Thursday, October 21, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Push
Thunderstorm at the moment.
Summer's last push?
An anemic attempt, at best. All the components are present and accounted for: Rain. Periodic flashes of white. Cracks of thunder. But there is a tepidness at play here.
This storm is just an old man, slow moving, brittle-boned; muttering obscenities mostly under his breath; filled not so much with fury, as anguish.
And just like that, gone.
Summer's last push?
An anemic attempt, at best. All the components are present and accounted for: Rain. Periodic flashes of white. Cracks of thunder. But there is a tepidness at play here.
This storm is just an old man, slow moving, brittle-boned; muttering obscenities mostly under his breath; filled not so much with fury, as anguish.
And just like that, gone.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Thoughts on the day the sky fell, and the sky from which it fell
It's been a long, hot summer.
Last week brought a string of scorchers, five or six days straight above 90 degrees. The air was dense and motionless, wearing the unique reek of summer's climax like a sweater. Over the weekend, that pressure cooker popped its top. Thunderstorms blew through the area, and when they had passed, I stepped outside to find it was almost twenty degrees cooler. The air had thinned out, started moving again, busily sweeping up the moisture, pushing it eastward in pursuit of the storms that had left it.
My heart raced for the invigorating change. I could sense the skulk of autumn through the late August night, even thought I felt the finest wintry tendril, still just a baby, coil around my ankle, trying to gain purchase.
This morning, post Labor Day, it was downright chilly. Not quite a freeze, but that fine wintry tendril definitely having grown four fingers and an opposable thumb to grip with. I took a walk along the river, and when the sun rose over the horizon, the light swept across the treetops, illuminating dabs of bright color where before there had been none. And the sky was smooth like glass, azure in color. Dry, cloudless.
Absolutely cloudless.
I have always loved this time of year. But the fresh, reborn air comes with a tremor now. Dismay and unease are implicit in the otherwise simple gesture of looking up.
This morning's walk took place in precisely the same conditions I awoke to nine years ago; awoke, with no clue at all that the very dynamic of my life - and every American life - was going to change forever in a matter of hours. I kept looking up repeatedly at the flat blue expanse dampened by bright sunlight, hoping against hope it would tell a different story, a better story, a less frightening story.
It didn't.
Almost a decade later, I still can't help but cringe a little. It is no longer the September sky I remember in my youth - heralding school, Halloween, a gentle reminder, even, in my overly eager child's mind, that Christmas was out there somewhere. It really isn't the "September sky" at all, now. It's the 9/11 sky, and it no longer gets me looking forward. It forces me to look back.
For the most part I've moved on, sanitized that day sufficiently, where I can live without thinking about it all the time. That wasn't always the case, but I've gotten better as the years have peeled away (time does heal all wounds, it would seem). But on mornings like this, which remind me as much of how I felt before the first airliner struck as how I felt the rest of the day, my thoughts can't help but turn plaintive:
Was there ever a time when we weren't anxious and uneasy in this country? Ever a time when we were not at war, not accustomed to heightened security and terror alerts? Were we ever not one inattentive baggage checker (in this country or abroad) away from planes being blown apart over major cities, one jihadist's inability to light the fuse correctly removed from another set of thousands dead on our streets? Were our armed forces ever not mired deeply in Iraq and Afghanistan? Was there ever a time when the music of Eminem was considered the biggest threat to the country, our President's sexual peccadilloes the country's greatest scandal and hottest topic? I want to go back there.
It's been a long, hot summer, but an even longer, hotter decade. And we are halfway to an entire generation coming of age knowing nothing BUT being at war.
The debate has been on-going for years the best way to commemorate 9/11. To tell you the truth, I don't care if it is ever commemorated in official channels. I don't need a national holiday or a monument. I don't need a day off from work or a new tower replacing the old towers to remind me of September 11th, 2001.
9/11 shows up in my mind uninvited, stays too long sometimes, like a bad guest. It replicates snapshot after postcard snapshot, clogging the hard drive of my memory with images I can't erase, like a malicious computer virus. I see towers of smoke and fire running parallel to the ground; human bodies falling a thousand feet; buildings falling a thousand feet; Olympic-sized billows of bright white dust chasing throngs of hysterical New Yorkers down streets, through cement canyons, around corners. I see heads held together with blood soaked bandages; faces covered in dust like theater performers, clumped wetly around the mouth and eyes.
I can still hear the low-slung roar of jet engines on a destructive course, the non-stop peal of sirens, a veritable chorus of shrieks and panicked (or dazed) profanity. I hear television newscasters bleating off report after report, trying to keep up - another plane down, this time in Washington, then another in Pennsylvania, then this tower fell, and that tower fell - endless speculation as to the potential death toll, the search for survivors, and who was responsible...I see myself watching the television with shocked co-workers, all of us wondering if it was ever going to end, and feeling, though we were safely fifteen hundred miles away, an acrid mixture of anger and fear (maybe not so safe, after all), and worse, a real sense of the change at hand, that nothing was going to be the same, that things were going to suck for a long time afterward.
And so they have.
All of it took place under the same sky I saw this morning on my walk: post-stifling summer heat / pre-killing autumn frost. Right at the negotiations of the seasons.
I don't like to think about this time of year, and the calm, restful conditions normally associated with it, being inextricably linked with terror, but it has come to that. The first couple of years I should have expected it. But it's been almost a decade, and still:
It's supposed to be 'back to school time', but it's 9/11 time.
It's supposed to be NFL time, but it's 9/11 time.
It's supposed to be harvest time, but it's 9/11 time.
For a full week each year, the TV flares up with a toxic prescription of specials and remembrances as exploitative as they are commemorative. The news media talking heads pinch off what they remember in two-cent portions, each year, like me, a little tireder-looking, a little grayer. The President speaks. We pray. But we don't forget. We won't forget.
We can't forget.
No matter the outcome of the War on Terror - if it ever ends or can ever be won - the terrorists scored a major victory that day. They have forever altered the way I view my world. Not 'The World' - faraway lands mired in complex geo-political machinations I only hear about on the news - but my world, my interpretation of my surroundings as I do something as routine as take a morning walk in no less a benign place than west-central Wisconsin. And one day, I will be a grizzled old man walking slowly along a shoreline somewhere, and if it's the right sky hanging above me, the September sky, I know that I will cringe then, as I cringe now.
------
Sadly, it may be impossible to forget the horror completely, but it helps to remember the heroes that were made that day, the courage that got called up - from NY Port Authority workers, members of the NYPD and FDNY, first responders at the World Trade Center and Pentagon (all intrepidly rising to the call of duty), to the civilians who stepped up at both locations to help out (notable among them, Hudson River boat operators tirelessly transporting victims from the New York side the the New Jersey side), to the individuals who staged a revolt against the hijackers on Flight 93 in the sky above Pennsylvania (and likely saved countless lives in doing so), to the innumerable volunteers who from 9/12 on donated their time and money to recovery, to everyone else ceaselessly donating their thoughts and prayers.
It's comforting to know a kind of clarified heroism can arise in times of crisis. It may very well need to be called upon again one day.
Last week brought a string of scorchers, five or six days straight above 90 degrees. The air was dense and motionless, wearing the unique reek of summer's climax like a sweater. Over the weekend, that pressure cooker popped its top. Thunderstorms blew through the area, and when they had passed, I stepped outside to find it was almost twenty degrees cooler. The air had thinned out, started moving again, busily sweeping up the moisture, pushing it eastward in pursuit of the storms that had left it.
My heart raced for the invigorating change. I could sense the skulk of autumn through the late August night, even thought I felt the finest wintry tendril, still just a baby, coil around my ankle, trying to gain purchase.
This morning, post Labor Day, it was downright chilly. Not quite a freeze, but that fine wintry tendril definitely having grown four fingers and an opposable thumb to grip with. I took a walk along the river, and when the sun rose over the horizon, the light swept across the treetops, illuminating dabs of bright color where before there had been none. And the sky was smooth like glass, azure in color. Dry, cloudless.
Absolutely cloudless.
I have always loved this time of year. But the fresh, reborn air comes with a tremor now. Dismay and unease are implicit in the otherwise simple gesture of looking up.
This morning's walk took place in precisely the same conditions I awoke to nine years ago; awoke, with no clue at all that the very dynamic of my life - and every American life - was going to change forever in a matter of hours. I kept looking up repeatedly at the flat blue expanse dampened by bright sunlight, hoping against hope it would tell a different story, a better story, a less frightening story.
It didn't.
Almost a decade later, I still can't help but cringe a little. It is no longer the September sky I remember in my youth - heralding school, Halloween, a gentle reminder, even, in my overly eager child's mind, that Christmas was out there somewhere. It really isn't the "September sky" at all, now. It's the 9/11 sky, and it no longer gets me looking forward. It forces me to look back.
For the most part I've moved on, sanitized that day sufficiently, where I can live without thinking about it all the time. That wasn't always the case, but I've gotten better as the years have peeled away (time does heal all wounds, it would seem). But on mornings like this, which remind me as much of how I felt before the first airliner struck as how I felt the rest of the day, my thoughts can't help but turn plaintive:
Was there ever a time when we weren't anxious and uneasy in this country? Ever a time when we were not at war, not accustomed to heightened security and terror alerts? Were we ever not one inattentive baggage checker (in this country or abroad) away from planes being blown apart over major cities, one jihadist's inability to light the fuse correctly removed from another set of thousands dead on our streets? Were our armed forces ever not mired deeply in Iraq and Afghanistan? Was there ever a time when the music of Eminem was considered the biggest threat to the country, our President's sexual peccadilloes the country's greatest scandal and hottest topic? I want to go back there.
It's been a long, hot summer, but an even longer, hotter decade. And we are halfway to an entire generation coming of age knowing nothing BUT being at war.
The debate has been on-going for years the best way to commemorate 9/11. To tell you the truth, I don't care if it is ever commemorated in official channels. I don't need a national holiday or a monument. I don't need a day off from work or a new tower replacing the old towers to remind me of September 11th, 2001.
