Tag: social comment

A Modern Drug for Contemporary Life

I love drug commercials on TV — not those idiot Cialis/Viagra jobbers; they’re way too nudge, nudge/wink,wink for my tastes — the real ones.  The ones that put the fear of God into you, then casually mention that they might have a cure, if you happen to be interested.  I see them as a 45 second history on our times.

Just to review.  The drug commercials usually start with an ordinary middle-class/middle-aged scene.  Somebody, sometimes in black and white, isn’t feeling well.  The kindly voice-over explains that this ailment, however small, is nothing to fool with.  It could be a disastrous medical condition.  Unfortunately, only trained professionals can tell the difference.  Therefore, it would be best, just for a little peace of mind, to get your sorry ass to the doctor – NOW – or you’re going to die – horribly, miserably and alone.  They usually don’t gear it up that bad, but the message is clear: there’s a tombstone out there somewhere.  At this point, the drug name is introduced as the only known cure for the disease you don’t have.  It’s repeated a couple of times, with its pedigree or references, as the middle-class/middle-aged scene changes to carefree (in colour) recreation, usually swimming or golf.  (BTW, all prescription drugs are government approved.)  After that, it’s all about, don’t take our word for it “Ask your doctor if Brand X is right for you.”  This naturally assumes that we somehow caught the disease, condition or ailment during the first half of the commercial, and now it’s only a matter of treatment.  Then — and this is the best part — the voice-over goes absolutely monotone and says something like, “Brand X is not right for everyone.  Serious side effects may include excruciating muscle pain, instantaneous diarrhea and incurable eyeball disease.  Talk to your doctor immediately if your tongue falls out.  Do not take Brand X if you’re a woman who’s ever even seen someone who’s pregnant or a man with a healthy liver and kidneys.”  The middle-class/middle-aged scene then changes to sunset or candlelit dining, with the drug name written in bold across the screen.  Fade out and back to reruns of Everybody Loves Friends.  There are a number of variations, but, in general, that’s it.

The reason I love these commercials so much is they really are an unconscious historical record of contemporary life.  For the last two generations (and maybe three) we have been giving ourselves every social, political, spiritual, economic, You-Name-It-We-Got-It disease known to humanity.  We’ve glommed on these malfunctions like an octopus with a fresh clam, giving each one pride of place as we discovered it.  I’m old enough to remember when the War on Poverty slyly slipped its leash to become the War on Drugs.  As the real and imagined maladies piled up, we went looking for a cure — even though nobody had ever realistically diagnosed any of the problems.  Somehow, we just instinctively knew we had them and now it was only a matter of treatment.  Sound familiar?  Suddenly, the world was full of social engineers, who, like drug dealers, (legal and otherwise) eagerly offered us all manner of remedies while conspicuously failing to mention the price.  Their shtick was (and still is) “Don’t take our word for it.  Ask the politicians which government programs are right for you.”  We did, and as a consequence, ever since Lyndon Johnson proclaimed The Great Society we’ve been throwing money around like a crack addict who just won the lottery.

The problem is the scenario has never changed.  We’re stuck on black and white, somebody’s not feeling that well, and we never get to in-colour carefree recreation – forget candlelit dining.  Our social, political, economic etc. problems are not getting better.  We have more homeless people now than ever before, our kids are still stupid and the President of the United States still doesn’t understand economics – to name just a few.  The cure we’ve been prescribed for the disease we may not even have ever had doesn’t work.

However, there are serious side effects to all this social engineering.  No, our tongues didn’t fall out but they might just as well have.  We have become hopelessly dependent on social programs and have abandoned reason in a manic search for them.  In short, we have become junkies.  The drug is government intervention, and we can’t get enough of it.  Like all addicts, our entire focus is now on the dealers to deliver a bigger hit, a larger dose.  Every discordant note sends us back to them, every anxiety, every concern, every doubt.  We excuse our destructive behaviour and gloss over our need.  We lash out in riotous anger and frustration when we don’t get enough.  We beg, borrow or steal the money to support our habit; bankrupting our children in the process.  We don’t care what it costs anymore; we just have to have it.

Unfortunately, if we don’t do something soon we’re going to be permanently chained to our addiction, and no amount of get-well-quick schemes is going to help us.

The Twitterpatter of Little Tweets

I’m way too old to understand Twitter.  I know what it is – obviously – I don’t live in a cave.  But I have no emotional attachment to it; therefore, I can’t possibly understand it.  It’s always been my experience that you have to care about something before you can figure out how it works.  For example, I don’t care how the microwave works: zap my burrito and I’ll be on my way.  It might be heat; it might be light; for all I know it might be a little guy with a blow torch.  The transformation from frozen to food doesn’t interest me.  Twitter, however, fascinates me.  Unfortunately, I’m not young enough to see it as an intimate part of life.  I grew up with other things that take precedence.  It’s as if I were my own grandfather, trying to understand why everybody is so captivated by the magic box in the living room where grey-tone Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz live.  It’s nice, but I’ve got other things to do.

Twitter is changing the way we live — D’uh!  But, not in that vacant “everybody’s on Facebook” kind of way.  Yes, everybody’s on Facebook, but most of us have figured out that while Facebook works fine as an ego repository, nobody’s going to change the world by clicking the “Like” icon.  Twitter is more than just being connected, putting on the brag and showing everybody our pictures.  It actually makes us communicate.  Not since the Golden Age of letter writing, when the Victorians introduced regular and inexpensive mail service, has there been such an outpouring of social communication.  It’s as if there’s a gigantic cocktail party going on, 24/7, and everyone’s invited.  Of course, as at any cocktail party, there are a bunch of dolts over by the food, talking nonsense, and most of the rest of the room is as dull as my half-heated burrito.  However, interesting people will gravitate to each other (or to the bar) and Twitter lets them do that – on a scale worthy of the pyramids.

