Tag: social comment

Happy Holidays?

One of the annoying things about living in the modern western world is that everybody complains so much.  There isn’t a day goes by without somebody having a nasty word to say about something.  And when it comes to high holidays like Christmas and Easter, the bellyaching reaches fever pitch.  Yesterday, sitting around the after dinner chocolate and ham, some incompetent wag (who shall remain nameless) came up with the oh-so-original: “Easter is crap!  How did we get from Christ on the Cross to bunnies and chocolate eggs?”  I suffered in silence for at least two seconds before I explained that it was a conspiracy by the Medieval Christian church to decrease the chicken population.  By convincing the peasants to collect, boil and colour eggs every spring, the priests kept the food supply at subsistence levels and thus kept the ignorant peasants in perpetual servitude.  Okay, I’m a dick, but I’m not sure she didn’t believe me.

In fact, the road from the crucifixion to the Easter Bunny was a simple case of marketing.  The early Christians were not as stupid as some people seem to think.  They knew they were the new kid on the block and it was going to be difficult to convince the heathen hordes of Europe to abandon their gods for this new guy.  After all, the pagan religions of the time were all about Mother Earth and fertility — which meant plenty of sex, wine and playing the lute (the 5th century equivalent of sex, drugs and rock and roll.)  Persuading people to give that up for abstinence, prayer and penury was a tough sell.  However, the Christians realized that the pagans had some pretty healthy spring festivals already available that celebrated the end of winter.  What they did was attach Christ’s resurrection and the renewal of the spirit to the established idea of the renewal of the earth.  From there, it was mere baby steps to preaching the gospel in terms that the local peasantry could understand.  In fact, the name “Easter” probably comes from the ancient Anglo-Saxon goddess Eastre.  She was the goddess of the dawn and fertility, and her symbols were the egg and the rabbit or hare.  The Christians just cashed in on her popularity and slowly squeezed her out of the picture.  Actually, by the time The Venerable Bede was writing about her in the 8th century, she was already ancient history.  Not bad for a bunch of religious fanatics without a marketing degree among them!

The early Christians’ sizing up local festivals and parachuting their man into them gives us a glimpse into why we have holidays in the first place.

Way back in the day — before weekends, paid vacations, stress leave and personal time — life, for the vast majority of people, consisted of toil.  People worked; that’s what they did.  Their lives depended on it.  In general, as soon as you could walk, you worked, and when you couldn’t walk anymore, you died.  It was a dismal existence.  Since most people grew their own food in those days, the only change to this trudge to the grave was the seasons.  The necessity of pleasing and pleading with the gods for fair weather and a good harvest gave rise to elaborate ceremonies.  These occasional attempts to invoke the gods were opportunities for celebration.  People took their noses away from the grindstone and their shoulders away from the wheel to party.  In the autumn, when the harvest was done, it was time to sample that year’s grape crop and eat everything that couldn’t be preserved.  In the spring, after planting the crop, fertility was everybody’s responsibility, so getting naked in the sunshine was what the gods intended.  These pagan rites were the perfect place for the early Christians to deposit their saints, their rituals and their religious holidays.

Non-religious holidays came much later.  Kings might grant a special feast day to celebrate a military victory or the birth of an heir, but it wasn’t until the Age of Reason that secular holidays became institutionalized.  Yet, even up until the early 20th century, there weren’t that many holidays.  Days like Labour Day and Thanksgiving are fairly recent additions.  However, since the 1950s we’ve gone nuts and now there are very few days left on the calendar which don’t have some significance.  We have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Secretary’s Day, Boss’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Groundhog Day and on and on and on.

Yet, in the land of plenty, where we can celebrate minor saints and jumped-up rodents, there is always somebody with a sour word about it.  Holidays are a modern invention, and given we have so much to celebrate, it would be nice if we could just shut up and enjoy them.

Dogs are from Heaven; Cats are from Hell

As I’ve said many times, I’m totally pissed that I’m never going to be able to view my time as history.  You see, in the future, we’re going to know so much more about ourselves and our world that it’ll be as if somebody turned on the lights.  I’m not just talking about technology, either, or science.  I’m talking about real discoveries.  Things like why there are always at least three lines at the DMV but the one we want is always the longest.  Or why all the really cool people are always at another table at a wedding and we’re stuck with somebody’s deadbeat aunt.  Or how come we can never think of that witty retort until after the jerk with the attitude has left the building?  This is important information, and eventually, we’re going to know this stuff.

