Category: Social Media

Margaret Thatcher and Ugly Politics

thatcherOkay, I’ve had enough.  I really thought that I could let it go and maintain the moral high ground by not acknowledging — forget responding to — the hate.  I can’t.  I’m not that fine a human being.  So…

We live in cowardly times, mean-spirited and smug.  We celebrate cheap shots and slink away from honest debate.  We attack those who can’t defend themselves while insisting it is our moral principles which give us the open warrant for this revenge.  We applaud bullies in our streets and on our social media and then wonder why they’ve crept onto our playgrounds.  In our society, many of us are not very nice, and because of that, history will probably judge all of us as vulgar.

The infernal optimist in me thought that we couldn’t sink much lower than making fun of 86-year-old Pope Benedict XVI for wanting to retire.  Old Christians are easy targets, but the same folks, so quick with the jokes, had already loudly refused to publish satirical Moslem cartoons under the guise of sensitivity.  I thought integrity was not a flexible commodity.  I was wrong.  As of last week, the vitriol circus three-ringing itself around the death of Margaret Thatcher proves the “progressives” among us have hit intellectual rock bottom and are now starting to dig.

As a public figure, even in death, Margaret Thatcher’s policies should be (and are) open to vigorous debate.  For those who disagreed with her methods and results there are any number of well thought out arguments they could use to support their opposition.  However, I doubt if “bitch” is one of them.  Perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t see abandoning my political position on the strength of that thesis.  At least, “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” — although about as original as most leftwing ideas — has a sophomoric air of carnival about it.  However, neither of these responses to one of the most divisive politicians in recent history is exactly a tsunami of intellectual prowess.  If this is all the left is bringing to the table, it’s no wonder they couldn’t convince the voting public that Margaret Thatcher was the personification of evil – on three separate occasions.  And this bringsthatcher1 us to the interesting question: What does one do with one’s political self-righteousness when the ballot box disagrees with them?  (After all, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was democratically elected three times.)  Does one snarl and cry and demonize one’s opponent, or pout and call her names?  Or perhaps one tantrums through the streets in sanctimonious anger, smashing things, burning cars and injuring police officers?   Or maybe one merely gathers enough explosives to attempt to blow one’s opponent’s head off and thus alleviate the need for any further discussion?  In Margaret Thatcher’s case, the answer is all of the above — plus one more.  Many on the left just quietly waited until the object (she was an object by then) of their hate died and now attack her viciously and personally with no fear of repercussions.  Plus it should be noted that those who profess an absolute abhorrence of hate are among the first to cast a stone.

To those who disagree with Margaret Thatcher’s policies — with measured argument and open debate — I wish you well.  To those who rant their hate from the rooftops and “celebrate” her death: you are the embodiment of all that is dull-witted and crude in our times.  I want nothing to do with you or your politics; you’ve shown the world the ugly face of both of them.

Technology Is Not To Be Trusted

pdaNot so many years ago, I had a PDA (I still don’t know what that stands for) from Palm.  I loved that little thing.  I carried it with me like a religious icon.  It held all my worldly knowledge and then some.  It was the beginning of the end of my memory because it told me what the phone numbers were, when the birthdays were, where I was supposed to go, what I was supposed to do and even what I’d been thinking two weeks before.  It saved my pictures and played music.  I even typed out a couple of short stories on its tiny screen.  It still holds most of my accumulated life, sitting in a dark closet, silent and forlorn, replaced by a telephone that’s smarter than I am.  My PDA (I called it Oscar) was my first foray into techno-living, and it taught me a valuable lesson: information technology is not to be trusted.

Way back in the day, when Hammurabi wanted to tell his people that goat stealing was a no-no for civilized Babylonians, he made a law.  Then, in order to get the word out, he found a guy with a hammer and chisel and etched that law into stone.  It was a permanent record.  In fact, if you happen to be hanging out at The Louvre and just happen to understand ancient Akkadian cuneiform, you can still read all about it and a whole lot more — in the original text.  Three thousand seven hundred and some odd years later, Hammurabi can reach through history and talk to us in the 21st century.  Cool, huh?  This is information technology in its simplest and most durable form – and it’s universal.  For example, we know that “The Drunks of Menkaure” helped build the Pyramids in Egypt because they carved their name on a rock.  Likewise, we have Sanskrit texts from India, the famous Mayan calendar from Mesoamerica and literally tons of other information from all over the world.  It’s not exactly an Information Super Highway, but we have enough stuff to get a pretty good vibe about what was going on before Herodotus turned history into a paying proposition.  The only problem with “cut into stone” technology is you have to be standing right beside it in order to use it.  It might be permanent, but it sure as hell isn’t portable.

However, our ancestors were an ingenious lot, and after several centuries of trial and error, they came up with a portable semi-permanent product called paper.  Paper and all the information we inscribed on it served our civilization well until the 1980s when Bill Gates and Stephen Jobs killed it dead as Disco.  Jobs, Gates and the boys turned information into electricity, and we’ve been expanding on that ever since.  And therein lies the problem.

