Blah, Blah, Blah

“To be honest,” the first one said, “basically, at the end of the day, it is what it is.  Y’know what I’m sayin’?”

That’s what the man said.

Then the second one replied, “Needless to say, that sucks 24/7.”

I hurriedly jotted verbatim each semi-precious syllable—God have mercy on us all—so as not to miss the weight of this exchange.  I heard the above mishmash of clichés and rubbish phrasing the other day at a local Starbucks as I read the morning paper.  Mildly annoyed, I wanted to insert myself into the conversation the twentyish men were having by screaming, “You aren’t saying anything at all.”  But good manners prompted me to remain a listener rather than that teacher who stood in front of classrooms for over thirty-five years.  Even if I knew the context of the dialogue, their rhetorical filler amounted to nothing of greater value than dogs barking at the vacuum cleaner.

Let’s parse the dialogue, shall we.  “To be honest,” the tattooed one began, which suggests to me that honesty is not a regular habit of the speaker.  “Basically,” he said, an expression that I have always found wanting because of its arrogant implication.  When someone uses the word “basically” repeatedly, that person makes the suggestion that the party to whom he or she speaks cannot cut through the complexity of a subject; the know-it-all must stoop to make matters clear to the dolt on the other end of the exchange.  “At the end of the day,” an expression that clutters our everyday speech, gains no traction (another cliché placed here for demonstration purposes only) because of its commonness, its lack of original thought.  And “it is what it is,” of course, is nothing more than bacon fat.  It sizzles a little the first time one smells it, but it is rhetorical rendering—nothing to bite, just a small greasy flavor.  Finally, “y’know what I’m sayin’?” gains the distinction of coming from people who say almost nothing worth listening to.  That idiom begs the listener to nod or in some cosmic way agree with the speaker.  It is, I suppose, a polite way to keep the conversation going, but it too amounts to nothing but wind through the bellows.

Then, the second young man, the one with a hatpin impaling his eyebrow, added inspiring wisdom.  “Needless to say,” an expression that is, by its own admission, needless to say or write precedes “that sucks 24/7.”  Whew!   That young man would have done better to just nod and season the gesture with a grimace.  True, sucking has some indelicate shock value, but no one seems to know the origin of the expression.  If you are a babe at the pap, sucking should mean goodness.  If you are an egg farmer and you discover a weasel sucking your inventory, well, that cannot be good.  Now, that 24/7 tag (y’know what I’m sayin’?) remains simply a clichéd abbreviation for the length of time that the speaker avoids choosing the right words in the right word slots.

Our conversational speech has devolved to the level of grunts and idiotic exchanges that denote the lack of concentrated thought.  Perhaps it has always been that way, but I doubt it.  In part because of developments in digital communication, because topics trend across our little screens, and because one little rhetorical sneeze (“Yada-Yada-Yada”) can infect a vast viewing public, the standard conversational tools have become cut-and-paste applications.  Sure language passes on by imitation, but never before has it spread in the mass production one-size-fits-all media culture under which we now suffer.

A little critical thinking would serve us well.  Recently, I heard John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, talk about what the “American people” would not stand for.  He is forever going on about what the American people think and want.  Listen to him.  Every time a reporter shows up, he breaks into a speech about what the American people seek.  Just about every politician (both sides of the aisle) seems to know what American people want.  Of course, rhetorical presupposition is just part of partisan politics, but it also represents a worrisome sickness in the way we communicate.  Here is how that works: if Boehner says it first and often enough, the herd just may stampede in the direction he indicates.  At the same time, the Democrat leader will exclaim that the “American people” desire the exact opposite of Boehner’s premise.  It gets confusing when hundreds of representatives and senators, each with a different take, tell us what we want.  Please, RoboVoices, you need not tell this American what he wants.  Bottom line (gag), I want Boehner et al to forego speaking on my behalf.  That would be, frankly, awesome (gag).

We live in a day and age when damn near everything is awesome.  “Shall I pass the butter for your dinner roll?”  “That would be awesome.”  “Here’s the awesome butter for your awesome dinner roll.”  “Awesome.”  Now, when an eruption column rose fifteen miles into the atmosphere above Mount St. Helens and the north side of the mountain collapsed creating the largest earth slide ever recorded, the word awesome fits the event.  So with all due respect, think about the denotation of a word before it drools from your mouth.