For example, we’re going to understand why cats hate us and dogs are the perfect pet.  I’ve got nothing against cats, BTW.  One of my favourite pets ever was a cat: Diega, who’s now in the witness protection program.  (It’s a long story for another time.)  But, let’s be honest: cats are adorable on Facebook, but try living with one.  Even dedicated cat people have some bloodcurdling tales to tell – mutilated mice in the bathtub during the in-law sleepover; slimy hairballs, coughed up on the boss’s cashmere lap; and deep childhood scars from “kitty has pins in her toes.”  Sound familiar?  Dog people never talk like that.  You never hear horror stories from a dog person.  And no complaints.  They never say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.  Fluffy just won’t eat anything but imported French dog food.”  Dogs will eat anything.  They eat bones and crap that nobody else can even look at.  A dog’s motto is “Go to the bowl: good things happen.”  Meanwhile, a cat will turn up its nose at free range $25.00 per lb hand ground salmon.  Then, not an hour later, it will go out in the alley and kill a totally scabby, wantonly diseased sewer rat and drag it home as snacks for the whole family.

But that’s the difference between dogs and cats, isn’t it?  Dogs are straight-ahead, and cats are devious.  If a dog’s angry with you, he chews your shoes.  If a cat’s mad at you, you’re in trouble.  A cat will wait for two or three weeks — until the night before you have the presentation of your life happening at 8:00 a.m. sharp.  That’s the night — all night — that it’ll have outrageous screaming sex, right outside your bedroom window, show up five minutes before you have to leave and shed all over your perfect black dress.  That’s not cute; that’s malicious!

Personally, I think cats hate us because they missed the first 50,000 years on the domestication train.

Way back, at the dawn of evolution, when humans ran in packs, dogs did, too.  We must have encountered each other somewhere along the trail.  Humans probably thought, “Those guys aren’t very good to eat, and they’re really difficult to kill.  So let’s leave them alone unless we’re desperate.”  Dogs probably thought, “Those guys have puny little teeth, no fur, and they can’t hear or smell worth a damn.  There’s no way they’re gonna survive.  Let’s hang around until they can’t keep up with their pack, and eat ‘em.”  Over the course of hundreds of generations, the two species got used to each other.  Humans discovered that dogs were really good at finding food.  All hunters had to do was follow the pack to get to the good stuff.  Dogs, on the other hand, figured out that even though humans were pretty much useless, in close, they were kick-ass dangerous and could bring down the big boys like mastodons.  All a smart dog had to do was bark and snarl and keep the prey at bay until the humans got in there with their pointy sticks.  Then it was Happy Meals™ for everybody.  Plus humans had fire, which, thumbless, a dog could never master.  But fire, under control was just the ticket for a frosty canine on a cold winter night.  Meanwhile, as dogs crept closer to the fire, humans found that, after dark, with their superior smell and hearing, dogs were the perfect burglar alarm.  It made sense to let them cuddle up to the warmth if they wanted to.  Over the course of a couple of hundred more generations, humans and dogs became inseparable.  They lived together, hunted together, their kids played together and they all ate the same food.  So it was only natural dogs and humans became BFFs*.

Cats, Johnny-come-latelies to domestication, have never really gotten over the special relationship humans have with dogs.  They see it as an insult to their self-diagnosed superiority.  Remember, cats didn’t start hanging with humans until the Egyptians turned them into gods for killing rats.  That little theological faux pas went directly to the feline ego and has been stuck there ever since.  These days, cats still think they’re gods almighty, and being cats, they want the lion’s share of human attention.  When they don’t get it, they go looking for revenge.

Of course, this is only my theory — which I’m never going to be able to prove.  Unfortunately, I’m not going to be around when humans and dogs develop two-way communication and we humans can finally just ask dogs, “What the hell’s wrong with cats, anyway?

*(Yes, I know, way back when, humans ate dogs.  In some parts of the world they still do.  But we’re talking millions of people over thousands of years, and dogs are intelligent enough to overlook the occasional act of barbarism.)

