In a few years (I Predict!) celebrity body parts are going to be big, huge, humongous, and mostly importantly - affordable!
Apart from the obvious desire for certain starlets’ partlets, I think the cloning industry will concentrate on those parts that they can reproduce in quantity, cost effectively.
A celebrity breast cloning and transfer, for example, would require a complex, relatively slow, and medically dangerous series of procedures.
If you want Brittney’s Best, it could cost you a fortune, so why not just go with the artificial.
But what about buying some famous somebody’s lips, or lobes, or nails?
How about Beyonce’s lashes?
What if you could grow a movie star’s hair in the privacy of your own home?
Scented soap will be made from the cloned bones of the beautiful people.
Jennifer Lopez – so well preserved after all these years, will have a designer line of genetic knock-offs.
And when this happens the only thing that will separate one clone from another, will be their credit card numbers.
I don’t mean to preach, it just comes out that way. I am not immune to this celebrity fever. To be imperfectly honest, I once worked at Mass General’s laboratories in Charlestown, where I had access to the early research in this area. And they were only too happy to let me – and any other cash-starved youth, volunteer for product testing.
You sign a waiver, you let them inject you, you get a check.
In this case though, I also acquired great personal beauty.
For a time I had Robert Plant’s voice.
For a while, I had Mick Jagger’s lips.
For several years, I had Roger Daltrey’s hair.
I became addicted to celebrity parts, which I just kept adding one after the other until no one recognized me, though everyone said I looked ‘very familiar’.
And then one day it all went away.
One day I was cool, young, hip, and handsome.
And the next day I had the puffer fish face I was born with.
You know the story.
You know what happened.
I burped.
It wasn’t a Jeffery Dahmer tale, full of ghastly, ghoulish monsters.
It was just your usual, harmless child’s fable – with cannibals and frightening metamorphoses.
One day, the story goes, Virgil went to kindergarten and the teacher, somewhat insensitively, remarked on his diminutive stature.
Actually, when you tell this story you’re supposed to say that the teacher said – in a kind of childish, toothless voice, “Virgil, how come you’re so small?”
In the story Virgil just shrugs, indifferent to his stature at first. But on the way home that day he starts to think about the teacher’s comment and, before the bus arrives at his stop, he vows to grow by any means necessary: (there is no dialogue to that effect, but it is implied by the action that follows).
The next day Virgil goes to school again - a changed worm, and the teacher remarks, “Virgil, how’d you get so big?”
While you’re telling this, you use your hands to indicate that Virgil is now, ‘this much bigger’.
And Virgil replies: “I ate my little sister.”
Suffice it to say that each day Virgil gets bigger, as he eats his way through his entire family: little sister, little brother, big sister, big brother, and so on and so on.
You can make the story as long as you like: just add or delete family members on the way.
The punch line, of a sort, is that after eating his mother and father and growing to over a yard in length (‘this big!’), the very next day Virgil shows up at school at his original, puny, inch and three-quarters length.
And when his teacher asks him what happened, he replied… “I burped”.
My God, Bobby loved that story.
I am not sure if it was the notion of eating all available relatives, rapid growth, or the slapstick image of Virgil ‘burping’ up his entire clan, but when the punch line was delivered he would practically go limp with laughter, sliding down into the tub like a trained seal.
I started thinking about that old story this week, when I heard the latest Keith Richard’s fable.
‘Keef’, the story goes, snorted his father’s ashes – mixed in, of course, with a little of the old Kickapoo Joy Juice.
I don’t believe the story and, in fact, Keef now denies it too. It seems he was having a bit of fun with journalists who would like nothing better than for him to admit such things.
People are going to make these things up about him anyway, so why not get in on the action. It is almost an obligation of the famous, to regularly astound us with their normalcy – which is, to say, their stupidity.
‘Keef’, the eager journalist asks, ‘where’d you learn to play guitar’?
“I snorted Chuck Berry”.
‘Keef’, the next in line queries, ‘where’d you learn to play that lick’?
“I snorted Jimi Hendrix”.
It’s nice, isn’t it, to have celebrities around to ridicule, when we’re feeling blue, but the truth, I think, is that WE are the cannibals. We are the ones who, given the opportunity, would snort up starlets and sports stars and anyone who was somehow famous, and do it without any kind of ‘chaser’. We are the ones, who everyday arrive at school, or work, wearing the designated designer clothes of our favorite soap store, the baseball caps of our famous team, the tee shirt with our favorite band’s logo, the tattoos that reveal our desired tribal affiliation.
Whatever happened to, so-called, individuality?
At one time, in the not too distant past – there was at least a token nod given to being an individual – with all of the quirks and eccentricities that come with going your own way. But perhaps it was naive to think that individuality stood a chance in this, or any age.
And perhaps our worship – our devouring of everything allegedly famous, is our last gasp attempt to be unique, by being anything but who we are.
You might argue that individuality today, is the sum of our desires.
And that may work - for now at least.
But as we watch, science is bridging the gap between who we desire to be, and who we appear to be.
