Category: Social Media

How to Qualify as a Hater

I’ve been called a lot of names over the years – some of them printable.  When I was younger, this kind of low-life criticism stumbled me a bit, but I got used to it.  Frankly, these days, I think, “Take a number!”  This last weekend a lot of people did — over my Olympic observations on Friday.  I say “observations” because despite what some (rather vocal) people think, I love the Olympics.  They’re fun.  I wasn’t bad-mouthing anything, just looking at it and (as I wrote on Friday) expressing a fair comment.  The problem seems to be that while I was making the clever point that the Olympics have always been an exclusive club, somehow, in a fit of cloud-cuckoo-land logic, that got morphed (in people’s minds) into an anti-Olympic tirade.  Oh, well!   So be it!

Fortunately, however, the weekend wasn’t a total loss because, as I was dodging invectives, I discovered the term “hater.”  I’ve seen the word before but only at a distance.  Up close, it’s quite a bit nastier.  In fact, hater is one of the biggies, like racist and homophobe.  People save it for that moment when they realize they’re losing the argument and then let fly as if launching a verbal ICBM.  It’s the accusation you’re not supposed to be able to walk away from.  I’m still standing, but that may be just because I had no idea I was being insulted.

My mistake was thinking that, by definition, a hater is one who hates.  However, as I found out, that’s not strictly true.  Hater is another one of our contemporary Lewis Carroll words that means whatever in hell the speaker wants it to mean and mostly nothing at all.  People who hate child molesters, for example, are not haters; whereas, people who mention Michael Jackson’s past are.  And this brings us to the crux of what can make you or break you as a hater.  I’m not going to go all Jeff Foxworthy on the subject, but a good rule of thumb is if you do not, as a matter of course, gush praise at everything that crosses your horizon, you might be a hater.  If you reach beyond our modern two dimensional emotional approach to life and suggest that some things suck – you might be a hater.  If you do not necessarily think that everything from potty training to particle acceleration is amazing – you might be… anyway, you get the idea.  However, and this is where it gets complicated, being a hater is essentially in the eye of the beholder.  It`s your audience who determines your status.  If he or she (or in my case, they) simply disagree with your assessment (even if it’s factual) they can exercise their option and end the argument with: “Expletive you!  You’re just a hater.”  Suddenly, your knowledge and analysis of whatever subject is on the table is swept away by the insinuation that your intentions were motivated by hate.  At that point, the best you can do is roll your eyes because — stick a fork in you — you’re done.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve got nothing against name calling.  After all, I’ve referred to Barack Obama, on more than one occasion, as a dolt and once, in the heat of the moment I called Richard Gere “His Holy Handsomeness.”   However, there is a contemporary idea that you can cover up great gaps in analytical thought simply by calling somebody a racist, or a homophobe, or any other derogatory term that pops into you head – including hater.  You might just as well say axe murderer.  The implications are the same, and it’s just about as provable.

For the record, I don’t hate the Olympics, Jacques Rogge, the young athletes or the kid who carries the towels.  In fact, about the only thing I actively hate in this world is rapini, a bitter green vegetable that can ruin a salad at fifty paces.  Thus, the only people who can legitimately call me a hater are vegetarians or their humorous companions, the vegans.  Aside from that, it’s all fair comment, folks. If you don’t like it, prove me wrong.

The Olympics: Plus Ca Change…

I’m walking on dangerous ground here, but I’m going to write about the Olympics anyway.  The multi-nationals get a little tetchy when minnows like me try swimming where the big fish feed, and, frankly, I don’t blame them.  If I were paying north of 50 million bucks for the five-ring logo, I’d damn well get my money’s worth, even if it meant passing out “cease and desist” orders as if they were “Two Can Dine for $8.99” coupons.  So, I’m going to insist my use of the various names of organizations is fair comment and hope for the best.  This may seem an excessive disclaimer, but I’ve seen what the IOC does to transgressors (the Olympics came to my town a couple of years ago) and it’s not pretty.

The law dogs are off the leash because the Olympics are the Big Kahuna of organized sports.  They are the perfect ménage a trois of sport, sponsorship and the media.  The revenues they generate are beyond the imagination of Croesus.  Of course, this kind of cash flow means power and the Olympics enjoy the kind of power that the ancient Greeks only dreamed their gods had.  Even the mighty FIFA, Lord High Mafia Caesar of the World Cup, kowtows to the IOC.  Governments tremble and start coughing up cash when the likes of Mario Pescante, Thomas Bach and Jacques Rogge come to town.  It’s a far cry from what Baron Pierre and his Olympic committee envisioned back in 1894 — but this is 2012, and times change.

The tale of Baron Pierre de Couberin and the history of the modern Olympic Games has been over-told by every media outlet that ever existed since 1956.  However, during those televised sidebars that fill in the blank spaces between Olympic Events, there is a large part of the story, as it is retold every four years that kinda gets glossed over.