Speaking of which, I always cringe when someone begins to address me with the phrase “With all due respect.”  Look out!  That slippery and disingenuous opener always means trouble.  It means conflict, disagreement, and probably the speaker has a complete lack of respect for me.  It goes without saying, which is another phrase that ought to go away and stay away, is probably better than “I’ll tell you what.”  One baseball color commentator has never offered a comment—not once—without using that phrase.  “I’ll tell you what” is a phrase less than nothing, a bell without a clapper.  What is the difference between these two comments: “I’ll tell you what, he hit that ball outta da park” and “He hit that ball outta da park”?  The first utterance is twice as long as it should be, that’s what.

If I were to record my every utterance each day and play back the results, I would probably make a New Year’s resolution to take a vow of silence for 2015 because I, along with the rest of us, fill speech bubbles with empty words and unrefined thoughts.

Words matter.  They reflect what we think and who we are.  Bottom line, when we open our mouths, we should be mindful of Homer’s advice: “Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.”

Am I right, or what?

Football and American Culture

Our games mirror what we value.

Take football, for instance.  Look, the game is violent.  That is a large part of why we like it.  It is a territorial struggle, something we adore.  It is war.  Apparently, we like war because we engage in it with such recurrent devotion.  Football invites our tribal nature to whoop it up.  We dance on the sidelines and in the stands.  We pump our fists and scream.  “We’re number one!  We’re number one!”  We take great joy in crushing our adversaries.  It is all part of the game.

Ashamed of myself, I sometimes skip church so I can stay home and watch a crucial game.  I cannot help it; our culture seduces me to join the mob.  I try to put on an act of disinterest, but that is hard to do when the home team calls an audible in the red zone (a term that may have military origins for decimated areas of battle).  When our gang of warriors fumbles, I groan.  When the other gang of brutes scores a touchdown, I groan louder.  When our battlers level their quarterback for a sack, I smile broadly and raise my glass.  Sure, I admit it.

Professional football eventually will change its rules and expectations.  The combatants keep growing larger, more powerful, and faster.  Nutrition and training develop outsized athletes, and naturally, that leads to impactful injuries.  The league owners may have to alter rules just to stay in business because players are simply too fast, too strong, and too prone to devastating injuries.  Lately, concussions have been a media focus, but knee and back injuries are almost as worrisome.  Ahem, it will happen that a player will die on the field bashing headlong into a behemoth.  To date, only one NFL player has died during a game.  That happened on October 24, 1971 when Chuck Hughes collapsed from a heart attack while playing for the Detroit Lions.  His death resulted from a predisposition to coronary disease.  But now the game has ratcheted up a few notches—it has become a spectacle much like the gladiators versus the lions.  When one too many celebrated players die right there on the field, we’ll have to change the rules of the game because, once again, our culture, while favoring blood sports, will not countenance too many deaths between commercials on the flat screen.

Pro football brings out the ugly in all of us.  Fans paint their bodies and festoon their heads with cheese wedges.  They masquerade as hellhounds, Bigfoots, Vikings, zombies, and superheroes, not to mention getups so outlandish that words fall short of accurate description.  Like primitives, these fans apply makeup to their faces and muss their hairdos into frightening displays savage haute couture.  Pacifists clench their fists.  Yahoos drink themselves silly.  Disdainful spouses make an end run for the mall clutching American Express credit cards.

Those of us slouching in front of the wide-screen suffer psychological body blows when our team loses and endorphin highs when our team wins, but in either case the emotional condition amounts to a substitute for the real issues pressing our lives.  We channel our animosities into something that does not matter.  Eugene McCarthy once said, “Being in politics is like being a football coach.  You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.”  (Washington Post, 12 November 1967)  This, to my way of thinking, says more about football than it does about politics.

And those well-practiced hip-thrusting celebrations only add to the atavistic displays of crudeness.  Chest pounding, self-important Groucho slinking, and newly devised moves just for the camera and in-your-face moments flavor vanity with crushing humiliation.  Trash talking is another garnish added to the humble pie that your opponents must choke down.  Rare moments of sportsmanship almost bring tears to my eyes because they are, well, so rare.

Makes baseball a sport for ladies and gentlemen, does it not?  That is why football has taken over as the national sport because in place of manners and humility, values no longer a big part of our culture, we have opted for the vicarious enjoyment of watching behemoths slam their bodies into one another.  Our salvage selves find that appealing.

NFL games highlight what we are, what we have become.

Why I Have a Gun

Let’s get something straight.

