Category: Social Media

Modern Times and the Lord of Misrule

In medieval Europe, there was a festival held every year in the run up to Christmas.  It went by a number of different names and a number of different shapes, but essentially it was the same all over the continent.  If I were an anthropologist, I would tell you that it was a mutation of the old Roman celebrations for the god Saturn, hijacked by the early Christian church.  And that it was also tied to the even earlier local animistic rituals connected to the Winter Solstice.  However, I’m not an anthropologist, so to me, the whole thing was just a drunken bash.  The Medievals would get together just before the onset of real winter and party – mainly because they weren’t sure if they were going to make it ‘til spring.  They’d eat and drink, gamble and chase women (or men, depending on which side of the bar wench you were on) until after the Solstice and the solemn occasion of Christmas.  Then they’d hunker down and try to survive for another year.

In England, this was called the Feast of Fools or Topsy-Turvy Time.  For twelve days (probably the 12 days from our Christmas song) the natural order of society was suspended and turned upside down – the more ridiculous, the better.  People wore their hats backwards; shepherds carried their sheep.  Peasants stopped toiling and went to the bar; servants were served by their masters, barmaids were treated like ladies, and on and on.  The whole thing culminated in a drunken ceremony on the steps of the handiest church or cathedral, where the unruly crowd grabbed the dumbest Dumb and Dumber oaf among them and crowned him the Lord of Misrule.  He presided over a feast that ate and drank into the early morning.  Over the centuries, these parties got wilder and wilder until they were finally banned, in 1512, by Henry VIII, a guy who knew how to party.  (That just tells you how crazy it got.)

It has stuck me recently that we live in Topsy-Turvy times — except for us they’re all year round.  The natural order of our world has been bent to the breaking point and little or nothing we do makes sense anymore.  For example, our cities are spending tons of money every day, trying to accommodate the needs of the ubiquitous Occupiers: things like extra police, fire and paramedical personnel, sanitation facilities and the essentials of water and trash removal.  These things cost money that our cities wouldn’t normally be spending.  Yet who’s complaining about these extra expenses?  Ordinary taxpayers!  This is exactly ass-backwards.  Let me explain.

Normally, aside from walking on the streets or calling the city to complain about potholes, ordinary people don’t have much contact with their civic government.  They go to work, come home, rake their leaves, lock their doors at night and shut up about it.  Come election time, they vote (in ever decreasing numbers) and once a month, they pay their rent or their mortgage, and that’s about it.  The majority of people in any city don’t even know what services, aside from garbage pickup and community centres, their cities offer.  They don’t need to; they don’t use them.

On the other hand, in every city I know of, there’s a group of people (and it’s getting larger by the minute) who not only know what services are available but actually need them to survive.  These folks, on the bottom end of our social order, are in dire straits.  They need homeless shelters, drop-in centres, clinics, paramedics and way more police protection than the rest of us.  Their very lives depend on the money the city passes around to the various and sundry agencies and institutions dedicated to helping them.  If that money is being spent someplace else, it has a direct impact on their quality of life — such as it is.  Thus, money spent on Port-a-Potties for political activists is literally being taken out of the mouths of the homeless.

It doesn’t make any sense for ordinary taxpayers to complain about the whack in the wallet the Occupiers are giving us.  That tax money is allocated long before we ever write the cheques, on stuff we’re never going to see anyway.  The city managers could just as easily take it down to the local casino and drop it on 14 Red at the roulette wheel, for all we know.   For example, thousands of dollars in my city was spent to encourage children to grow wheat in their backyards.  That didn’t impact my quality of life one bit.  I didn’t get any wheat, but that’s okay: I wouldn’t know what to do with it in the first place.  My point is the money’s gone, folks, and Occupiers or not your tax assessments are going to go up next year.

However, the people who should be bitching, loud and long, are the disadvantaged among us who have a long, cold winter ahead of them.  The money the city is spending on aid and comfort to the Occupiers is all immediate costs.  If nothing else, overtime has to be paid, and that’s real cash – dollars and cents.  At some point, city services are going to suffer — just to make ends meet.  After all, that annual tax increase isn’t going to come until late next year, which is a little late when the snow’s gonna fly in January.  Personally, if I was digging in a dumpster behind KFC, trying to find breakfast, I’d be a little tight-jawed to see a $20.00-an-hour city worker getting time and a half for extra clean-up at the local protest.  A couple of thousand dollars a day is big money when food and shelter are an occasional luxury.

So here’s the deal.  The people who are going to take the biggest kick in the groin from the uber-extra city expenses are oddly silent on the subject — whereas they should be the ones howling, to claw back some of that money, as if their life depended on it (which, in fact, it does.)  Meanwhile, the folks who really aren’t affected by what the city spends (because they have to pay for it, regardless) are roaring away like a lion with a thorn in its paw, just as if somebody at the other end was actually listening.

Me, I want a spot in the front row, when we finally get it over with and crown the Lord of Misrule.