The fact is De Couberin and his compadres never envisioned the Olympics as an egalitarian gathering of the world’s athletes.  They were men of their class and time, and they saw athletics as strictly a gentleman’s game (de Couberin was an admirer of Thomas Arnold.)  To that end, the Olympic Games have always featured sports that have been historically associated with the upper classes.  The first Games included (among other events) fencing, shooting and tennis.  It’s widely documented that very few 19th century coal miners, factory workers or stevedores played tennis, and although fencing and shooting were not unheard of during the many labour disputes of the period, they were never considered leisure activities.  Polo was introduced to the Games in 1900 and remained part of the Olympics until 1936 when the German team’s aggressive use of the mallet was considered unsportsmanlike in finer circles.
Cricket was also introduced that year, but when the rest of the world found out how insanely complicated, long and boring it was, it was immediately dropped.  Unfortunately, it may return to London 2012.  Sailing, a hobby synonymous with the wealthiest among us, has always been a popular Olympic event.  The oddest activity of the upper classes to become part of the Olympics, however, was Dueling Pistols in 1906.  It was dropped after only one year possibly because, even though there was an undisputed champion, no Silver or Bronze medals were awarded.

Likewise, the original Olympic committee went to great lengths to preserve the Games as the province of the gentleman athlete by insisting that all Olympic participants be virginal pure amateurs.  This kept the professional bully boys away from the podium because, in the early days, this rule was usually enforced.  The most famous case, of course, was Jim Thorpe, who was stripped of the medals he won in 1912 when it was discovered he had once been paid ten dollars to play football.  In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler’s famous competitive spirit led to some pretty serious bending of the Olympic amateur rule.  Luckily, however, Jesse Owens preserved the integrity of the Games when he singlehandedly took on the Nazis and beat their brains out.  In the late 1950s, the IOC adopted the “nudge-nudge/wink-wink” classification for its wealthier athletes when it became patently obvious that the Soviet and East German “amateurs” were anything but.  This system was finally abandoned in the 1980s, when everybody realized that the athletes were wearing more gold during the competition than they were actually competing for.  These days, aside from a few African marathon runners, most athletes in the medal rounds are millionaires.

Thus, more than a century later, the Olympics have remained true to Baron de Couberin’s original vision.  Despite the corruption, bribery, doping and out-and-out cheating, the Games remain the province of the rich and famous.

Entertainment is Us!

A very wise man once said, “The problem with doing nothing is you never know when you’re done.”  As we march further and further into the 21st century, our society is discovering that this is indeed true.  Idle time is infinite in its scope, and even though we are harvesting it at a furious pace, it literally goes on forever.  It is the ultimate renewable resource and perhaps the only one that can save us from devouring our planet raw and abandoning the carcass to the cosmos.

Ever since human beings figured out there was a concept called time, we’ve been trying to get away from it.  I’m certain our relentless pursuit of leisure started when Lucy and her sisters looked longingly back at the apes and thought, “Those were the good old days.”  Yet, for most of human history, leisure has been a rare commodity, traded only by the wealthy.  The vast majority of our ancestors simply worked every day until it was too dark to see anymore and eventually dropped dead of exhaustion.  It wasn’t until organized religion came along that anybody even thought of taking a day off.  However, once those floodgates were opened, people just naturally gravitated to sitting on their ass.  Soon the Lord’s Day had company when a few extra holidays got sprinkled into the year.  Then it was half a day off on Saturday, a shorter work day, long weekends, paid vacation, early retirement and the list goes on and on.

The idea, of course, was that people need time away from work in order to recharge their life spirit, enjoy the arts, relax and metaphorically take a moment to smell the flowers.  I suppose at some point, in the olden days, we did do some of that stuff, but in this century it’s all about entertainment.  Somewhere back in the mid 1950s, we sat down to watch television and now– sixty years later– most of us just aren’t getting up anymore.  In fact, between video games, cell phones and Smart TVs, some people never leave the world of entertainment.  We’re rapidly approaching the point where, at any given moment, more people in our society are passively doing nothing than actively doing anything.  The best we can hope for is a game of Wii tennis, but for most people, it’s only Season 3 of Everybody Loves Friends or Level 8 of Angry Birds™.  We’re wasting so much time we could build a parallel reality with the leftovers.

However, before you jump to the natural conclusion that we’re entering some kind of a slobbering, Trans Fat, sci-fi dystopia, there is a silver lining to this soulless dark cloud.  Our wall-to-wall lust for entertainment might just be the thing that saves our dying world.  Think about it!  The human species, who have been digging, chopping, burning, bullying and paving our planet for over 5,000 years, are now fully contained by all nine seasons of The Beverly Hillbillies – delivered directly to their homes or mobile devices.  All they have to do is keep their eyes open.  Likewise, the reckless ambitions of millions of people are being played out every hour as billions of harmless Black Ops mouse clicks that disappear instantaneously, without a trace.  The only casualty is Carpal Tunnel.  Rhetorically speaking, what’s wrong with a guy selling a million dollars worth of The Rainbow App he developed in his parent’s basement?  (The only resources he consumed were grilled cheese and Pepsi™.)  Especially if he sells it to the inert among us who prod the unicorn to do tricks for a day or two and then move on to The Flying Witch App, thus repeating the cycle of mythological abuse.  It’s all thin air, guys!  Without substance, it does no harm.  Plus, and here’s the beauty of it, it’s economically infinite.  Resurrected sit-coms from the 80s are selling just as often as 1st run movies, and nobody is getting tired of blasting the bad guy, the beast or the undead zombie warrior.  It’s capitalism at its finest – supply and demand meshed in perfect harmony.

The reality of our times is we are now massive passive consumers of inactivity.  We can rail all we want about the Dark Side, but– as with any drug – good luck taking it away!  Karl Marx may have been right in the 19th century when he almost said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses” but here in the 21st, God takes a back seat to Netflix, Warcraft and Facebook.