9/11 shows up in my mind uninvited, stays too long sometimes, like a bad guest. It replicates snapshot after postcard snapshot, clogging the hard drive of my memory with images I can't erase, like a malicious computer virus. I see towers of smoke and fire running parallel to the ground; human bodies falling a thousand feet; buildings falling a thousand feet; Olympic-sized billows of bright white dust chasing throngs of hysterical New Yorkers down streets, through cement canyons, around corners. I see heads held together with blood soaked bandages; faces covered in dust like theater performers, clumped wetly around the mouth and eyes.
I can still hear the low-slung roar of jet engines on a destructive course, the non-stop peal of sirens, a veritable chorus of shrieks and panicked (or dazed) profanity. I hear television newscasters bleating off report after report, trying to keep up - another plane down, this time in Washington, then another in Pennsylvania, then this tower fell, and that tower fell - endless speculation as to the potential death toll, the search for survivors, and who was responsible...I see myself watching the television with shocked co-workers, all of us wondering if it was ever going to end, and feeling, though we were safely fifteen hundred miles away, an acrid mixture of anger and fear (maybe not so safe, after all), and worse, a real sense of the change at hand, that nothing was going to be the same, that things were going to suck for a long time afterward.
And so they have.
All of it took place under the same sky I saw this morning on my walk: post-stifling summer heat / pre-killing autumn frost. Right at the negotiations of the seasons.
I don't like to think about this time of year, and the calm, restful conditions normally associated with it, being inextricably linked with terror, but it has come to that. The first couple of years I should have expected it. But it's been almost a decade, and still:
It's supposed to be 'back to school time', but it's 9/11 time.
It's supposed to be NFL time, but it's 9/11 time.
It's supposed to be harvest time, but it's 9/11 time.
For a full week each year, the TV flares up with a toxic prescription of specials and remembrances as exploitative as they are commemorative. The news media talking heads pinch off what they remember in two-cent portions, each year, like me, a little tireder-looking, a little grayer. The President speaks. We pray. But we don't forget. We won't forget.
We can't forget.
No matter the outcome of the War on Terror - if it ever ends or can ever be won - the terrorists scored a major victory that day. They have forever altered the way I view my world. Not 'The World' - faraway lands mired in complex geo-political machinations I only hear about on the news - but my world, my interpretation of my surroundings as I do something as routine as take a morning walk in no less a benign place than west-central Wisconsin. And one day, I will be a grizzled old man walking slowly along a shoreline somewhere, and if it's the right sky hanging above me, the September sky, I know that I will cringe then, as I cringe now.
------
Sadly, it may be impossible to forget the horror completely, but it helps to remember the heroes that were made that day, the courage that got called up - from NY Port Authority workers, members of the NYPD and FDNY, first responders at the World Trade Center and Pentagon (all intrepidly rising to the call of duty), to the civilians who stepped up at both locations to help out (notable among them, Hudson River boat operators tirelessly transporting victims from the New York side the the New Jersey side), to the individuals who staged a revolt against the hijackers on Flight 93 in the sky above Pennsylvania (and likely saved countless lives in doing so), to the innumerable volunteers who from 9/12 on donated their time and money to recovery, to everyone else ceaselessly donating their thoughts and prayers.
It's comforting to know a kind of clarified heroism can arise in times of crisis. It may very well need to be called upon again one day.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
'Brusque and Cranky' has no place in the friendly skies
NOTE: Since I began writing this, The Huffington Post, which, though I am a fan, routinely reveals a glaring immaturity amidst its news writers (as though its entire staff is comprised of 22-year-old interns), has wisely changed 'captured the nation's imagination' to 'captured America's attention', along with other story updates. But I left it in my post. It's truly how it read this morning, and, I believe, in part exemplifies my point.
----
So, the 'famed' JetBlue flight attendant who, according to The Huffington Post, 'captured the nation's imagination' when he snapped like a twig and took a ride down an emergency chute is no longer employed by the airline.
Following an August 9 altercation with a passenger aboard JetBlue flight 1052, which had just landed in New York from Pittsburgh, Steven Slater reportedly unleashed a profanity-laden tirade on the airliner's PA system, announcing he was quitting his job then exiting through an emergency slide he deployed himself. He then disappeared across the tarmac and went home, where he was later arrested.
A spokesperson for Slater says Slater wanted his job back, but JetBlue announced yesterday, without going into details, that he was no longer employed by their company. Since the incident he had been suspended, pending an investigation. Now - at least for now - he is unemployed.
Good.
'Captured the nation's imagination'...??? Seriously?!
There has been way too much talk in the last month about Slater being painted as a folk hero, too many people happy (desperate?) to play devil's advocate by trying to understand his point of view, even applauding the flourish with which he made his grand exit, as though he did it on behalf of working class people everywhere. One HuffPost reader commented, of his purported frustration, 'we've all been there'; another stated that quitting while 'giving the company a big middle finger' was better, at least, than going on a murderous workplace rampage.
Uhh...okay? Someone shits on my front porch, I don't excuse it by giving thanks he didn't shit in my bath tub.
To boot, a reported tens of thousands of on-line 'fans' have been pushing to persuade JetBlue to reinstate Slater, evincing sympathy for this guy by trotting out some tired old 'us against them' argument - corporate America v. everyman.
What. The. Fuck. ?.
In fairness, not everyone is on Slater's side (most importantly JetBlue). It has been acknowledged that most passengers who witnessed the altercation (with a woman, reportedly over a carry-on bag) claim not only that Slater was the instigator but, perhaps of greater significance, 'brusque and cranky' throughout the flight.
Soo...WHO are the tens of thousands of fans trying to make excuses for the culmination of his 'brusque and cranky' behavior, exactly? They obviously weren't on the flight. Do they know what actually happened?
Have they ever flown?
When I walk into a Starbucks and encounter a 'brusque and cranky' worker pouring my Venti black...or frankly, when I notice that the individual assembling my sub sandwich, depositing my paycheck, pumping my gas, bagging my groceries, helping me find Season 4/Disc 3 of The Office, installing my DVR, fingering through a drawerful of prescriptions on my behalf, mixing me a Captain and Coke, pouring me a glass of wine, or cutting off a piece of peanut butter fudge for me to sample seems 'brusque and cranky', I get indignant. I suddenly don't want them helping me. Doesn't matter how short-lived their involvement in my day might be, I don't want them involved at all. I don't want them knowing what I watch, or what medication I've been prescribed, or touching my food, if they're - for whatever reason - going to be 'brusque and cranky' about it.
NOBODY involved with whisking me or anyone else away at 35,000 feet - from the individual piloting the big bird, to the person wheeling a cart full of peanuts and Sprite down the center aisle, to the person back at the airport scrubbing the toilet where I (accidentally, to be sure) splashed a little on the floor - should be allowed, CAN be allowed, to get 'brusque and cranky'.
I can imagine, probably more than it seems reading this post, that being a flight attendant is a difficult occupation; I really can. And I'm not completely without sympathy. The relationship between 'server' and 'customer' in any arena is inherently perverse. I myself while away my work week on the 'server' side of things, and from that experience alone, I have no doubt that a large number of airline passengers are awful (beyond 'brusque and cranky') on any given day. I'll even go so far as acknowledge the strong possibility that the woman involved in the altercation with Slater was a real pill.
Tough shit. Deal with it. Keep it together. You're NOT assembling a sub sandwich, Mr. Slater; there is nothing innocuous about your involvement with my life for the duration of the flight. You are, in part, responsible for my life; for ensuring my safety and comfort not only 6.62 miles above the Earth, but from the moment I walk into one airport until the moment I walk out of another...in the post 9/11 world, to boot, where long lines, delays, diverted flights, cancellations and a general sense of unease have become the norm. If you can't handle it, find another line of work.
I hear Subway is hiring...
Is this unreasonable?
Considering reports that he was the instigator, and a lack of anyone willing to corroborate his side of the story, Slater's actions should not have 'captured' anyone's imagination, nor should he be lauded as some kind of Robin Hood. He is at best, and this is a stretch, Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. And even if one is determined to support some imagined cause, there is no excuse for the 'flourish' of his exit. Slater could just as easily have told the woman where to stuff her carry-on bag, quietly left the plane and never come back. No childish public address tirade or emergency chute descent was necessary, or appropriate.
Not in the post-9/11 world. Not in the post-underwear bomber world.
JetBlue should have fired him immediately, not weaseled their way through a month of 'suspension, pending investigation' corporate blah-blah, allowing his folk hero status to take root, then allowing him to claim, as he is now, that he resigned. Symbolically, it would have helped their cause if they'd displayed an immediate zero tolerance policy. That Slater still faces charges of criminal mischief, reckless endangerment and trespassing is a good sign justice, of some sort, will be served.
But folk hero status has long shown itself to be a dysfunctional phenomenon. Once the legal dust settles, I wouldn't be surprised if we hear from, or about, Steven Slater again. Another airline will pick him up, probably, sure to command an unholy amount of news coverage and analysis when it happens...or we just might whiff a reality show in the works at some point.
----
So, the 'famed' JetBlue flight attendant who, according to The Huffington Post, 'captured the nation's imagination' when he snapped like a twig and took a ride down an emergency chute is no longer employed by the airline.
Following an August 9 altercation with a passenger aboard JetBlue flight 1052, which had just landed in New York from Pittsburgh, Steven Slater reportedly unleashed a profanity-laden tirade on the airliner's PA system, announcing he was quitting his job then exiting through an emergency slide he deployed himself. He then disappeared across the tarmac and went home, where he was later arrested.
A spokesperson for Slater says Slater wanted his job back, but JetBlue announced yesterday, without going into details, that he was no longer employed by their company. Since the incident he had been suspended, pending an investigation. Now - at least for now - he is unemployed.
Good.
'Captured the nation's imagination'...??? Seriously?!
There has been way too much talk in the last month about Slater being painted as a folk hero, too many people happy (desperate?) to play devil's advocate by trying to understand his point of view, even applauding the flourish with which he made his grand exit, as though he did it on behalf of working class people everywhere. One HuffPost reader commented, of his purported frustration, 'we've all been there'; another stated that quitting while 'giving the company a big middle finger' was better, at least, than going on a murderous workplace rampage.