In a few years (I Predict!) celebrity body parts are going to be big, huge, humongous, and mostly importantly - affordable!
Apart from the obvious desire for certain starlets’ partlets, I think the cloning industry will concentrate on those parts that they can reproduce in quantity, cost effectively.
A celebrity breast cloning and transfer, for example, would require a complex, relatively slow, and medically dangerous series of procedures.
If you want Brittney’s Best, it could cost you a fortune, so why not just go with the artificial.
But what about buying some famous somebody’s lips, or lobes, or nails?
How about Beyonce’s lashes?
What if you could grow a movie star’s hair in the privacy of your own home?
Scented soap will be made from the cloned bones of the beautiful people.
Jennifer Lopez – so well preserved after all these years, will have a designer line of genetic knock-offs.
And when this happens the only thing that will separate one clone from another, will be their credit card numbers.
I don’t mean to preach, it just comes out that way. I am not immune to this celebrity fever. To be imperfectly honest, I once worked at Mass General’s laboratories in Charlestown, where I had access to the early research in this area. And they were only too happy to let me – and any other cash-starved youth, volunteer for product testing.
You sign a waiver, you let them inject you, you get a check.
In this case though, I also acquired great personal beauty.
For a time I had Robert Plant’s voice.
For a while, I had Mick Jagger’s lips.
For several years, I had Roger Daltrey’s hair.
I became addicted to celebrity parts, which I just kept adding one after the other until no one recognized me, though everyone said I looked ‘very familiar’.
And then one day it all went away.
One day I was cool, young, hip, and handsome.
And the next day I had the puffer fish face I was born with.
You know the story.
You know what happened.
I burped.
The Headless Woman, and Other Stories..
I heard that there is a native tribe in Arizona building an elaborate diving board on the edge of the eastern edge of the Grand Canyon.
I’m told they see it as the final solution to the problem of the White Man, and as a convenient, if ironic method for raising funds for the tribe’s own social service programs.
It’s not the horseshoe shape of the viewing platform that their brothers on the far side of the Canyon recently finished – it is, as I said, a diving board: a narrow rectangle that sticks out over the edge of the canyon.
“You get a great last look” one of the tribal elders allegedly said, “from a series of rapidly different perspectives.”
“Go west young man” a member of the tribe supposedly interjected, and the others tittered nervously.
The diving board to eternity won’t be finished for 18 months, but I hear they already have thousands of reservations.
I’m not surprised.
We have been in such a hurry since we came to this continent.
It’s been as if Filene’s Basement held their wedding gown sale every day for 400 years running.
As soon as the doors opened the brides-to-be rushed in, grabbing land, claiming mineral rights, building factories, and taking no prisoners as they marched from sea to shining sea in search of a better quality of life.
What exactly quality of life consists of however, has evolved, over the years.
At first, it was simply surviving.
Then it was owning – the water, the woods, other humans.
Then we got the notion that quality of life had something to do with personal freedom – so, after killing each other by the hundreds of thousands, we decreed that whatever an individual believed quality of life was, that individual had to respect the lives of other humans.
Unless Congress said so.
Eventually in our search for a better quality of life we reached the end of the continent, divvied up the remaining resources, let everyone vote, and realized that the only thing that was left to fight for – was life itself.
And so we demanded more time to figure things out.
…
I went to a side show at a county fair years ago, and saw The Headless Woman.
She’d been decapitated in a freak car accident – a man in a white smock solemnly explained, but an enterprising young man who happened upon her body moments after the accident, was able to preserve her.
So there she sat, a perfect specimen - save for the absence of her head.
Plastic tubes – allegedly providing a gas that supposedly provided nutrients and kept her skin supple and pinkish, came out of her neck.
Volunteers – the smocked pseudo-scientist called for: anyone who wished could ‘step right up’ and pinch the flesh of her calf, thereby assuring themselves of her reality.
I stepped forward then, and in a sense that is what I am doing here now: stepping forward and giving a philosophical pinch to our society’s obsession with extended life for its own sake.
The reality is – as I see it, is that too many of us live beyond our physical abilities.
The sad truth is, more and more of us live well beyond our mental ability to take care of ourselves in old age.
The hard truth is that we are extending life beyond our ability to afford it.
We simply live too long.
There are tubes coming out of the place where our head should be.
…
Then there’s the joke about the Englishman, the Mexican, and the Texan, flying home from a vacation in Hawaii, when the one of their plane’s two engines breaks.
We need two volunteers, the Captain comes over the intercom, saying: unless two passengers are ejected, the whole plane will crash into the sea.
“God Save the Queen,” the Englishman yells, and leaps out of the plane.
“Remember the Alamo”, the Texan yells, and throws out the Mexican.
No, I am not volunteering. I am not interested in seeing the Grand Canyon, up close and personal, not yet at least.
I’m part of the problem, and I know it.
I can see the end coming, but the closer it gets the more reasons I can find for avoiding it.
I am young – relatively speaking, but I am already sure that when I am in my eighties or nineties, I will be the exception to the rule.