The Second Amendment has little to do with the attraction I have for my arsenal of guns, which I keep in almost every room in my home.  I don’t collect guns as a hobby.  I don’t belong to the NRA or a gun club.  I keep my stash of weapons and ammo for reasons most gun owners are reluctant to admit.

Please, allow my explanation.

I like guns.  Guns give me a boost.  I probably shouldn’t admit that I have low self-esteem, but I do.  With a gun in my ankle holster, I feel elevated above my normal ordinary feelings of powerlessness.

I confess I’m a mess.  I’ve always known that I am sexually inadequate, a condition I surely share with most gun owners.  Having a gun, though, compensates for my shortcomings.  I don’t know why.  A small measure of testosterone shoots through me when I fondle a gun grip.
Ever since elementary school, my report cards have indicated that I am not very smart.  So be it.  Weapons are, after all, great equalizers, and as a small man with a small intellect, I need a lift to keep up with the clever people who make rules I don’t like.  The eggheads who received all the good grades don’t stand a chance if I choose to act out one day.  So there!

C’mon, man, you must read the newspapers.  Bad guys (and gals) get the ink each day.  I keep my guns ready because I fear those people, because I fantasize about unspecified bad forces overrunning the neighborhood, raping and murdering as they go door-to-door.  I’m ready for them, especially those punks who shoot up our schools, those mentally unbalanced losers who blast children cowering inside coat closets and the like.  The way I see it, one day when I hear pop pop pop at some school I’m passing in my Jeep Wrangler, I’ll hop to it, gun drawn, and even the score against those misfits and bottom feeders.
 
I know, I know, one runs a 43 times higher risk of harm if a weapon is present. (New England Journal of Medicine 1986. 314: 1557-60.)  But I don’t put much faith in cockeyed science when the hard-boiled eggheads stir the pot.  In fact, as far as I’m concerned, their so-called empirical evidence is nothing more than a liberal think tank political statement.  Mark Twain said there are three kinds of lies.  “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

I recently read this cornball statement from a left-leaning online propaganda rag.  Does anyone believe this stuff?  The claim took the spit right out of my mouth.  “There is no country on earth that is even remotely similar to the U.S. on guns. We have five percent of the world’s population and we own nearly half of the world’s civilian guns. Our gun murder rate is 20 times higher than other developed nations.” (http://www.progressivemajorityaction.org/how_to_rebut_common_pro_gun_arguments)

The part I like most about that conclusion is that we’re pretty darn special.  We have more guns than anyone else does.  So be it.  Let’s see how that plays out when the Chinese or the Russians or those Muslim hoards try to invade our “sea to shining sea” homeland?  The claim about the murder rate embedded in that statement doesn’t bother me a bit because I’ll be the one gripping the gun when somebody tries something funny.  See my point?  How many of those fallen creeps actually deserved to die because they started something that they couldn’t finish?

I concede one point to the controlling crowd that wants change in gun laws.  Hand grip ID tagging just might be okay.  If my palm print will identify me as the only legal user of my handgun, then I am good to go when the gun thief stands there trying to pull off a couple of rounds only to find that my weapon will not fire.  That will give me some time to draw another weapon from my stash and take care of business.  You see, I want the control, not conceding that power to some wanker in congress or some blowhard trying to tell me what to do.

But beyond that tweak in the gun laws, just leave me alone.  And don’t come calling with a goon squad to confiscate my arsenal.  I know my rights.

I know how to compensate for my character weaknesses.

Go ahead, just try to stop me!

Gun death rates are 7 times higher in the states with the highest compared with the lowest household gun ownership. (Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Injury Control Research Center, 2009).  

An estimated 41% of gun-related homicides and 94% of gun-related suicides would not occur under the same circumstances had no guns been present (Wiebe, p. 780).

Household gun ownership levels vary greatly by state, from 60 percent in Wyoming to 9 percent in Hawaii (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2001).

Blowout Sale

What may appear as marketing to most people who have become accustomed to the bombardment of adverts inflicted on us daily may soon be light pollution and crass materialism to those of us who do our best to dodge the pitches that come as fast as major league high “cheese” toward our heads.

Billboards, radio and television spots, flyers, newspaper spreads, popups on our computers, embedded messages on Facebook and Google, robot calls, and brands slapped on our shoes, on our cars, on our stadia, on damn near everything—there is no end to the hard sell.  The captains of marketing maintain they entry into our wallets and purses, and they will attempt to do just that with nauseating frequency.  We are interrupted and assaulted by those messages so often that we no longer know what to think.  That may be the intent, actually.  Please, people, do not think about what we do.  Just remember the images and sounds we jam into your heads.