Uhh...okay? Someone shits on my front porch, I don't excuse it by giving thanks he didn't shit in my bath tub.
To boot, a reported tens of thousands of on-line 'fans' have been pushing to persuade JetBlue to reinstate Slater, evincing sympathy for this guy by trotting out some tired old 'us against them' argument - corporate America v. everyman.
What. The. Fuck. ?.
In fairness, not everyone is on Slater's side (most importantly JetBlue). It has been acknowledged that most passengers who witnessed the altercation (with a woman, reportedly over a carry-on bag) claim not only that Slater was the instigator but, perhaps of greater significance, 'brusque and cranky' throughout the flight.
Soo...WHO are the tens of thousands of fans trying to make excuses for the culmination of his 'brusque and cranky' behavior, exactly? They obviously weren't on the flight. Do they know what actually happened?
Have they ever flown?
When I walk into a Starbucks and encounter a 'brusque and cranky' worker pouring my Venti black...or frankly, when I notice that the individual assembling my sub sandwich, depositing my paycheck, pumping my gas, bagging my groceries, helping me find Season 4/Disc 3 of The Office, installing my DVR, fingering through a drawerful of prescriptions on my behalf, mixing me a Captain and Coke, pouring me a glass of wine, or cutting off a piece of peanut butter fudge for me to sample seems 'brusque and cranky', I get indignant. I suddenly don't want them helping me. Doesn't matter how short-lived their involvement in my day might be, I don't want them involved at all. I don't want them knowing what I watch, or what medication I've been prescribed, or touching my food, if they're - for whatever reason - going to be 'brusque and cranky' about it.
NOBODY involved with whisking me or anyone else away at 35,000 feet - from the individual piloting the big bird, to the person wheeling a cart full of peanuts and Sprite down the center aisle, to the person back at the airport scrubbing the toilet where I (accidentally, to be sure) splashed a little on the floor - should be allowed, CAN be allowed, to get 'brusque and cranky'.
I can imagine, probably more than it seems reading this post, that being a flight attendant is a difficult occupation; I really can. And I'm not completely without sympathy. The relationship between 'server' and 'customer' in any arena is inherently perverse. I myself while away my work week on the 'server' side of things, and from that experience alone, I have no doubt that a large number of airline passengers are awful (beyond 'brusque and cranky') on any given day. I'll even go so far as acknowledge the strong possibility that the woman involved in the altercation with Slater was a real pill.
Tough shit. Deal with it. Keep it together. You're NOT assembling a sub sandwich, Mr. Slater; there is nothing innocuous about your involvement with my life for the duration of the flight. You are, in part, responsible for my life; for ensuring my safety and comfort not only 6.62 miles above the Earth, but from the moment I walk into one airport until the moment I walk out of another...in the post 9/11 world, to boot, where long lines, delays, diverted flights, cancellations and a general sense of unease have become the norm. If you can't handle it, find another line of work.
I hear Subway is hiring...
Is this unreasonable?
Considering reports that he was the instigator, and a lack of anyone willing to corroborate his side of the story, Slater's actions should not have 'captured' anyone's imagination, nor should he be lauded as some kind of Robin Hood. He is at best, and this is a stretch, Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. And even if one is determined to support some imagined cause, there is no excuse for the 'flourish' of his exit. Slater could just as easily have told the woman where to stuff her carry-on bag, quietly left the plane and never come back. No childish public address tirade or emergency chute descent was necessary, or appropriate.
Not in the post-9/11 world. Not in the post-underwear bomber world.
JetBlue should have fired him immediately, not weaseled their way through a month of 'suspension, pending investigation' corporate blah-blah, allowing his folk hero status to take root, then allowing him to claim, as he is now, that he resigned. Symbolically, it would have helped their cause if they'd displayed an immediate zero tolerance policy. That Slater still faces charges of criminal mischief, reckless endangerment and trespassing is a good sign justice, of some sort, will be served.
But folk hero status has long shown itself to be a dysfunctional phenomenon. Once the legal dust settles, I wouldn't be surprised if we hear from, or about, Steven Slater again. Another airline will pick him up, probably, sure to command an unholy amount of news coverage and analysis when it happens...or we just might whiff a reality show in the works at some point.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
YouTube becoming MUCH more than just string of lame, incidental moments caught on camera
I have spent a large part of this summer reminiscing. As oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico and our country's most fractious polemics spewed vitriol in an equally noxious gush, as news broke of Lindsay Lohan's blubbering, Lady Gaga's bingeing, Mel Gibson's breakdown and Brett Favre announcing he would be making his announcement soon, I've gone on-line in search of a gentler relief, a time in my life when that kind of stuff wasn't going on. At least, not in any way that affected me - emotionally, spiritually or otherwise. A time when which Archie comic to while away an afternoon with (Jughead's Digest, or Pals n Gals) and what flavor Charleston Chew (chocolate...frozen, please) to take along for the ride, were decisions with world-wide consequences.
Whose world? My world. The only one that mattered. The extent of logic, reason, desire, success and failure reached only a few square miles once, and this summer I've been traveling back to that small, focused place more frequently.
Too much reminiscing can be dangerous, of course. It's all too easy for curiosity to turn into longing, and equally as simple for that longing to become a debilitating fixation. This would seem especially true nowadays, when a virtual codex of pop culture - the main ingredient in the best recipes for self-indulgent remembrance in the modern age - lies at one's fingertips and a lot - a lot - of time can be wasted sifting through it.
Nowhere is this more true than on YouTube, the website that brought ease to what had previously been the arduous task of posting even a simple video on-line, the website that has made almost as many stars out of nobodies as VH-1. In its five years of existence, YouTube has become known largely for pandering to puerile and prurient interests, from girls stripping to cats playing the piano to dogs mowing the lawn, horses farting, babies singing, Midwestern teenagers fantasizing they're on Jackass as they skateboard off the roof and land with a nut-crunching thud on the patio, the pimply chuckles, chortles and cheers of their chums causing the camera's little microphone to distort.
But in that same period of time, YouTube has become about much more than just bad behavior and stupid pet tricks. It has become dumping ground for a precious stock load of historic imagery. From rare interviews to vintage performances on the talk shows of yesteryear, from historical news bites to TV sitcoms and every 'very special episode' ever produced, from classic music videos to classic commercials, chances are, if it was broadcast on television sometime in the last forty years, someone has, just in the last couple, found a VHS copy of it slowly melting away in an upstairs closet, transferred it to a digital format, and uploaded it to share with the world. That other people care about these things like I do, or that they have boxes of old VHS tapes stored away in upstairs closets, is not too surprising; that so MANY have gone to the trouble of preserving what's on those tapes is something I wouldn't have predicted, and it has resulted in a truly exciting collection of goodies that should be of interest to all but the most steadfastly UN-sentimental. (Truthfully, though, sentimentality is secondary. There is more going on here than mere nostalgia.)
Of paramount significance among this burgeoning archive, I believe, are the commercials; retromercials they're called these days.
For better or worse, there might be no more indepth way to study a decade or historical period than by perusing old advertising, particularly television commercials. Madison Avenue, as a game-changing, consent-manufacturing entity, has been riding high since at least the dawn of TV in the 1950s, and in various forms long before that. In pursuing its mission to get us to consume and feel good about consuming by making sure we smile brighter, smell better, don't go to bed hungry, wake up grouchy, settle for skunky beer, skanky coffee, flat hair or fat thighs, it has consistently attempted to reflect our deepest desires, predilections, longings, fears, fights and flights of fancy at any given moment. In doing so, it has captured, through the decades, the Zeitgeist of the times as they have changed.
That so much of what otherwise would be lost to time can now be enjoyed with the simple click of a mouse is thrilling to me. The only thing that gets in the way, or COULD unfortunately, is copyright infringement of the material being posted. This happens once in a while; some copyrighted material will be there one day, and gone the next, removed at someone's request. But posting seems to be an unstoppable force that is quickly becoming an immovable object. And if regarding YouTube as an historical archive, at least in part, helps temper the corporate world's red hot need to jealously guard its property, I'll do everything I can to spread the word.
I've been wondering where to take this post from here, what more can be said. Not much really. Those who are interested will seek it out, or have already. Those who are not interested, well, it'll be there for them one day, hopefully, if they're so inclined. I've decided instead to share some of the more memorable things I've found on YouTube. Some of it probably means more to me than it does to others, but advertising is nothing if not universally appealing, or universally annoying, and honestly, anything I post here is more worthy of taking a moment or two to watch than Snooki passing out on the boardwalk.
McDonald's - There was no McDonald's in my hometown growing up. I had to settle for Hardee's and Kentucky Fried Chicken. McDonald's represented another world - a good world, to be sure. If I was eating at a McDonald's restaurant, it meant I was on vacation with my parents. It meant we had driven to a distant city, or flown to one. It meant no school, no chores, no depressing day-to-day sameness. It meant, usually, a stop by the (equally special) shopping mall, and the Aladdin's Castle arcade I knew was inside (usually just off the food court), was not far behind.
I'll never forget the day in July 1989 when McDonald's finally arrived. I was sixteen. Driving down the highway at sundown and spotting the brightly lit golden arches punctuating my town's low-slung skyline, I felt, somehow, my little town had, as Obi-Wan Kenobi said, taken its 'first steps into a larger world.'
McDonald's employs a variety of initiative to sell its product; they seek out all demographics, all strata of the population, all walks of life. They are good at leeching off the sensation of any given moment, as in this commercial, which borrows heavily from H.R. PufnStuf, the children's show from the early 1970s (come along on Ronald's acid trip, kiddies!...):
They're also good at capturing sentimentality, sometimes gratuitously so, as in this absurdly melancholic gem from 1982 or '83:
Seriously, what the hell is up with this commercial?! It had me blubbering heavily and not knowing why when I was ten! Now, it seems corny and over-the-top, but back then I was so saddened by this spot, I was, for a little while, frightened to be alone after watching it, thinking the older brother was dead, or dying, or something...