A couple of rainy afternoons ago, I wandered through this electronic booze cruise and randomly gleaned (“stole” is such a hard word) some of this good stuff.  The kicker is it only took me a little over an hour and here are just a few of the results.  I’ve changed them slightly from Twitterspeak.

I wish I had two more middle fingers for you.
Deja Moo: Same old bull
I have heels higher than your standards.
I hope when the shark comes, you don’t hear the music.
Are you Voldemort’s child?
Don’t you think if I was wrong, I would know it?
I can only aspire to be the person my dog thinks I am.

I could go on and on.  If Dorothy Parker were alive today, her head would explode.  The entire world is playing Algonquin Hotel, and Twitter is the Round Table.

Yet, even as you read this, people are lamenting the passing of the written word and damning YouTube for filming the eulogy.  They see texting and Twitter as mind-numbing barbarians who are putting Shakespeare’s quill pen legacy to the sword.  However, there are more words being written today than at any other time in human history.  There are more words being read, more conversations taking place and more ideas being exchanged.  Certainly, most of them are crap, but that’s the nature of democracy: everybody gets a voice.  My point is, though, so far, Twitter is not only saving the written word (140 characters at a time) it’s finding its own place in history.  It, along with texting, are reviving the art of written communication that cheap and easy telephones almost destroyed.   Young people all over the world are thumbing away at each other, sitting in schools and at the dinner table looking down at their crotches and laughing.  The wit and wisdom of the 21st century is sitting there — right in their lap.

This is the Twitter revolution that I’m never going to be able to understand.  I think it’s a wonderful, magical thing, but, as Mark Twain would have texted, “Too bad Tweets are wasted on the young.”

It’s Them and Us – Whether You Like It or Not!

One of the main reasons people have so many problems these days is no matter how contemporary we try to be, we have never given up our tribal, them-and-us, way of thinking.  It isn’t a revelation that people think in pairs; we’re built that way.  We have two hands, two feet, two eyes etc. etc., so it’s only natural that we organize our world along the same lines.  It’s that eternal balance in nature that the Greek philosophers discovered (while their slaves were doing all the work) and scruffy-bearded bores have been droning on about ever since.  What started out as primitive left and right simply translated itself into everything else — hot and cold, wet and dry, etc. etc.  From there, it wasn’t a major leap to less tangible things like smart and stupid or right and wrong.  We might intellectually recognize all kinds of nuances in things like wet and dry (damp, for example) but when it comes down to straight analysis, inside our heads, there are no shades of grey.  The best we can do is black, blacker and white, whiter.  Of course, we mouth all kinds of platitudes about inclusivity and nonlinear thinking, but that’s merely for public consumption.  Unless your name is Leonardo da Vinci, you paint the world with only two brushes.

Here’s how it works.  When we think, we can only hold two complete ideas in our head at the same time.  It’s the natural pairing of things, – Bert and Ernie, Hansel and Gretel, Bogie and Bacall.  Once we step outside this comfort zone, we get confused.  It’s something I like to call “The Other Guy Phenomenon.”  When we are faced with more than two items, the third one gets a little hazy in our minds.  For example, Apollo 11 was America’s first manned space mission to land on the moon.  This was one of the major events in all human history.  Everybody knows there were three men involved; Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and … wait a minute… who was that other guy?  (FYI it was Michael Collins, but see what I mean.)  Likewise, remember The Three Tenors?  Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and – uh — the other guy.  (He was Jose Carreras, by the way.)  How about the Bronte Sisters?  There are Charlotte, who wrote Jane Eyre; Emily, who wrote Wuthering Heights and … and…  Her name was Anne and she wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a novel that not even sophomores study anymore.  Or there are always The Three Musketeers?  Unless you’re a total Alexandre Dumas fan, you remember them the way everybody else does: Athos, Porthos and D’Artagnan.  But, that’s not right; D’Artagnan wasn’t a Musketeer.  The third Musketeer was actually Aramis.  What happens is our minds hold the natural pair together and kinda hope for the best on whatever’s tagging along.  In the case of the Musketeers, we even make a substitution when we can’t quite remember!  Yes, I know there are The Three Stooges; Snap, Crackle and Pop; and bacon, lettuce and tomato.  But if you think about it, we treat these trios as if they were one item.  A BLT is a sandwich; Snap, Crackle and Pop are Rice Krispies; and The Three Stooges weren’t funny the first time.

My point is that we think in terms of pairs, whether they be strikingly similar or diametrically opposed.  It’s cultural memory from the dark tips of time.  In the beginning, there was us, the cave people we knew, and there was them, the ones we didn’t.  We were the good guys because we were us, and they were the bad guys because it pays to be careful with strangers.  For several millennia, there was no third choice, so we never adapted to one.  Now, in the 21st century, when we need to make a judgement call, we revert to that natural pairing because anything else is just some cloudy, vague option.  Of course, nobody admits to it because, after all, it is Neanderthal thinking.  However, like it or not, we live in a world of peanut butter and jelly, Starsky and Hutch and who was the third Bee Gee, anyway?