Today, I carry all I know and all I need to know in the palm of my hand – including a translation of Hammurabi if I want it.  pda1Unfortunately, without the machine to read it, I have nothing.  Not only that but if my good friends at Google decide to kill the thing (I honestly don’t know what it is) they call Android, I’m totally screwed.  Under some circumstances, I wouldn’t even be able to find my way home.  After all, it’s not like I carry maps anymore – or an address book, or an appointment calendar or even a pen.  But it doesn’t have to actually get that drastic.  For all intents and purposes, most of my (and a lot of other people’s) existence gets put on hold every time the techno somebodies change their minds.  For example, when the Palm operating system went out of business, so did I — for a while.  The information was there (somewhere) but I couldn’t see it.  It was like trying to fit my vinyl recording of Sgt. Pepper into my CD player.  (Yes, I still have both.)

Of course, these days, information isn’t even really “there” anymore.  There is no tangible place (like my old Palm) that has my sisters’ phone numbers or my doctor’s appointment or my nephew’s wedding pictures.  All these things do exist but in such specific formats that one techno-twitch either way and they disappear.  They haven’t been destroyed; it’s just that nobody can see them.  I might have all my information backed up on an SD card or Flash Drive, but without a corresponding slot to put it in or a protocol that recognizes it, my information becomes a lump of factory formed plastic.  And what happens to Grandma’s birthday party if the Cloud goes away?

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not a 21st century Luddite, but I keep a handwritten address book and my photo albums right beside Oscar the PDA because, these days, information might be portable but it sure as hell isn’t permanent.

 

Confessions of a Hipster: Part 2

Young Adult Woman SilhouetteRecently, I was unwittingly placed in a position to observe a cultural phenomenon: the hipster.  Sometimes life just throws the dice.  You can read about it here.  Unable to let opportunity knock without at least saying hello I found myself going mano a mano with Mason (not his real name) a man of high property.  He allowed me to question him closely about the hipster subculture.  Although his answers were not what I expected, a good journalist rolls with the punches and jabs hard to get real answers.  I think you’ll agree this was a hard nut to crack.  I offer his interview here – unedited and raw – like the urban streets that are Mason’s home.  Once again, make no mistake: this is a work of fiction.  The only thing I’ve added are a few notes (in square brackets) that remember the conversation vividly.

Question: In his novel, Pattern Recognition, William Gibson, although he didn’t coin the phrase, uses coolhunter as a motif for society’s search for meaningful dialogue with its future.  In an increasingly monochromatic culture, would you say that hipsters are the coolhunters among us?  By deliberately turning their backs on what many believe is a media-generated world, are hipsters actually leading society away from itself?  As they create fashion and style and then move on, aren’t they inadvertently dragging the rest of us after them?

Answer: No.

Question: Wait!  Wait!  Hear me out.  We live in a cultural hegemony which is both narcissistic and artificial.  Our fashion and fragrance are celebrity driven and repetitive.  Our films are weak fables, espousing the triumph of good over evil; our politics reduced to sound bytes; and our philosophies marketed like breakfast bars.  Aren’t hipsters the antithesis of all that?  By rejecting contemporary style and lifestyle, aren’t they cultural paladins, warring on their own monolithic civilization, which is seeking to deny them their cultural imperative?

Answer: No.

Question: Are you being ironic?

Answer: [He gave me a look of constipation.]

Question: Okay, let’s take a different tack.  Hipsters were born out of the 21st Century’s economic instability, which has, in turn,hipster1 led to a decrease in social mobility.  Since we can no longer economically guarantee that we will even maintain our social position — never mind rise above our class — young people have become disillusioned with the very ethos of our society.  They believe that we are approaching a social stagnation that can lead only to cultural bankruptcy.  Therefore, they have abandoned traditional long-term social mores in favour of immediate urban credibility – street creds — credits.  They gather this cultural currency by stylistic innovation.  Thus, they not only maintain their social status but can enhance it through anticipating the avant garde.  Would you say this is a fair statement?

Answer: No.  This is easy.

Question:  Okay, then.  Ironic is the hipster’s stock in trade.  Isn’t it the greatest irony in the world that hipsters are actually the parents of cultural change?  They conceive it in their very lifestyle.  The time between when the first hipster moves in and the last hipster moves on is the gestation period, and its birth is when it’s adopted by mainstream culture.

Answer: [He looked at me as if he was seeing me for the first time.  I knew I had him]

Question: Then what would you say about the hipster subculture?  [I pointed a journalistic finger.]

Answer: Tintin.

Question: What?

Answer: Tintin is the original hipster.  And you are obviously not from Indiana.

[As he stood up and walked away I was humbled by his perceptions.]hipster3