One of the fastest growing age groups – at least in this country, are those between 65 and 80, and that age group requires more and more of society’s resources to support them, or should I say – to resuscitate them.
With rare exceptions, if you live beyond your seventies you will need to go back to the factory for repairs, replacements, lube jobs and such.
New knees, new hips, new teeth, new hair – and that is just for starters.
And for the most part they can make you ‘like new’.
But I am not sure I want to be a collector’s item.
Is the car that is kept in a garage all year long, still a car?
There is something to be said for the dignity of the rusted out old Buick, sitting in the weeds on the side of the road, where it finally broke down.
But I don’t have an answer, or a solution.
I just see the problem, see it growing, and see it affecting everyone, of every age.
My father is 85, and obnoxiously healthy. But other family members are near permanent residents of the nearby hospitals and rehabilitation centers.
We have learned to survive, well beyond our natural years.
It may take centuries, for understanding to catch up.
I’m told they see it as the final solution to the problem of the White Man, and as a convenient, if ironic method for raising funds for the tribe’s own social service programs.
It’s not the horseshoe shape of the viewing platform that their brothers on the far side of the Canyon recently finished – it is, as I said, a diving board: a narrow rectangle that sticks out over the edge of the canyon.
“You get a great last look” one of the tribal elders allegedly said, “from a series of rapidly different perspectives.”
“Go west young man” a member of the tribe supposedly interjected, and the others tittered nervously.
The diving board to eternity won’t be finished for 18 months, but I hear they already have thousands of reservations.
I’m not surprised.
We have been in such a hurry since we came to this continent.
It’s been as if Filene’s Basement held their wedding gown sale every day for 400 years running.
As soon as the doors opened the brides-to-be rushed in, grabbing land, claiming mineral rights, building factories, and taking no prisoners as they marched from sea to shining sea in search of a better quality of life.
What exactly quality of life consists of however, has evolved, over the years.
At first, it was simply surviving.
Then it was owning – the water, the woods, other humans.
Then we got the notion that quality of life had something to do with personal freedom – so, after killing each other by the hundreds of thousands, we decreed that whatever an individual believed quality of life was, that individual had to respect the lives of other humans.
Unless Congress said so.
Eventually in our search for a better quality of life we reached the end of the continent, divvied up the remaining resources, let everyone vote, and realized that the only thing that was left to fight for – was life itself.
And so we demanded more time to figure things out.
…
I went to a side show at a county fair years ago, and saw The Headless Woman.
She’d been decapitated in a freak car accident – a man in a white smock solemnly explained, but an enterprising young man who happened upon her body moments after the accident, was able to preserve her.
So there she sat, a perfect specimen - save for the absence of her head.
Plastic tubes – allegedly providing a gas that supposedly provided nutrients and kept her skin supple and pinkish, came out of her neck.
Volunteers – the smocked pseudo-scientist called for: anyone who wished could ‘step right up’ and pinch the flesh of her calf, thereby assuring themselves of her reality.
I stepped forward then, and in a sense that is what I am doing here now: stepping forward and giving a philosophical pinch to our society’s obsession with extended life for its own sake.
The reality is – as I see it, is that too many of us live beyond our physical abilities.
The sad truth is, more and more of us live well beyond our mental ability to take care of ourselves in old age.
The hard truth is that we are extending life beyond our ability to afford it.
We simply live too long.
There are tubes coming out of the place where our head should be.
…
Then there’s the joke about the Englishman, the Mexican, and the Texan, flying home from a vacation in Hawaii, when the one of their plane’s two engines breaks.
We need two volunteers, the Captain comes over the intercom, saying: unless two passengers are ejected, the whole plane will crash into the sea.
“God Save the Queen,” the Englishman yells, and leaps out of the plane.
“Remember the Alamo”, the Texan yells, and throws out the Mexican.
No, I am not volunteering. I am not interested in seeing the Grand Canyon, up close and personal, not yet at least.
I’m part of the problem, and I know it.
I can see the end coming, but the closer it gets the more reasons I can find for avoiding it.
I am young – relatively speaking, but I am already sure that when I am in my eighties or nineties, I will be the exception to the rule.
One of the fastest growing age groups – at least in this country, are those between 65 and 80, and that age group requires more and more of society’s resources to support them, or should I say – to resuscitate them.
With rare exceptions, if you live beyond your seventies you will need to go back to the factory for repairs, replacements, lube jobs and such.
New knees, new hips, new teeth, new hair – and that is just for starters.
And for the most part they can make you ‘like new’.
But I am not sure I want to be a collector’s item.
Is the car that is kept in a garage all year long, still a car?
There is something to be said for the dignity of the rusted out old Buick, sitting in the weeds on the side of the road, where it finally broke down.
But I don’t have an answer, or a solution.
I just see the problem, see it growing, and see it affecting everyone, of every age.
My father is 85, and obnoxiously healthy. But other family members are near permanent residents of the nearby hospitals and rehabilitation centers.
We have learned to survive, well beyond our natural years.
It may take centuries, for understanding to catch up.
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