I wonder now who conceived of it, and what led this individual or group of people to believe something so gushy, so shamelessly sentimental, was a good way to hock hamburgers...arouse anyone's appetite. It certainly did not make me hungry.
And yet I remember it, don't I? And that's really all advertising needs to do - lodge into your brain, and stay there.
Another from McDonald's. This one going way back, early 1970s...a true classic:
'There is nothing so clean, as my burger machine....' indeed...
I can't say I remember this commercial; it was a bit before my time. But I really like it. Its campy, Broadway extravaganza vibe is kind of timeless. (Man, that shift manager really kills it with his tenor, doesn't he?) Unlike the other two McDonald's examples, it could likely still work today; though it's highly unlikely any of the slack-jawed, glassy-eyed teenagers working at your average McDonald's now - covered in tattoos, hair hanging in their eyes - could possibly show the same level of enthusiasm for scrubbing fryers, grills and grease traps as these spirited gentlemen in their paper hats.
But it's probably always been slack-jawed teenagers working at McDonald's, and I'd bet nobody in the history of humanity has ever taken to the task of cleaning a grease trap with enthusiasm. I sure as hell haven't; and I WAS a long-haired, slack-jawed teenager working at McDonald's once, come to think of it...
Advertising is lot of things, but nothing if not dependent on suspension of disbelief.
Drugs - As a child of the 80s, I grew up at ground zero in the War on Drugs. Post-1960s America was just starting to think, oh shit...we might have a problem here...we never thought our kids would want to do drugs like WE did!....
Its response to the problem was to tell kids to just say no. Don't give them any reason to say no (other than the abstract specter of potentially turning their brains into mush)...that is, don't instill in them a sense of hope, purpose and psychological well-being that might make the need to get wrapped up in drugs a less powerful urge, or need. Nah, just say no. Just say no. Just say no.
Seems a futile battle now, but I must say, it worked on me at the time. I was sufficiently scared straight, came to regard people who did drugs as bad, and people who didn't do drugs as good, though this may simply be on account of the fact that there weren't many opportunities for drug use in my world. Drinking, of course, was a whole other story. Drinking was okay, encouraged, in fact. I learned from an early age that no small amount of beautiful women, nice cars, and funny dogs to share the good times with would come my way when I sipped my first beer.
Some notable anti-drug PSAs from my youth:
Love how he uses his grandpa's cigar box to hold his stash. And Dad, seriously, I know you're upset, but let the kid get a word in, why don't you?
This might just be the mother of all anti-drug PSA's. And probably the most effective on me back then. The visual is undeniably impactive. Nevertheless, my friends and I, none of whom were doing drugs at the time, always had a stock wise ass reply to 'Any questions?'
'Yeah, do I get bacon with that?'
Other commercials that I remember seeing time and time again as a kid:
This terribly (hilariously) acted spot is very old, before my time, though I do remember it. It was probably being replayed as a 'classic' when I was ten or eleven years old. My brother and I identified the red-headed kid as Donny Most (who played Ralph Malph in the sit-com Happy Days), congratulating ourselves on having discovered some very important secret. Now, I'm not so sure. Nor do I think the other kid is Robby Benson.
Though, gotta confess, I don't really know who Robby Benson is...
I do know, whoever these two are, they can't act. And really, who walks down the street eating from a frigging jar of peanut butter?!
Reeses Pieces - 1980
This is the first commercial I remember being skeptical of. When they cut a Reeses Piece open to show the peanut butter inside, note how thick and round it appears. Anybody who has ever eaten one knows they're not anywhere near that firm and fully packed.(Gives you an idea of the caution advertisers need to exercise in the claims they make; I figured that out when I was eight!). What's more, I remember thinking the peanut butter inside didn't look too appetizing. In fact, it seemed to possess the same brown/purplish hue as the canned food I fed our dog.
Life Cereal - 1970s
Not much needs to be said about this. Just a classic. And, again, far more worthy of watching than anything on reality TV...
Monster Cereals - late 1970s
I might never have seen this commercial, or others, were it not for the presence of various 'superstations' on our cable system. When it finally came to town, cable TV gave us not only local network affiliates and HBO, but WTBS-Atlanta (carrying my beloved Braves games), WGN-Chicago, and WKBD-Detroit, where nearly all of the commercials I remember seeing were actually seen, including this one from the Ontario Ministry of Tourism and Recreation. It ran every spring, summer and autumn in the States throughout the early 1980s (there was a different one for each season, as I recall), and signified that summer was on the way, that school was almost out. The song still makes me thing of all things done in warm weather, under sunny skies.
It was the music that told me my family and I would soon be traveling to a McDonald's somewhere. And in fact, Ontario, specifically Thunder Bay, was our destination more than once.
Here's a shocker:
Winston Cigarettes - 1960s
Schoolhouse Rock - "Figure 8"
Nobody who is currently between the ages of 29 and 45 should fail to remember Schoolhouse Rock. These Saturday morning educational shorts were very much of their time: an earnest attempt to reinvent how children are taught, to speak to a new, 'hipper' (such as we were) generation of kids, yet still geared TOWARD kids (whereas today, we seem to excel mostly at teaching kids how to be snarky, skeptical adults). There isn't a Schoolhouse Rock song that I don't love watching to this day, but 'Figure 8' is the stand-out for me. Pleasantly spacy, catchy (as all S.R. ditties were) this one is also a pretty well-textured piece of music...and the ending is just trippy as hell. Infinity...right on, sister!
'In the News'
A news bite segment for kids that aired during saturday morning cartoons, I think I can trace my interest in news, in being plugged in to what is going on in our world, to this effort on the part of CBS...so, mission accomplished for one kid, anyway. (Although the subject matter of this particular installment is interesting. Don't know that discussing ways our military can drop bombs more efficiently would happen today. Not commenting on whether it should...only that it probably wouldn't.)
CBS 'Special Presentation' intro
PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) Station Ident, 1970s
Whose world? My world. The only one that mattered. The extent of logic, reason, desire, success and failure reached only a few square miles once, and this summer I've been traveling back to that small, focused place more frequently.
Too much reminiscing can be dangerous, of course. It's all too easy for curiosity to turn into longing, and equally as simple for that longing to become a debilitating fixation. This would seem especially true nowadays, when a virtual codex of pop culture - the main ingredient in the best recipes for self-indulgent remembrance in the modern age - lies at one's fingertips and a lot - a lot - of time can be wasted sifting through it.
Nowhere is this more true than on YouTube, the website that brought ease to what had previously been the arduous task of posting even a simple video on-line, the website that has made almost as many stars out of nobodies as VH-1. In its five years of existence, YouTube has become known largely for pandering to puerile and prurient interests, from girls stripping to cats playing the piano to dogs mowing the lawn, horses farting, babies singing, Midwestern teenagers fantasizing they're on Jackass as they skateboard off the roof and land with a nut-crunching thud on the patio, the pimply chuckles, chortles and cheers of their chums causing the camera's little microphone to distort.
But in that same period of time, YouTube has become about much more than just bad behavior and stupid pet tricks. It has become dumping ground for a precious stock load of historic imagery. From rare interviews to vintage performances on the talk shows of yesteryear, from historical news bites to TV sitcoms and every 'very special episode' ever produced, from classic music videos to classic commercials, chances are, if it was broadcast on television sometime in the last forty years, someone has, just in the last couple, found a VHS copy of it slowly melting away in an upstairs closet, transferred it to a digital format, and uploaded it to share with the world. That other people care about these things like I do, or that they have boxes of old VHS tapes stored away in upstairs closets, is not too surprising; that so MANY have gone to the trouble of preserving what's on those tapes is something I wouldn't have predicted, and it has resulted in a truly exciting collection of goodies that should be of interest to all but the most steadfastly UN-sentimental. (Truthfully, though, sentimentality is secondary. There is more going on here than mere nostalgia.)
Of paramount significance among this burgeoning archive, I believe, are the commercials; retromercials they're called these days.
For better or worse, there might be no more indepth way to study a decade or historical period than by perusing old advertising, particularly television commercials. Madison Avenue, as a game-changing, consent-manufacturing entity, has been riding high since at least the dawn of TV in the 1950s, and in various forms long before that. In pursuing its mission to get us to consume and feel good about consuming by making sure we smile brighter, smell better, don't go to bed hungry, wake up grouchy, settle for skunky beer, skanky coffee, flat hair or fat thighs, it has consistently attempted to reflect our deepest desires, predilections, longings, fears, fights and flights of fancy at any given moment. In doing so, it has captured, through the decades, the Zeitgeist of the times as they have changed.
That so much of what otherwise would be lost to time can now be enjoyed with the simple click of a mouse is thrilling to me. The only thing that gets in the way, or COULD unfortunately, is copyright infringement of the material being posted. This happens once in a while; some copyrighted material will be there one day, and gone the next, removed at someone's request. But posting seems to be an unstoppable force that is quickly becoming an immovable object. And if regarding YouTube as an historical archive, at least in part, helps temper the corporate world's red hot need to jealously guard its property, I'll do everything I can to spread the word.
I've been wondering where to take this post from here, what more can be said. Not much really. Those who are interested will seek it out, or have already. Those who are not interested, well, it'll be there for them one day, hopefully, if they're so inclined. I've decided instead to share some of the more memorable things I've found on YouTube. Some of it probably means more to me than it does to others, but advertising is nothing if not universally appealing, or universally annoying, and honestly, anything I post here is more worthy of taking a moment or two to watch than Snooki passing out on the boardwalk.
McDonald's - There was no McDonald's in my hometown growing up. I had to settle for Hardee's and Kentucky Fried Chicken. McDonald's represented another world - a good world, to be sure. If I was eating at a McDonald's restaurant, it meant I was on vacation with my parents. It meant we had driven to a distant city, or flown to one. It meant no school, no chores, no depressing day-to-day sameness. It meant, usually, a stop by the (equally special) shopping mall, and the Aladdin's Castle arcade I knew was inside (usually just off the food court), was not far behind.