So now, a Japanese company has plans to launch a can of soda into space (Magnaleno).  And space billboard ideas have popped up before.

Imagine you are camping high in the Cascade Mountains, a trout stream nearby, a night sky replete with innumerable stars.  As you search for the Little Dipper, a big space banner comes slowly into view.  It may pitch a particular car brand, a pharmaceutical product, or an Insurance company, whatever.  Your heart will take a big dip because no matter what you do you cannot escape them, the pimps of commerce.

 Get this.  Say you travel in a train, place your head against the window, and close your eyes.  A commercial sounds through the glass—no one else can hear it but you—and you marvel at the magic of the interruption while trying to nap. (Trotman)  The sneaky invention uses “Bone Conduction,” and a German company now goes all out to hook up its creation in likely places.

When you invoke an app on your smart phone, ever wonder why a message pops up asking permission to know your location?  The message might as well read: “Do you mind if we stalk you so we can feed you ads when you get close to one of our sponsors?”  Your phone will insist that you pay attention if you walk near one of their tempting offers.

What will come next?  It used to be that the salesman would put his foot in your door so you would have to listen to the spiel.  Now the pirates of commerce may insinuate themselves into your dreams.  A discounted article from Google appeared several years ago suggesting that if a person were to wear a “dream helmet” then a forward-thinking company could insert ads into your REM sleep.  It probably won’t happen, but people have sold a spot on their skin (allowing a commercial tattoo) for the right price.  Oh, no, no place to find sanctuary from the money predators.

The discomforting part of our culture is that we do not seem to mind when others insinuate themselves into every private area of our lives.  The phone rings when we sit down to dinner.  The doorbell chimes when we take a bath.  The commercial breaks in when we settle in with a bag of popcorn in a darkened theater.  And the newspaper falls apart each morning with inserts, flyers, and front page wraps that demand attention when we simply want to enjoy our coffee and sweet roll.

Would anyone object to the premise that our culture runs on high-octane greed?  We have gotten used to the shills, the flimflam artist, and the fast-talkers.  They want just a moment of our time, and we regularly succumb to their wishes.  They use sexual come-ons, vapid jingles, and rapidly changing images to get our attention.

Once when staying in Newfoundland for a winter, we suffered privations as an ice storm blow through.  The island locked down, the harbor iced over.  The power went down.  All our devices went dark: no television, no internet, no radio, no newspaper, and no safe travel to Wal-Mart and Costco in Saint John’s.

We opened fat books and read by candlelight.  We watched the blizzard haunt the woods.

Abandoned by the commercial world and caved in a storm, we loved every minute, distractions gone, silence filling us, at last a world without stalkers and manipulators.  
 

Magnaleno, Max. "One Small Step for a Sports Drink, One Giant Leap for Advertising." 18 May 2014. Mashable. 22 May 2014.

Trotman, Andrew. "The Telegraph." 3 July 2013. Article. 25 May 2014.

Education

As I stood in line to pay my check, I sensed someone’s focus.  Turning, I faced a middle-aged woman.

“Pardon me,” she said, “do you teach at Pierce College?”

“I confess,” I said.

She grabbed my hand and bowed deferentially.  Then she started to cry.

She thanked me generously.  It took a moment before I remembered her.  What I recalled was that she pursued her studies fiercely.  I just happened to be one of her teachers when she decided to learn, when she felt the “wild surmise.”  Feeling appreciated fits well, but I should have thanked her for valuing the risks and rewards of an education.  At the restaurant, she was dressed in scrubs, so I assumed that she worked in the medical profession.  But I did not ask.  She did not say.  She told me about a book she had read, that she had a family, and was active in her church.  She said her son and her daughter both enjoy reading.  I did not get the whole story, but I witnessed enough to share her joy and gratitude.  Before we parted, she asked if our college offered a night class in music appreciation.

That encounter started me thinking about how higher education has shifted its mission over the years.  That traditional stuff, you know, values, creativity, leaps of discovery, ethics, critical thinking—that sort of thing—once made higher education glow, attracting suitors who were interested in a relationship based on personal growth and the journeys of the mind.  Liberal hearts for the liberal arts, professors, deans, students, all sorts, entered her halls anticipating passion, thrilled to be a part of education’s charms.  But that charm has abandoned campuses across America.

