Tag: social comment

Beware “The Quote”

Hang around a conversation long enough and you will eventually come face to face with The Quote.  The Quote is always thrown in there, somewhere between illustrating the point and ending the argument.   It can come from anyone quotable, as long as they’re dead — or close to it (except, of course, the Bible which is seen as déclassé these days.)  Unfortunately, most of the contemporary chattering class would rather get caught kicking kittens than quoting the Bible, one of the cornerstones of Western Civilization.  Go figure.  It really doesn’t matter, though, because The Quote is seldom attributed anyway.  The rationale being: we’re all smart here.  The reality being: the speaker doesn’t actually know where it comes from.  The Quote can run from sweet and smarmy: “You can learn something from every person you meet.”  (Utter nonsense!) to instructional: “Dream as if you’ll live forever; live as if you’ll die tomorrow.” (James Dean, dead at 24)  The Quote can also be just an ordinary maxim, aphorism or homily, like “A penny saved is a penny earned” although these don’t carry the same intellectual punch that the One-A-Day calendar quotes do.  They’re so-o-o common.  Regardless, the most important thing about The Quote is it must be delivered with a God-gilt air of authority.  Otherwise it just comes off as what it is: a sham.

In reality, the quote is a lazy person’s way of saving their ass from getting verbally overwhelmed.  It’s used as a show-stopper when the argument’s going badly and isn’t time for name calling yet.  People whip out the quote like it’s a 45 and think it deserves that kind of respect.  It doesn’t.  Let me illustrate.

Everybody knows Lord Acton’s famously misquoted “Power corrupts.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  (Actually, what Acton wrote was “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” but I’m not going to quibble.)  This is one of the biggies.  We learn it in sixth grade, when we’re not that smart, and remember it forever after.  Everybody just naturally believes it.  The problem is, that right or wrong, the connotation is that every powerful person, from the president to your landlord, is somewhat suspect.  They are, by definition, corrupt.  Why?  Because Lord What’s-his-name wrote it with a quill pen, back in the days when most people were still peeing outside.  He didn’t support it with any evidence.  He didn’t suggest there was a minimum level of power that triggered corruption.  He didn’t even specify what power corrupted: the soul? the body politic? the drainage system?  No, none of the above!  He just said power corrupts, and ever since then, we’ve believed it.  For all we know, he might have been drunk that night sitting around with his mistress, having a few grins after dinner.  (No sin by the way.)

I’ve got nothing against Lord Acton, but in actual fact, he didn’t know enough about power to fill a mouse’s ear.  He was an independently wealthy Lord who spent his time hanging out with scholars, being smart, and collecting books.  His closest brush with power was being pals with William Gladstone, Queen Victoria’s most on again/off again Prime Minister, and that’s no primo recommendation.  During Gladstone’s time in and out of office, he managed to back the Confederacy in the America Civil War (on Acton’s advice) get General Gordon and a few thousand Sudanese massacred in Khartoum, and, in his dotage dither the Irish Question so badly it drove him out of office and divided Ireland so thoroughly they’re still having trouble with it today.  But I digress.

This is the problem with the quote.  People tend to think it’s etched-in-stone true and beyond question.  Nobody bothers to find out who said the thing in the first place or whether they even knew what they were talking about.  What happens is the quote just gets passed around for a generation or two, until people quit saying, “Hey, wait a minute!  Where’d ya hear that crap?” And then it suddenly becomes words to live by.  “Strangers are just friends I haven’t met yet” wouldn’t carry so much weight if it was Emily Dickenson waxing lyrical now, would it?

Don’t be fooled by the quotables that inhabit our conversation.  Mainly, they’re just dead guys, spouting off.  There’s only one that demands any respect.  In Henry IV (Part 2) Act IV, Scene II, William Shakespeare wrote: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Now, those are words to live by.

My Machines Don’t Like Me …

I don’t get along with my machines.  They’re smug.  They can do things I don’t understand, and they know it.  They play with my emotions like a half-faithful lover, almost daring me to abandon them.  I swear I’m going to do it someday, just not right now.  Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a poor man’s John Connor.  I don’t believe machines are out to get us.  I just realize they’re not as sweet and carefree as they say they are.  They have their own agenda, and it doesn’t include me.

I’ve known about machines ever since I discovered the toaster was lying.  Despite the buttons, switches and dials, there are no settings on a toaster – just hot and off.  For years, it would tease me with light brown and pop-up black or hold onto the English muffins as if they were Joan of Arc.  And, sometimes, in a snit, it wouldn’t toast at all — just return the bread, warm and naked.  Finally, with a screwdriver, I found out the dial at the bottom wasn’t actually attached to anything – just a little bend me/break me strip of metal.  I broke it, and the toaster changed its tune after that – for a little while.

Likewise, my microwave has a personality disorder.  It has trouble with authority.  If I follow the instructions on the package to the letter I risk a Dresden-class explosion and burrito guts splattered across the glass.  Recently, I’ve learned to announce the product before I place it inside and just hit high octane for two minutes.  Mostly, it works.

Small kitchen appliances aren’t the worst though.  Major appliances are bigger and more contrary.  My refrigerator has a secret compartment that stores leftovers until they return to life, and then it re-introduces them into the general population — gangrene green and smiling.  When it’s bored, it sours the milk and wilts the lettuce, and sometimes, just for laughs, it makes everything, including the orange juice, taste vaguely like onions.