I'll never forget the day in July 1989 when McDonald's finally arrived. I was sixteen. Driving down the highway at sundown and spotting the brightly lit golden arches punctuating my town's low-slung skyline, I felt, somehow, my little town had, as Obi-Wan Kenobi said, taken its 'first steps into a larger world.'
McDonald's employs a variety of initiative to sell its product; they seek out all demographics, all strata of the population, all walks of life. They are good at leeching off the sensation of any given moment, as in this commercial, which borrows heavily from H.R. PufnStuf, the children's show from the early 1970s (come along on Ronald's acid trip, kiddies!...):
They're also good at capturing sentimentality, sometimes gratuitously so, as in this absurdly melancholic gem from 1982 or '83:
Seriously, what the hell is up with this commercial?! It had me blubbering heavily and not knowing why when I was ten! Now, it seems corny and over-the-top, but back then I was so saddened by this spot, I was, for a little while, frightened to be alone after watching it, thinking the older brother was dead, or dying, or something...
I wonder now who conceived of it, and what led this individual or group of people to believe something so gushy, so shamelessly sentimental, was a good way to hock hamburgers...arouse anyone's appetite. It certainly did not make me hungry.
And yet I remember it, don't I? And that's really all advertising needs to do - lodge into your brain, and stay there.
Another from McDonald's. This one going way back, early 1970s...a true classic:
'There is nothing so clean, as my burger machine....' indeed...
I can't say I remember this commercial; it was a bit before my time. But I really like it. Its campy, Broadway extravaganza vibe is kind of timeless. (Man, that shift manager really kills it with his tenor, doesn't he?) Unlike the other two McDonald's examples, it could likely still work today; though it's highly unlikely any of the slack-jawed, glassy-eyed teenagers working at your average McDonald's now - covered in tattoos, hair hanging in their eyes - could possibly show the same level of enthusiasm for scrubbing fryers, grills and grease traps as these spirited gentlemen in their paper hats.
But it's probably always been slack-jawed teenagers working at McDonald's, and I'd bet nobody in the history of humanity has ever taken to the task of cleaning a grease trap with enthusiasm. I sure as hell haven't; and I WAS a long-haired, slack-jawed teenager working at McDonald's once, come to think of it...
Advertising is lot of things, but nothing if not dependent on suspension of disbelief.
Drugs - As a child of the 80s, I grew up at ground zero in the War on Drugs. Post-1960s America was just starting to think, oh shit...we might have a problem here...we never thought our kids would want to do drugs like WE did!....
Its response to the problem was to tell kids to just say no. Don't give them any reason to say no (other than the abstract specter of potentially turning their brains into mush)...that is, don't instill in them a sense of hope, purpose and psychological well-being that might make the need to get wrapped up in drugs a less powerful urge, or need. Nah, just say no. Just say no. Just say no.
Seems a futile battle now, but I must say, it worked on me at the time. I was sufficiently scared straight, came to regard people who did drugs as bad, and people who didn't do drugs as good, though this may simply be on account of the fact that there weren't many opportunities for drug use in my world. Drinking, of course, was a whole other story. Drinking was okay, encouraged, in fact. I learned from an early age that no small amount of beautiful women, nice cars, and funny dogs to share the good times with would come my way when I sipped my first beer.
Some notable anti-drug PSAs from my youth:
Love how he uses his grandpa's cigar box to hold his stash. And Dad, seriously, I know you're upset, but let the kid get a word in, why don't you?
This might just be the mother of all anti-drug PSA's. And probably the most effective on me back then. The visual is undeniably impactive. Nevertheless, my friends and I, none of whom were doing drugs at the time, always had a stock wise ass reply to 'Any questions?'
'Yeah, do I get bacon with that?'
Other commercials that I remember seeing time and time again as a kid:
Reese's Peanut Butter Cups - 1970ish
This terribly (hilariously) acted spot is very old, before my time, though I do remember it. It was probably being replayed as a 'classic' when I was ten or eleven years old. My brother and I identified the red-headed kid as Donny Most (who played Ralph Malph in the sit-com Happy Days), congratulating ourselves on having discovered some very important secret. Now, I'm not so sure. Nor do I think the other kid is Robby Benson.
Though, gotta confess, I don't really know who Robby Benson is...
I do know, whoever these two are, they can't act. And really, who walks down the street eating from a frigging jar of peanut butter?!
This is the first commercial I remember being skeptical of. When they cut a Reeses Piece open to show the peanut butter inside, note how thick and round it appears. Anybody who has ever eaten one knows they're not anywhere near that firm and fully packed.(Gives you an idea of the caution advertisers need to exercise in the claims they make; I figured that out when I was eight!). What's more, I remember thinking the peanut butter inside didn't look too appetizing. In fact, it seemed to possess the same brown/purplish hue as the canned food I fed our dog.
Life Cereal - 1970s
Not much needs to be said about this. Just a classic. And, again, far more worthy of watching than anything on reality TV...
Monster Cereals - late 1970s
This one is significant for me because it is, quite literally, one of my first memories. I remember this commercial as a clearly ringing bell in what otherwise, with one other notable exception posted below, is a murky haze of extreme youth, say four or five years old. I remember the three monster characters on the beach, and recall vividly wondering why Count Chocula and Frankenberry were excluding BooBerry, my favorite of the Monster cereals. (Though today, sadly, they're all kind of nasty....completely inedible. That isn't true of all 'kid' cereals; I fancy myself quite a connoisseur, and some have held up: Apple Jacks, Cocoa Puffs, Cocoa and Fruty Pebbles. The nastiest cereal ever made in my youth? C3POs...I love Star Wars, but there IS a limit, or should be, to merchandising!)
Many who grew up in the upper Midwest might remember this Ontario tourism commercial:
I might never have seen this commercial, or others, were it not for the presence of various 'superstations' on our cable system. When it finally came to town, cable TV gave us not only local network affiliates and HBO, but WTBS-Atlanta (carrying my beloved Braves games), WGN-Chicago, and WKBD-Detroit, where nearly all of the commercials I remember seeing were actually seen, including this one from the Ontario Ministry of Tourism and Recreation. It ran every spring, summer and autumn in the States throughout the early 1980s (there was a different one for each season, as I recall), and signified that summer was on the way, that school was almost out. The song still makes me thing of all things done in warm weather, under sunny skies.
It was the music that told me my family and I would soon be traveling to a McDonald's somewhere. And in fact, Ontario, specifically Thunder Bay, was our destination more than once.
Here's a shocker:
Winston Cigarettes - 1960s
Whoever posted this commercial didn't get the sound timed quite right, but man, they certainly immortalized the drastic change our society has gone through in forty-plus years when it comes to smoking. To be sure, all change for the better. I am an (ex)smoker, but I could never imagine a world in which people are allowed to smoke on airplanes or in movie theaters, belch out soot from the booth behind you in a restaurant. We've happily come a long way since you've come a long way, baby.
It's not only commercials I remember:
It's not only commercials I remember:
Schoolhouse Rock - "Figure 8"
Nobody who is currently between the ages of 29 and 45 should fail to remember Schoolhouse Rock. These Saturday morning educational shorts were very much of their time: an earnest attempt to reinvent how children are taught, to speak to a new, 'hipper' (such as we were) generation of kids, yet still geared TOWARD kids (whereas today, we seem to excel mostly at teaching kids how to be snarky, skeptical adults). There isn't a Schoolhouse Rock song that I don't love watching to this day, but 'Figure 8' is the stand-out for me. Pleasantly spacy, catchy (as all S.R. ditties were) this one is also a pretty well-textured piece of music...and the ending is just trippy as hell. Infinity...right on, sister!
'In the News'
A news bite segment for kids that aired during saturday morning cartoons, I think I can trace my interest in news, in being plugged in to what is going on in our world, to this effort on the part of CBS...so, mission accomplished for one kid, anyway. (Although the subject matter of this particular installment is interesting. Don't know that discussing ways our military can drop bombs more efficiently would happen today. Not commenting on whether it should...only that it probably wouldn't.)
CBS 'Special Presentation' intro
When I heard this, usually on a Friday or Saturday night, I was one happy kid. It was the unmistakable pre-cursor to something fun or interesting about to be broadcast, something interrupting the normal boring adult programming; a cartoon special, perhaps. I remember on many occasions jumping around excitedly to this music in anticipation of the Peanuts or Dr. Seuss special I knew was seconds away, and actually air-bongoing once or twice. They used this sounder for ALL special programming though, which meant every once in a while, the music was followed by something depressingly adult - the Emmys, or the Oscars, or some crap like that. But most of the time, I was not disappointed. A Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Halloween is Grinch Night, and countless others...cartoons were a special thing then, in a way they simply can't be for children in this day and age.
PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) Station Ident, 1970s
I must say there is probably nothing that moved me more when I was a kid than this short, Moog synthesizer-ish tone, used to announce, and unequivocally, that you were watching PBS.
When I was very young, we lived in the country. Eventually, we moved into town, but until that happened there was no cable TV for us. Just four over-the-air channels broadcasting faintly from a distant city; the three networks, and channel 8, Public Broadcasting. In the days before I started going to school, and during the summer, PBS is mostly what I watched, and this ident's unearthly, plaintive plunk struck a resonant (and not at all pleasant) chord in me.
It came on before Sesame Street, then after Sesame Street, linked shows like Mr. Roger's Neighborhood with The Electric Company together in the way commercials did on the other channels. But there were no commercials on PBS; and as pathetic as this seems to me now, I was aware of this fact at age four and five, and somehow bothered by it.
Again, I wonder just how this particular ident was conceived, and what the eerie tone was meant to represent. Something futuristic, I imagine...PBS leading the way into a perceived computer age, or a cerebral endeavor of some sort.
But to me it signified isolation; served only to remind me that I lived in the country; that there were distances between our house and others, and a long road into town; that I could, at any time, get lost in the woods not twenty feet from the back door of my house and maybe never find my way back.