Remembrance Day

I’ve seen a lot of war memorials in my time, from the USS Arizona to the Eternal Flame over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe.  They’re all very much the same – structures cut out of quiet stone, asking us politely not to forget.  In England, every crossroads with a pub has a cenotaph to World War I because that’s where those boys came from.  In France, there are rows and rows and rows of white gravestones because that’s where they ended up.  If you’ve ever seen them, you can never forget.

One hot summer day when I was a young man, I paused in front of the World War I cenotaph in Hedley British Columbia.  It’s a single grey obelisk about two metres high.  I’d seen it many times before but never bothered to stop.  On that day in the glorious sunshine, its weathered grey was bright and warm and dry. There was no breeze in the drowsy afternoon, and no sound, just settling puffs of dust at my boot heels.  No one was there but me.  There were four or six or maybe even eight names etched at the base (Hedley wasn’t a very big town in 1918.)  I touched the stone where the names were cut and read them to myself.  These were men my age — sons and brothers.  They had looked at the same mountains I saw that day; saw the same creek wandering down to the Similkameen River.  They’d played games on that street, run and laughed and learned how to talk to girls.  They were in their time what I was in mine.

Every year on November 11th, Remembrance Day, we pause for a moment.  We touch the names cut into stone.  Every year, I remember that I’ve forgotten those names.

Information Overload

One of the serious side effects of living in the 21st century is the incredible amount of intrusive information that comes our way every day.  I’m not just talking about crap either but high grade ore suitable for framing.  I found out Berlusconi was going down for the count while I was standing in line at McDonald’s, probably before some of his own party members knew it.  Most people will tell you this is a good thing: that information is power (and all that other claptrap.)  This is not true.  Giving too much information to people who don’t want it, need it, or understand it is a dangerous thing.  Information is like any other commodity: when supply overwhelms demand its value decreases.

Let me give you an absurd example.  The Louvre has one of the greatest collections of art in the world.  There’s enough paint on canvas there to wallpaper an entire condo development — with lots left over.  However, talk to any ordinary person (read “non art student”) who’s been there, and after they mention the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo and a few others, they invariably run out of things to say.  That’s not because all the other works are second rate.  There’s one huge room filled with wall-to-wall Rubens, for example (which, by the way, was actually commissioned as wallpaper by one of the Medici girls.)  No, it’s because there’s simply too much to see.  At the end of two hours (three hours, max!) the average person just can’t take any more.  The senses shut down, fold up their tents and wander off.  The bratty kid, ying-yanging on the guardrail, gets equal attention to the Titian hanging on the wall behind her.  People just can’t process that much stuff in that length of time.  It’s difficult enough to appreciate the intricacies of a single masterpiece in isolation; it’s impossible to do it when you’ve upped the ante by a thousand.

Information works the same way.  Here’s another absurd example.  There have probably been more words written about the Kardashians this week than anybody else on the planet.  The mega-hours of reporting Kim’s wooing, wedding, build-up and breakup when laid end to end (pardon the old pun) would likely last longer that the marriage itself.  Yet, despite tons of information, even the harshest Kardashifan has no idea what’s going on.  The whole sordid spectacle could be anything from a brilliantly executed publicity stunt to the tragicest love story in the history of Reality TV.  Mere information is helpless if you’re looking into the heart of a Kardashian.

Out of sheer self defence many people make a couple of big mistakes when dealing with the volumes of information coming at them.  First of all, they confuse information with knowledge.  While knowledge is especially useful in a world that’s travelling faster than a speeding Tweet, information on its own is the closest thing you can get to useless without actually going there.  In fact, it’s actually detrimental.  Just because you know something, doesn’t mean you understand it – and that can cause problems.  For example, back when I cared about such things, I knew a bunch of stuff about cars.  I could open the hood and tell you where things were and what they did.  However, even then, as I found out a couple of times, give me a wrench and you better call a tow truck.  I had information but no understanding, and without understanding, I couldn’t postulate far enough to solve even minor problems.  In order to make a reasonable assessment of anything, you have to understand it, not just recognize it exists.

The second big mistake people make about information is assuming it’s an end unto itself.  It isn’t.  Information is the raw material that we build things out of, it is not the final product.  Even though I know the attributes of a right angle triangle, that doesn’t make me Pythagoras.   I might think I am, but unless I have a practical application for a2 + b2 = c2, it could be written in Greek for all the good it does me.  Most of the tons of information we receive is like that: we hardly ever apply it.  It lies dormant; its usefulness wasted by benign neglect.  Essentially, it’s like sitting on the sofa getting all the answers (Questions?) correct on Jeopardy: if we aren’t contestants we’re never going to win any money.  It’s not the information we have that counts; it’s what we do with it.

Here in the 21st century, we believe there is intrinsic value in the possession of information.   We think a well-informed population will naturally make well-informed decisions.  While this is basically true, the problem comes from the minor annoyance that the general population is not well-informed, at all.  They merely have access to information; they’re two different things.  Without understanding and application, the information we do have is useless.  In fact, the tsunami of data that assaults us every day is actually a hindrance to informed decision-making.  Not only do we think we already have the information we need, but in many cases our brains have already shut down from information overload.  Therefore, we have to rely on those comfortable sound bytes and buzzwords we already know to guide us.  The problem is that just isn’t real information: is it?