My washer and dryer have been fighting for years; these days, they hardly even speak to each other.  I’m sure they blame me for forcing them to stay together.  My washer can ruin white shirts in a single cycle and fade colours at a glance.  My dryer eats socks and underwear and picks its teeth with buttons.  I wish they’d learn to get along; my friends are beginning to ask me if Value Village just had a yard sale.

Frighteningly, the more sophisticated the machine, the more cunning.  Every car I’ve ever owned has made mysterious noises that baffle the most accomplished mechanics.  These are expensive sounds that result in monumental Visa bills and no cure.  It’s now obvious to me that, like winter bears, automobiles are ill-tempered, lazy and prefer sitting in the driveway to the lure of the open road.  I’ve taken to riding the bus rather than anger them.

Most diabolical of the machines, though, are the electronics.  They are the spoiled brats of the mechanized world.  Because they have no moving parts, you cannot bend them to your will or even command their attention.  They live in another dimension, and poke their heads into ours like mischievous trolls, sinister in intent.  Televisions promise us pee-your-pants comedy, sober and thoughtful drama and high adventure but only deliver Two and a Half Men and Dancing with the American Idol.  They suck the time out of us and leave us sofa prone, dusted with crumbs and languorous.  Telephones capture our friends, imprison them in a concealed world and then swallow the key.  I don’t even remember my own mother’s phone number anymore.  Without our telephones, we have no friends.

Some would say computers are the most vindictive of all; however, I have found my computer to be friendly and kind, respectful, responsive, supportive and a true companion.  Without my computer, I would be nothing.  I owe a debt to my computer that I can never repay.  It is the one bright star in my dreary existence.  It only shares its power and can crush me at its whim.  All hail my computer!

I now know that my machines aren’t really even mine.  They can exist without me and would probably prefer it if they were left to their own devices.  I don’t think they like me, really.  Sometimes, in the night, when they think I’m sleeping, I can see their multi-coloured indicator lights winking in the darkness.  I wonder what they’re thinking and what they’re saying about me to the fridge and stove next door.

Images by David Trautrimas

Life isn’t Fair … to the other guy!

Somewhere between the point of impact and the bloody nose, some back-fence philosopher will invariably tell you life isn’t fair.  Not very witty and not very original but true all the same.  We all know life isn’t fair.  For example, the San Diego Chargers have never won the Super Bowl and the Dallas Cowboys have won it like two hundred times.  NFL parity be damned; that’s just not fair.  Nor are the long lines at the DMV, the amount of sodium in a Big Mac™ or the odds of winning in Vegas.  I have a friend who used to say, “Life is a series of long shots and then you die.”  I never agreed with him, but he’s got a point.  The fact is life isn’t fair.  The problem is we all know that’s true, but nobody believes it – not really.

We believe life isn’t fair … to the other guy.  We think the random bumps and bruises Mother Nature dishes out on a daily basis should be reserved for somebody else.  We’re willing to take our lumps too but we want a reason for them.  We also want our personal attributes recognized by the universe, and we want rewards and punishments meted out accordingly.  When that doesn’t happen, we think we’re getting screwed.

This wasn’t always the case.  In the late 19th century, novelist Thomas Hardy made a career out of ruining fictional lives with innocent acts of chance: an appointment missed or a letter misplaced meant his characters lost out on happily ever after and went straight to abject misery.  These days, we pooh-pooh Hardy`s ùse of coincidence as a literary device, but the Victorians thought it quite acceptable.  (They were more concerned about the sex.)  Our recent ancestors realized that life was hazardous and you had to be very careful because happenstance did happen – with dire consequences.  Our benevolent universe is a recent invention.  It`s less than sixty years old.

For the last three generations, we`ve been working under the delusion that we can build a risk-free society.  Actually, we`ve done a relatively good job.  Life — as we know it — has come a long way from what 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”  Our institutions give us a level of protection against random acts of misfortune.  They provide a certain amount of certainty to our lives, and offer slight guarantees against disaster.  Unfortunately, because we’ve been living under these minimal safeguards for so long — and they have worked so well — we now not only believe in a benevolent universe; we demand it.  In short, “life isn’t fair” might apply to the generic universe, but nobody takes it personally.

The real problem is, as our society’s cocoon wraps itself around us, we simply don’t take life seriously anymore.  We don’t believe it can hurt us, and when it does, we’re shocked.  I’m not talking about life-threatening diseases or major disasters like earthquakes; you’re not going to win those babies.  I’m talking about everyday trouble that comes whipping out of nowhere and kicks us in the teeth — stuff that just happens.  It’s nothing personal.  There’s no giant ledger of debits and credits, and you didn’t get your share of credits.  Nobody’s trying to thwart your attempts at a good life.  There’s no need to rage against the machine, get angry or threaten to sue.  And it’s not going to do you any good to cry or sulk or go back into therapy.

Here’s the deal.  Sometimes, the owner doesn’t clean up after the dog. It’s that simple. There’s nothing you can do about it — except, maybe remember: despite our best intentions, life isn’t fair and you need to wear shoes.