Therein lies the rub.

We have reformed, students, teachers, and the countless supporting staff.  Where once we emphasized the life of the mind, we now pursue task-oriented, utilitarian outcomes.  Students used to read textbooks.  Now they read tweets, Wikipedia summaries, and instant messages.  They sit at computers in the library and blast zombies after checking their Facebook pages.  Higher education no longer flirts with passé academics who love the world of ideas.  Smitten by the market and branding, she now has eyes on the full-length mirror.  She is into self-satisfaction and self-assessment: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, / Who is the fairest of them all?”  She wants surveys, self-study projects, reports, outcomes, inputs, accountability, and all the self-congratulatory approval that comprises twenty-first century pedagogics.  Administrators, faculty and staff spend their time tinkering with the machinery of instruction, retooling the academy as an industrial unit.  We have little time for students.  During office hours, I used to tell my students, “Make it quick—I’m doing education here.”  That brings to mind Einstein’s truism, “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”

Of the over 4000 institutions of higher learning in the US, only about 200 describe themselves as liberal arts schools.  As liberal arts schools slowly disappear from the American landscape, in their place we have institutions modeled after the likes of Thomas Gradgrind, the infamous headmaster in Hard Times by Charles Dickens, who demanded, “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.”  Students get fewer options and pay more tuition to boot, but the party line is that we are all getting better, more efficient, and so on.  On some level, that policy may be fitting for these hard times in education.

Then I think of that woman whose life changed because she decided to do the work and wanted to learn.  She did something special.  I did not.  If she started her college work now, she would be disappointed because the heart of a liberal arts education lingers on life-support.

And, no, we do not offer a night class in music appreciation.

Numbers

My brain is too small.  I cannot remember passwords, phone numbers, and appointments.  Names escape me.  I cannot find my car keys.  Ah, jeez, what did I eat for dinner last night?

No, I’m not afflicted with early stage dementia.  The malady must be something like future shock, the overwhelming stress that produces paralysis when confronting too much—too much change, too much information, too many choices.  When using a search engine to get directions on how to build a kite, I discover 15,300,000 hits—too much to crowd into my small head.  Naturally, faced with too much, I choose to do nothing.  That may not be sensible, but what should one do when stunned with too much of everything?  No, I cannot subscribe to the notion that too much is never enough.  The thought itself is too much.

Look online or in your favorite magazine.  You will find an epidemic of grabbers that rely on the old number tease: “Five Things To Do Before You Die,”  “Four Things a Cheating Spouse Does,” “Six Frequent Income Tax Mistakes,” “Seven Best Vacation Spots in Washington state,” and “Five Best Burger Joints in Tacoma.”

Short lists have captured people’s attention for centuries: Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins, Eightfold Way, Seven Holy Virtues, Four Noble Truths, and so on.

Why?

Faced with the snags of daily life, many of us look for shortcuts.  Who wouldn’t?  In order to understand a topic or problem, the quickest way for a reader to wade through the tsunami of daunting data that engulfs us is the short list.  In-depth understanding takes time and it’s hard work.  So we often opt for the quick fix, the overview, the snatch and go.  About the time that the trite expression “bottom line” popped from my neighbors’ mouths, I began to notice the new paths that cut through the unknown.

A comprehensive assessment requires more than an overview, but who has the time?  I suppose we want that bottom line right now, if not sooner, because it is hard to concentrate.  It is wrong to assume that ADHD now afflicts most adults (it does not), but in trying to cope with the world of meta-information, we look for those timesavers and easy answers to complicated issues.

And now we have multimedia galore, a caboodle-Google of it.  Used to be that newspapers, television, and radio had the corner on breaking stories.  Not anymore.  Before we have a chance to get the dope on the big story, our mobile devices ding with “Breaking News.”  And if that news gets complex, it seems sensible to read the thumbnail piece titled “Five Superstars and Their Big Secrets.”

But with that diversional quick fix comes a fractional guilt, at least for me it does.  I think of Thoreau’s advice—to avoid squandering time.  “Our life,” he wrote, “is frittered away by detail.  Simplify, simplify, simplify!”  So do I look up an article titled “The Six Ways to Simplify One’s Life,” or should I chuck guru advice, turn off the devices, take a walk along Ruston Way in the rain?

Where did I leave my raincoat?