In Praise of Higher Education

A couple of weeks ago, I got into a hopeless discussion (argument, for the uninitiated) with some young people (under 30) about education.  I haven’t taken a beating like that since Betty Jones (not her real name) and her 2nd grade boyfriend decided my lunch was more interesting than hers.  The problem was, in both cases, no amount of reason was going to be sufficient to change anybody’s mind.  Unreasonable people, with big boyfriends, have a way of winning discussions.  In the early part of the evening, I relied on Aristotlesque logic.  I laid out concise theses, which I supported with facts and observations, which in turn, naturally led to the only possible conclusion: mine.  Q.E.D!  Their response was “Crap!” (or a somewhat stronger version of said same.)  I spent the rest of the night — and at least two more bottles of wine — fighting for my verbal life against wave after wave of anecdotal evidence, non sequitur reminiscences, rhetorical questions and profanity.  The kids were clearly angry about the fuzzy end of the lollipop they had received at the hands of liberal education, but they couldn’t articulate it.  Therefore, even though I knew they were intelligent young people, they looked just about as dumb as they assured me they weren’t.

I’m not going to rework the discussion here.  That wouldn’t be fair.  But my position was “Stay in school you’re going to need it” and theirs was, the oft repeated, “Crap!” (or a somewhat stronger version of said same.)  This really surprised me, because my generation and every generation before mine has worshipped education.  Ever since Gideon outwitted the Midianites, it’s been seen as, not only the magic carpet of social mobility but the keys to the bank vault.  Even in the darkest of the Dark Ages, education was the one thing that gave ordinary peasants a leg up in society.  A millennium later, our contemporary world is so compartmentalized that, without a specialized education, you are almost certainly relegated to tier-two employment – Starbucks, et al.  Either that or you could luck-out and land a union-protected public service job (but you might want to buy lottery tickets on that one just to be on the safe side.)  Of course, there is intrinsic value in learning for its own sake.  Nobody denies that, but practically speaking (which is all I was doing the other night) it’s all about where the money is.

My young friends beg to differ, however.  They see education as a great wormhole that eats time, energy and student loans, then shoots them out the other end, no wiser, several years older and deeper in debt.  While admitting that post-secondary education is indeed a necessity, they also see it, for the most part, as a waste.  Their argument is, why should they spend four years and forty thousand dollars for information they already know or can find on the Internet?  To them, a liberal education is merely a thinly disguised tactic to keep them out of the job market for as long as possible, and a single university or college degree is a ticket to poverty.  The “piece of paper” as they call it, with disdain, is not essential preparation for future employment but an artificial barrier to their own advancement.   With it, the only guarantee is student debt.  There are not that many high-priced jobs going begging these days, and experienced expertise trumps recent graduation, every time.  Remember, these kids are making cappuccinos with a lot of underemployed PhDs.  However, without a diploma (of some sort) there is a serious top end to whatever employment they find.  Whether they’ve landed their perfect career/job or they’re just getting a pay check, without accreditation, they’re going to stay where they are for an awfully long time.  It’s a no-win/no-win situation, and they know it.

To be fair, the kids have a point.  However, they’re missing some essential ingredients.  First of all, the big bad world out there has never heard of them.  Education is the hello handshake that separates them from the herd.  To be brutally honest, to employers, a degree is just shorthand for “at least the guy hung in there for four years.”  Secondly, education, off its own bat, is useless.  It needs thought and practical application.  Getting a degree in Earth Science, Medieval Dance or the infamous Art History is indeed a ticket to poverty.  Our society is awash in people who found that out – the hard way.  The trick is fitting education to employment, even if it isn’t a perfect match.  Sometimes, the difference between doing what you like and making change at Chevron is flexibility and imagination.  Finally, and most importantly, only about half of post secondary education occurs in the classroom.  At this level, gathering information is nothing serious.  The kids are right; it’s all on the Internet.  The important stuff is learning the complex skills of analysis, organization, communication and time management, to name but a few.  The smartest person in the world is just a German Shepherd with a thumb if he can’t find his notes, doesn’t have the discipline for deadlines or can’t express his ideas effectively.  Anybody can Google “the capital of Poland,” but it’s post-secondary education that teaches us how to use that information.

It might have been the wine, but I wasn’t this articulate the other night.  Maybe it’s time for Round Two.  After all, I met Betty Jones years later, and we came to an understanding over a couple of churros and a bottle of Kahlua.