It was the sound of boredom.
Of restlessness.
Of a bland lunch.
It was the sound I was going to hear when I (eventually) got lost in those woods, reaffirming a lack of humanity. It was the sound that arose in the absence of a heart beat.
I'd be the first to admit I was just an overly sensitive kid, bordering on being a freak. But user comments on the YouTube page where this is posted suggest I was not the only one weirded out by it.
In any case, reading over this post, it's clear I watched way too much TV growing up.
When I was very young, we lived in the country. Eventually, we moved into town, but until that happened there was no cable TV for us. Just four over-the-air channels broadcasting faintly from a distant city; the three networks, and channel 8, Public Broadcasting. In the days before I started going to school, and during the summer, PBS is mostly what I watched, and this ident's unearthly, plaintive plunk struck a resonant (and not at all pleasant) chord in me.
It came on before Sesame Street, then after Sesame Street, linked shows like Mr. Roger's Neighborhood with The Electric Company together in the way commercials did on the other channels. But there were no commercials on PBS; and as pathetic as this seems to me now, I was aware of this fact at age four and five, and somehow bothered by it.
Again, I wonder just how this particular ident was conceived, and what the eerie tone was meant to represent. Something futuristic, I imagine...PBS leading the way into a perceived computer age, or a cerebral endeavor of some sort.
But to me it signified isolation; served only to remind me that I lived in the country; that there were distances between our house and others, and a long road into town; that I could, at any time, get lost in the woods not twenty feet from the back door of my house and maybe never find my way back.
It was the sound of boredom.
Of restlessness.
Of a bland lunch.
It was the sound I was going to hear when I (eventually) got lost in those woods, reaffirming a lack of humanity. It was the sound that arose in the absence of a heart beat.
I'd be the first to admit I was just an overly sensitive kid, bordering on being a freak. But user comments on the YouTube page where this is posted suggest I was not the only one weirded out by it.
In any case, reading over this post, it's clear I watched way too much TV growing up.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
The noxious seas of reality television might brighten a bit, were Abby Sunderland to attempt sailing through them
It is almost certainly a sign of the times that all sorts of foul is being cried, now that 16-year-old Abby Sunderland has been found and rescued from the Indian Ocean.
The California teenager set sail on her 40-foot vessel Wild Eyes in January, hoping to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo, unassisted and non-stop. Early into her journey, her hopes of achieving non-stop were dashed when she had to land in Mexico and later Cape Town, South Africa for repairs to her boat, but she made the decision to press on anyway, follow through with her trip.
Everything was flowing along nicely until last week, when a rogue wave knocked out her mast and satellite communication thousands of miles from land. She had no choice but activate her emergency beacon, and was discovered and rescued by a French fishing vessel within 48 hours, her own boat abandoned.
I had no idea who this girl was until last week, when she was feared lost at sea. I mentioned her predicament in a previous post on this blog as part of a larger point I was making about myself: about determination, about marshaling emotional high seas. Succeed or fail, Abby Sunderland, and people like her, are to be commended and should be impervious to unfair scrutiny. Not immune or above, perhaps, but impervious.
The parents of Abby Sunderland, whose older brother Zac briefly held the much sought-after record last year (until it was broken by an even younger Australian adventurer), were already under fire for allowing their daughter, barely old enough to legally drive a car, to undertake the long, treacherous journey by herself, when it was revealed early this week that they had been in talks with a production company for a possible reality show chronicling their family's adventures.
This really got fingers pointing. The entire thing smacked of last October's 'Balloon Boy' incident, when Richard and Myumi Heene were called out for staging an elaborate hoax involving their youngest son Falcon, in hopes of landing a reality show deal. And on the surface at least, such a conspiracy would make sense: Wunderkind Abby is plucked from the perilous ocean, just in the nick of time. Et voilà ! Instant name recognition, dialogue and intrigue! Sit back, and watch the offers pour in!
In response to such accusations, the family has recoiled, disavowing any current 'deals' - television, book or otherwise - and plans for any in the future.
Admirable, but hardly necessary, in my opinion. The most pencil-thin scratching at the surface will reveal this is not even remotely the same situation as Balloon Boy. Little Falcon Heene was just an unwitting pawn in his talentless father's sad gambit for 15 minutes of fame. Abby Sunderland, on the other hand, is obviously a skilled sailor. Whether it was some kind of publicity stunt or turned into one after the near-tragedy (and neither scenario really seems to be the case), this young lady still came close to sailing around the world by herself, and probably will at some point in the future. There is something about her abilities, and her brother's, and the parents that raised them, that is - at the very least - interesting, and undeniably inspiring.
At least they bring something to the table.
And by that reckoning (once you've come to terms with the fact that the reality television phenomenon is probably not going away anytime soon, of course) the Sunderlands are more deserving of TV and book deals than a lot of established reality celebs.
More deserving than the entire cast of Jersey Shore combined.
The California teenager set sail on her 40-foot vessel Wild Eyes in January, hoping to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo, unassisted and non-stop. Early into her journey, her hopes of achieving non-stop were dashed when she had to land in Mexico and later Cape Town, South Africa for repairs to her boat, but she made the decision to press on anyway, follow through with her trip.
Everything was flowing along nicely until last week, when a rogue wave knocked out her mast and satellite communication thousands of miles from land. She had no choice but activate her emergency beacon, and was discovered and rescued by a French fishing vessel within 48 hours, her own boat abandoned.
I had no idea who this girl was until last week, when she was feared lost at sea. I mentioned her predicament in a previous post on this blog as part of a larger point I was making about myself: about determination, about marshaling emotional high seas. Succeed or fail, Abby Sunderland, and people like her, are to be commended and should be impervious to unfair scrutiny. Not immune or above, perhaps, but impervious.
The parents of Abby Sunderland, whose older brother Zac briefly held the much sought-after record last year (until it was broken by an even younger Australian adventurer), were already under fire for allowing their daughter, barely old enough to legally drive a car, to undertake the long, treacherous journey by herself, when it was revealed early this week that they had been in talks with a production company for a possible reality show chronicling their family's adventures.
This really got fingers pointing. The entire thing smacked of last October's 'Balloon Boy' incident, when Richard and Myumi Heene were called out for staging an elaborate hoax involving their youngest son Falcon, in hopes of landing a reality show deal. And on the surface at least, such a conspiracy would make sense: Wunderkind Abby is plucked from the perilous ocean, just in the nick of time. Et voilà ! Instant name recognition, dialogue and intrigue! Sit back, and watch the offers pour in!
In response to such accusations, the family has recoiled, disavowing any current 'deals' - television, book or otherwise - and plans for any in the future.
Admirable, but hardly necessary, in my opinion. The most pencil-thin scratching at the surface will reveal this is not even remotely the same situation as Balloon Boy. Little Falcon Heene was just an unwitting pawn in his talentless father's sad gambit for 15 minutes of fame. Abby Sunderland, on the other hand, is obviously a skilled sailor. Whether it was some kind of publicity stunt or turned into one after the near-tragedy (and neither scenario really seems to be the case), this young lady still came close to sailing around the world by herself, and probably will at some point in the future. There is something about her abilities, and her brother's, and the parents that raised them, that is - at the very least - interesting, and undeniably inspiring.
At least they bring something to the table.
And by that reckoning (once you've come to terms with the fact that the reality television phenomenon is probably not going away anytime soon, of course) the Sunderlands are more deserving of TV and book deals than a lot of established reality celebs.
More deserving than the entire cast of Jersey Shore combined.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Confessions of a (former) Facebook junkie...
I was a Facebook user for exactly one year out of my life - twelve months, three of which I might very well have qualified as a junkie. I set up my page in April '09, climbing on board just as everyone, it seemed, was climbing on board, and in April 2010, disembarked with equally fortuitous timing, just when everyone, it seemed, was starting to complain about Facebook, looking for other places to network on-line, fed up with its lax privacy policies and the reported jerkiness of its primary founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
I say 'disembark' because I don't know how else to describe it. I've disembarked the ship, but the ship is still there; that is, my page still exists. They wouldn't let me shut it down permanently. Deactivation seemed to be the best (and only) option, and even then 'the Facebook' pleaded to keep me, asked if I was sure I wanted to do it, even going so far as to suggest that certain people on my friends list would 'miss' me when I was gone.
Uhhh, yeah... *sigh*...
For this and other reasons, it's unlikely I will ever sail Facebook's negligent blue seas again. Never say never, of course, but my decision to bolt was about more than just privacy. In the last twelve months I've gotten everything I possibly can out of Facebook, everything it can possibly offer, and a little more than I bargained for.
It's been around since 2004, growing steadily, but in 2009 Facebook was like a virtual reality boom town; its population grew exponentially, surging to a reported 400 million users (and counting), lending the ever-changeable English language new words (like 'unfriend') and the ever searching human race new ways to idly while away an afternoon at work. It was this mad dash that I got swept up in.
I'd been doing so well at holding out, too; resisting, as I usually try to, what 'everyone else' is doing. To that end, I had plenty of practice. I'd been resisting a MySpace page for years, tempted, but unable to ignore that MySpace always seemed a little too youthful to me, to the point of lameness. Most pages I visited were like the digital equivalent of a teenager's bedroom: posters of bands and babes plastering the walls, music blaring, clutter all over the floor, a visually self-indulgent story of one's existence far too random to avoid looking like a big amateurish contrivance, no matter how carefully considered.
Facebook seemed more staid, more 'adult' somehow, and therefore more organic, the focus centered on making a real connection with other people, without the need for flash (that is, a wallpaper background of smokin' hot fairy demons crying tears of blood, NASCAR insignia, masters of metal, or some such...). But even then, I did not jump into it quickly.
It's not that I'm technologically impaired. I know the ins and outs of the Internet, the ins and outs of the Windows operating system for that matter, and possess a fair amount of experience with Mac. I'd spent a number of years designing websites, though admittedly this was back when it was a simple matter of HTML (strange to think that so much of that early Internet lexicon is now as dated to the late 90s/early 00s as the 8-track player is to the 1970s). And only the year before, I'd started this blog, not so much because other people were doing it, but because it's good practice, and any writer hoping to achieve and/or maintain relevance in this day and age needs to recognize that the future of the written word is on-line.
