Diverging paths: an allegory

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Say you’re walking down a dangerous path in a forest, overgrown with thorny vines, progress is difficult.  You’re increasingly fed up with hacking at the vines to eke out a few steps at a time.  Someone has told you this is the path that leads out of the forest, but you’re no longer convinced it’s true.

Suddenly, the path in front is suffused with light, and there’s an easier looking path splitting off to the left.  The first light you’ve seen in days of wandering, so tempting, but on examination, you see that it just leads to a small clearing a few feet away, surrounded by the same thorny vines on the path you’re on.  A nice enough place to rest, but it won’t help you out of the forest.  Still, you’re utterly exhausted, tired of slogging away, unsure you’re any closer to being out of the forest than when you started. Could you be going in circles? You think, I could just live in that clearing, give up trying to find a way out altogether.

Then you notice that all of the light doesn’t come from that side; on the right is another, narrower path leading away.  It is small, but straight, so you follow it for a few steps, until you see that it leads straight over a precipice to jagged rocks below.  It’s a long way down, you think, but a person might just survive the fall, and it’s definitely out of the forest.

Shuddering, you return to the path you started on, with considerable dismay.  It hasn’t gotten any less thorny, has it.

What to do?

History’s lesson: competing curses must be lifted slowly and one at a time

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Not that many years ago, there were two major curses in baseball, one in Boston and the other in Chicago.

The Boston Red Sox, who had not won a World Series since 1918, were under the Curse of the Bambino, so called because the beginning of their drought came after they traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. The Chicago Cubs had a World Series winless streak from 1908. Their curse was sometimes called the Billy Goat Curse, but this only dated to 1945. Either way, these competing curses were fabled in American sports mythology, discussed, dissected, and compared, to the dubious delight of fans.

I used to imagine the ending something like this: The Cubs and the Sox finally break their competing curses partially, and meet each other in the world series. After six games, they are tied, three games apiece. The seventh game is a gem, and ends up tied 3-3 at the end of the ninth.

Just at that moment, a giant fireball descends from the sky, obliterating Earth and all of its inhabitants, the universe being unable to withstand such a momentous eventuality.

Of course, the Sox spoiled that scenario in 2004, sweeping their opponents, the St. Louis Cardinals and not the Cubs, in the World series. Damned Boston, no sense of drama!

And if you live in the United States, and have been even marginally conscious over the last week, you know that the Cubs finally broke their curse as well. It was a great series, and came down to a tie in the ninth, but, since it was Cleveland, who had only a minor drought of 68 years, there was no fireball, and the fateful 10th inning went on to history.

I have to admit that I like that ending better than an apocalyptic fireball.

So over the rainbow: a noir interview

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Say, whatever happened to all those characters from Oz?

Glad you asked.

We know what happened to Dorothy: she went back home and became an overworked farm wife, bitterly comparing her tedious life to her great adventure in Oz. After her initial relief at getting back home so easily, Kansas just didn’t stack up anymore. She eventually moved to Chicago and worked in a baby buggy factory, sadly ironic, because, unbeknownst to her at the time, the Wicked Witch of the West had cast a sterilization spell on her. She died penniless and miserable.

That’s so sad!  What about the Tinman? He got his heart, didn’t he?

Well, yes. But as a result, he couldn’t help feeling the pain of all the people around him, and took to weeping almost all the time. The end came when he learned of Dorothy’s fate in Chicago. He just couldn’t stop crying. Finally, with all those wet tears rolling down his face, and into his joints, he rusted clean away, poor thing. Had he only wished for a brain, he could have seen that coming, and taken steps to avert it.

Huh. But the Scarecrow? He did get the brain, right? So, he must have turned out okay.

Yes, and things did look good at first. But, since he didn’t have a heart, he became arrogant, thinking he was better than all those idiots out there. Not a way to make friends, I’m afraid.

But still, he made it, right?

Well, no. His arrogance so infuriated his neighbors that they set him on fire, and, being made mostly of straw, he went up like a roman candle. Proving, if proof was needed, that burning out isn’t any better than rusting, after all, rock stars notwithstanding.

Well, at least the lion must have made it.

Indeed he did.

So, he didn’t die a miserable death?

Nope.

Great!

Not necessarily. See, with no brains and no heart, and no longer afraid, he started bullying everyone around him, and since he was a lion, there wasn’t much they could do. Eventually, the people with brains and hearts got together and figured out a way to capture him.

What did they do with him?

Some brainy people wanted to kill him, thinking it was the only way to be rid of him for good, but others saw an opportunity to study him, so that they’d be ready if another courageous lion happened by. It was the people with hearts who made the difference, because they refused to let him be killed. As a compromise, they declawed him and pulled all his teeth. Now he lives in a cage, because the brainy people are afraid he’ll run away before they get a chance to study him.

Wow. Didn’t the people with hearts try to release him?

No. With no claws and no teeth, how could he survive?

Tradition under fire?

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White Christian males in America have forever been the gold standard of uprightness. They have assumed that their beliefs, traditions and moral compasses have defined the values of the nation. They have seen themselves as the epitome of all that is right and good in America, or indeed, the world, and the measure of all that is evil has been the extent of deviation from their cherished beliefs.  They have seen themselves as righteous enforcers of these principles, guardians of beauty and goodness, arbiters of social place, gatekeepers of heaven.

Never mind that these values have changed substantially since the foundation of the country. Never mind that they once included the right to enslave any human being of a culture they deemed inferior and a set of superficial features they found lacking. Never mind that they included, in my own lifetime, the right to execute summary injustice upon those same formerly enslaved people for having the audacity to behave as if they were equal. Never mind that, even today, a whole set of dubious “rights” is invoked in the repression of those people.

Never mind that, despite a constitution which claims all are equal, these ideals include the right to exclude anyone who differs from the prestige demographic from those very rights.

Of course they’re furious. Of course they’re frightened, convinced their cultural and moral hegemony is being mortally threatened.

They’re right; it is, and good riddance.

Hipness

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There are two keys to hipness, inextricably woven together: image and timing.  Image has a lot to do with the proper air of disdain, not so much that you just look sour, but not so little that it’s invisible.  This is often accomplished linguistically, and that’s where timing comes in.

There are seven stages to the rise and decline of a hip word or turn of phrase:

  1. Someone comes up with a clever neologism.
  2. Her immediate cohort, seeing this, starts using it among themselves.
  3. Eventually, they use it in social media, and it catches on.
  4. It appears in Urban Dictionary.
  5. There are articles in Time or some similar rag on its proper use.
  6. Suddenly, it’s everywhere.
  7. Suddenly, it’s nowhere.

Consider the word ‘mansplain.’  If you used it during the first three phases, you were hip; if it was during the first two you were very hip, but only retroactively.  In phases 4 and 5, you were probably an older person ‘in tune’ with the younger generation.  After that, you’re dead to the younger generation, and in phase 7, you’re either completely out of it, or just being a smart ass.

Unless you use it in a blog, in an eye-rolling sort of way.  Then you’re extremely cool.  You might call that ‘blog-rolling.’

Feel free to use use that.