Facebook, however, was all about peer pressure. I signed up simply because 'everyone was doing it,' like a joint passed around at a party, or my first sheepish swig of beer way back when. My impulse had been to resist, but curiosity was quickly eclipsing apprehension in April 2009, and when my girlfriend set up her own account, the whole thing was legitimized for me. She too is a resister by trade, adopting a wait and see attitude in the face of nearly every new fad, gadget and political wind blowing, and far more distrustful of all this integrated technology than I am (in terms of the effect it could have on our privacy). So when she caved to pressure from friends and family members to get on board, I let her pull me along.
When I was a little kid, I dreamed of starting a sign company one day. Seriously, I wanted to make signs. More than the artistic element of doing so, the thrill for me was thinking of one of my signs being in a public place and seen by a lot of people. My dad owned a bookstore, and I was all too happy to make a sign if he needed one. A special on comic books, or penny candy, a 'back in 5 minutes' placard if he had to run to the bank and there was no one to watch the place, upon request I'd carefully craft it with wide-tipped magic markers. My signs were simple and direct; they got the job done. And frankly, that was much the point:
I absolutely loved the thought of dispensing pertinent information.
Dispensing pertinent information. 'Broadcasting' in its many forms. Given some of my various career choices since then - radio deejay, web designer, book editor, newspaper publisher -it's clear I still do. And I fully admit, I liked that Facebook was not only about making a connection, but about being seen.
It was not hard to become happily mired in the Facebook world, but in the first few days, as I enthusiastically chose photos to upload and cobbled together information for my profile page (marveling at how easy it all was), something truly unexpected happened: I found myself inundated with more friend requests than I ever thought possible. Every time I logged on, there were five or six new ones. Sometimes a few would pop up while I was logged in.
I was shocked. I'd been expecting close friends to find me on Facebook, my girlfriend's family, my parents, some of their friends perhaps, maybe some co-workers here and there, et cetera. But it went way beyond that. People from high school I had not thought about since then - ex-classmates with whom I competed for everything (attention, grades, jobs, identity), upperclassman I mostly remember avoiding in the hallway at all cost lest they give chase, underclassman who at best lingered on the periphery of my world (and sometimes avoided me for the same reason), several people I simply didn't get along with in those days and a few I never particularly liked - all had Facebook accounts, and all poured into my request box like fans besieging a box office for tickets that have just recently gone on sale.
Most of them, on the rare occasion I thought of them, had remained age 17 or 18 in my mind for two decades. To my astonishment, they were now in their late thirties, married, or divorced, with kids or step kids, balding heads, widening hips, mortgages, beer bellies, tired but still mostly pleasant smiles. It was trippy to have these people come back into my life - so many at once, and so quickly. Overnight, Facebook became not a boom town of strangers, but a grand entrance into a high school reunion in a virtual Holiday Inn banquet room; a reunion where everyone actually showed up, the jocks, the dirtballs, the geeks, dorks and drama queens...everyone was on one level now, everyone was an adult. Everyone was a Facebook user.
Recollections of the past spilled over in short but violent bursts at this reunion. It's truly amazing how memories we think we've forgotten are actually lying dormant, waiting to burst back to colorful life, like desert flowers after the rains come. It all came back to me and my new Facebook friends, hundreds of details I'd considered lost to time: things we said, things we believed, things we thought about ourselves and one another. Weekend first times moments of glory and cringe-worthy failures on courts, fields and stages were trotted out, dusted off, reveled in. First hour hilarity became new again, memories of sneaking into class, sneaking out of class. Teachers with bizarre habits, or bad breath became the butt of our laughter, now electronically transmitted across miles as well as years.
I say 'disembark' because I don't know how else to describe it. I've disembarked the ship, but the ship is still there; that is, my page still exists. They wouldn't let me shut it down permanently. Deactivation seemed to be the best (and only) option, and even then 'the Facebook' pleaded to keep me, asked if I was sure I wanted to do it, even going so far as to suggest that certain people on my friends list would 'miss' me when I was gone.
Uhhh, yeah... *sigh*...
For this and other reasons, it's unlikely I will ever sail Facebook's negligent blue seas again. Never say never, of course, but my decision to bolt was about more than just privacy. In the last twelve months I've gotten everything I possibly can out of Facebook, everything it can possibly offer, and a little more than I bargained for.
It's been around since 2004, growing steadily, but in 2009 Facebook was like a virtual reality boom town; its population grew exponentially, surging to a reported 400 million users (and counting), lending the ever-changeable English language new words (like 'unfriend') and the ever searching human race new ways to idly while away an afternoon at work. It was this mad dash that I got swept up in.
I'd been doing so well at holding out, too; resisting, as I usually try to, what 'everyone else' is doing. To that end, I had plenty of practice. I'd been resisting a MySpace page for years, tempted, but unable to ignore that MySpace always seemed a little too youthful to me, to the point of lameness. Most pages I visited were like the digital equivalent of a teenager's bedroom: posters of bands and babes plastering the walls, music blaring, clutter all over the floor, a visually self-indulgent story of one's existence far too random to avoid looking like a big amateurish contrivance, no matter how carefully considered.
Facebook seemed more staid, more 'adult' somehow, and therefore more organic, the focus centered on making a real connection with other people, without the need for flash (that is, a wallpaper background of smokin' hot fairy demons crying tears of blood, NASCAR insignia, masters of metal, or some such...). But even then, I did not jump into it quickly.
It's not that I'm technologically impaired. I know the ins and outs of the Internet, the ins and outs of the Windows operating system for that matter, and possess a fair amount of experience with Mac. I'd spent a number of years designing websites, though admittedly this was back when it was a simple matter of HTML (strange to think that so much of that early Internet lexicon is now as dated to the late 90s/early 00s as the 8-track player is to the 1970s). And only the year before, I'd started this blog, not so much because other people were doing it, but because it's good practice, and any writer hoping to achieve and/or maintain relevance in this day and age needs to recognize that the future of the written word is on-line.
Facebook, however, was all about peer pressure. I signed up simply because 'everyone was doing it,' like a joint passed around at a party, or my first sheepish swig of beer way back when. My impulse had been to resist, but curiosity was quickly eclipsing apprehension in April 2009, and when my girlfriend set up her own account, the whole thing was legitimized for me. She too is a resister by trade, adopting a wait and see attitude in the face of nearly every new fad, gadget and political wind blowing, and far more distrustful of all this integrated technology than I am (in terms of the effect it could have on our privacy). So when she caved to pressure from friends and family members to get on board, I let her pull me along.
When I was a little kid, I dreamed of starting a sign company one day. Seriously, I wanted to make signs. More than the artistic element of doing so, the thrill for me was thinking of one of my signs being in a public place and seen by a lot of people. My dad owned a bookstore, and I was all too happy to make a sign if he needed one. A special on comic books, or penny candy, a 'back in 5 minutes' placard if he had to run to the bank and there was no one to watch the place, upon request I'd carefully craft it with wide-tipped magic markers. My signs were simple and direct; they got the job done. And frankly, that was much the point:
I absolutely loved the thought of dispensing pertinent information.
Dispensing pertinent information. 'Broadcasting' in its many forms. Given some of my various career choices since then - radio deejay, web designer, book editor, newspaper publisher -it's clear I still do. And I fully admit, I liked that Facebook was not only about making a connection, but about being seen.
It was not hard to become happily mired in the Facebook world, but in the first few days, as I enthusiastically chose photos to upload and cobbled together information for my profile page (marveling at how easy it all was), something truly unexpected happened: I found myself inundated with more friend requests than I ever thought possible. Every time I logged on, there were five or six new ones. Sometimes a few would pop up while I was logged in.
I was shocked. I'd been expecting close friends to find me on Facebook, my girlfriend's family, my parents, some of their friends perhaps, maybe some co-workers here and there, et cetera. But it went way beyond that. People from high school I had not thought about since then - ex-classmates with whom I competed for everything (attention, grades, jobs, identity), upperclassman I mostly remember avoiding in the hallway at all cost lest they give chase, underclassman who at best lingered on the periphery of my world (and sometimes avoided me for the same reason), several people I simply didn't get along with in those days and a few I never particularly liked - all had Facebook accounts, and all poured into my request box like fans besieging a box office for tickets that have just recently gone on sale.
Most of them, on the rare occasion I thought of them, had remained age 17 or 18 in my mind for two decades. To my astonishment, they were now in their late thirties, married, or divorced, with kids or step kids, balding heads, widening hips, mortgages, beer bellies, tired but still mostly pleasant smiles. It was trippy to have these people come back into my life - so many at once, and so quickly. Overnight, Facebook became not a boom town of strangers, but a grand entrance into a high school reunion in a virtual Holiday Inn banquet room; a reunion where everyone actually showed up, the jocks, the dirtballs, the geeks, dorks and drama queens...everyone was on one level now, everyone was an adult. Everyone was a Facebook user.
Recollections of the past spilled over in short but violent bursts at this reunion. It's truly amazing how memories we think we've forgotten are actually lying dormant, waiting to burst back to colorful life, like desert flowers after the rains come. It all came back to me and my new Facebook friends, hundreds of details I'd considered lost to time: things we said, things we believed, things we thought about ourselves and one another. Weekend first times moments of glory and cringe-worthy failures on courts, fields and stages were trotted out, dusted off, reveled in. First hour hilarity became new again, memories of sneaking into class, sneaking out of class. Teachers with bizarre habits, or bad breath became the butt of our laughter, now electronically transmitted across miles as well as years.
We recalled the jobs we shared washing dishes and bussing tables, flipping burgers and mopping lobbies; recalled the pop culture bric-a-brac of our youth, our Atari 2600's, our camouflage and parachute pants, our Swatch watches, our acid-washed mullets; we talked about cruising up and down Main Street looking for someone to buy us beer in big 1970s boats, the Chrysler Newports, Ford LTDs and Olds 88s that had been set aside as the junkers we could afford; we all remembered sneaking it into seedy apartments above the main street in town to consume the beer with the twenty-somethings living there, those who were reluctant to grow up and move on; whom we swore we would never turn out like.
Those apartments were our sanctuaries. Our Studio 54's.
All of that past was merged with the present. We learned about each other's lives now - what we did for a living, who we ended up marrying, who we divorced, who had quit smoking, who had quit drinking. Who had started drinking. Much of this we did through private messages, or open wall posts, sometimes live chatting if we happened to catch one another on-line, but frankly, Facebook allowed this dialogue to be carried on without saying anything to one another. About even those 'friends' with whom I did not communicate at all (and there were several of these; people who requested me, then fell strangely silent...), I learned everything I could possibly ever want or need to know simply by perusing their wall a couple of times a week, meandering through their photos now and then. There were lots and lots of photos on display - of their children, their cars, their camping trips, their homes, their ways of life, everything that was part of the world they lived in as something so outrageous as a (near) middle aged adult! It satiated my curiosity in the most savory way. I was glad for the opportunity to recall old times, and happy to learn most of them seemed to be doing just fine.
But this melancholy madness lasted only a few weeks, two months tops, mostly fortified by the non-stop stream of friends who joined my ranks early on. When that inundation leveled off, and eventually petered out, it did not take long for the past - having been hashed out six ways from Sunday - to become a tiresome subject. When that happened, we all fell silent.
No big deal if this were a real high school reunion at a real Holiday Inn. In that scenario, you get together, drink copious amounts of alcohol, remember the past for a night, or a weekend, but then it ends. There is a clear distinction between the real world and the reunion world, the past and the present. On Facebook come mid-June of last year, at least for me, it suddenly felt like Monday morning. The reunion was over; we were all supposed to be back to work, but we were still sitting in the banquet room, trying to think of something to say to one another, and failing.
In response, I turned to the variety of Facebook distractions, and promptly got swept up in that. This is when I became a true junkie.
Over the course of the summer, I contributed my 'Top 5' picks for everything under the sun, from beer to movies to rock albums to flowers, affirmed my knowledge of 80s trivia and song lyrics (70s trivia and song lyrics for that matter), established my IQ to be at least over 100, tried my hand at being a virtual farmer and a virtual gangster (though I must say, my interest in games like Mafia Wars, Farm Town and YoVille lasted about thirty-six seconds each), and learned a few things about myself I never even thought to consider:
If I were a Popsicle flavor, I'd be cherry.
If I were a Kool-Aid flavor, I'd be Purplesaurus Rex.
If I were an American president, I'd be Millard Filmore (uh...okay?)
My 'ultimate' light saber color is red.
If I were a Twilight character I'd be Edward (assuming that's a good thing...right?)
And if I were a character from classic literature, I would be Fagin. (I took this test twice, and came up with 'Buck' from London's Call of the Wild the second time. Edward Cullen, Fagin and Buck the dog...hmmm, a motley assortment, to be sure...)
All of it fascinating, or fun (kind of...) for a little while; a reliable distraction from any odious, chore-ridden day in the short term, but no good over the long haul. Just as my interest in the likes of Farm Town lasted thirty-six seconds, my interest in the sum of distractions Facebook has to offer held out for thirty-six days, give or take a day or two.
By October, I had exhausted the options, and felt exhausted. There was nothing left for me to do on Facebook except log on and read all the status updates on my stream, treat it like a kind of daily news ticker...
Not the best option. Doing so set the beginning of the end in motion.
Like any Facebook user, I was very conscious of making sure I presented myself in as wonderful a light as possible, and good status updates were central to this campaign. I kept mine smart or clever, always, either commenting on something in the news or popping off little witticisms.
"Jared Glovsky has himself flown in fresh daily..." I would post, and always receive an enthusiastic 'LOL!' from someone.
But without the distractions of games, Top 5's or memories of our wild and crazy teenage years, everyone else's status updates started getting really annoying, to the point where the observation my son had made about Facebook prior to my joining (and his joining) was proven to be spot on:
"Facebook exists so people can provide answers to questions that have not been asked."
Through the holidays, logging onto Facebook became a chore. My 'stream' of friends had little to say that was of interest or relevance to me, and nothing that, frankly, wasn't starting to piss me off a little. This I say not in any way to disparage them as people, as human beings, as moms and dads and productive members of society (or as the ones with whom I shared my much-vaunted youth, and who shared theirs with me), but as virtual buddies/veritable strangers streaming their way insipidly through my consciousness during morning coffee.
Some examples of the headlines that greeted me:
"'XX' is having a second piece of cheesecake for dessert tonight, because he DESERVES it!!!"
"'XX' spent all morning cleaning up the kid's room. Dentist appointment later. Baseball practice. Then what to do for dinner? Yikes! :p"
"'XX' hears birds outside her window..."
"'XX' prefers the brown M&Ms...."
Once in a while, there was something of some import. Somebody had a job interview, or landed a new job, or a baby was born, disease was mitigated or crisis averted. Wonderful. All of that is just fine, and I'm happy to have people share it with me.
But that was rare. Facebook statuses were ordinarily a daily diet of banality, to which posters were nevertheless guaranteed (and this is the worst part) to get someone feigning to give a shit.
Being guaranteed a response for something you say, or write, is intoxicating. It means that what you're saying is being heard, thus affirming that you are here, and people know you're here, in this world. That's the allure of Facebook, I think (and MySpace, and Twitter...). The same thing I loved about sign-making as a kid. A Facebook status is like putting up a new sign, viewed by tons of passers-by, each day.
Yet in a way it's not at all like the sign-making I dreamed of as a kid. The dispensing of information, perhaps...but pertinent information? Nah...
Nor were the responses people got to their status updates any less aggravating. 'Hearing birds outside her window'... was sure to get someone quipping, 'At least you're not hearing voices! Ahahahahah...!'
'Brown M&Ms...' could not possibly fail to garner a critique of the green ones, with a sidebar about eating them on Thursdays, or something or other...
'Cleaning up the baby's room...' was guaranteed a Krakatau-caliber explosion of respondents, each one a parent filled to the brim with empathy. I'm a parent too...I know what it's like. A never-ending process. I get it. I still could find no way to respond, no honest way to make myself look like I gave a rat's ass. All that kept coming to mind was the 6th grade crush I had on her in the cello section of our middle school orchestra; but that was neither relevant nor appropriate.
And as for 'cheesecake...', well, seriously...have a second piece, buddy. Have a third. Eat the whole thing and let the rest of your family share a stale box of animal crackers beneath the sink. But just do it; I don't know that it has to be heralded as news, or some kind of personal triumph on your part, capitalization, multiple exclamation points and all (in this world of abbreviated grammar and truncated thoughts, multiple punctuation where there is no need seems to be a counter-intuitive development....counter-intuitive, and hugely annoying). Please don't clog my stream with that stuff. Please!
Those apartments were our sanctuaries. Our Studio 54's.
All of that past was merged with the present. We learned about each other's lives now - what we did for a living, who we ended up marrying, who we divorced, who had quit smoking, who had quit drinking. Who had started drinking. Much of this we did through private messages, or open wall posts, sometimes live chatting if we happened to catch one another on-line, but frankly, Facebook allowed this dialogue to be carried on without saying anything to one another. About even those 'friends' with whom I did not communicate at all (and there were several of these; people who requested me, then fell strangely silent...), I learned everything I could possibly ever want or need to know simply by perusing their wall a couple of times a week, meandering through their photos now and then. There were lots and lots of photos on display - of their children, their cars, their camping trips, their homes, their ways of life, everything that was part of the world they lived in as something so outrageous as a (near) middle aged adult! It satiated my curiosity in the most savory way. I was glad for the opportunity to recall old times, and happy to learn most of them seemed to be doing just fine.
But this melancholy madness lasted only a few weeks, two months tops, mostly fortified by the non-stop stream of friends who joined my ranks early on. When that inundation leveled off, and eventually petered out, it did not take long for the past - having been hashed out six ways from Sunday - to become a tiresome subject. When that happened, we all fell silent.
No big deal if this were a real high school reunion at a real Holiday Inn. In that scenario, you get together, drink copious amounts of alcohol, remember the past for a night, or a weekend, but then it ends. There is a clear distinction between the real world and the reunion world, the past and the present. On Facebook come mid-June of last year, at least for me, it suddenly felt like Monday morning. The reunion was over; we were all supposed to be back to work, but we were still sitting in the banquet room, trying to think of something to say to one another, and failing.
In response, I turned to the variety of Facebook distractions, and promptly got swept up in that. This is when I became a true junkie.
Over the course of the summer, I contributed my 'Top 5' picks for everything under the sun, from beer to movies to rock albums to flowers, affirmed my knowledge of 80s trivia and song lyrics (70s trivia and song lyrics for that matter), established my IQ to be at least over 100, tried my hand at being a virtual farmer and a virtual gangster (though I must say, my interest in games like Mafia Wars, Farm Town and YoVille lasted about thirty-six seconds each), and learned a few things about myself I never even thought to consider:
If I were a Popsicle flavor, I'd be cherry.
If I were a Kool-Aid flavor, I'd be Purplesaurus Rex.
If I were an American president, I'd be Millard Filmore (uh...okay?)
My 'ultimate' light saber color is red.
If I were a Twilight character I'd be Edward (assuming that's a good thing...right?)
And if I were a character from classic literature, I would be Fagin. (I took this test twice, and came up with 'Buck' from London's Call of the Wild the second time. Edward Cullen, Fagin and Buck the dog...hmmm, a motley assortment, to be sure...)
All of it fascinating, or fun (kind of...) for a little while; a reliable distraction from any odious, chore-ridden day in the short term, but no good over the long haul. Just as my interest in the likes of Farm Town lasted thirty-six seconds, my interest in the sum of distractions Facebook has to offer held out for thirty-six days, give or take a day or two.
By October, I had exhausted the options, and felt exhausted. There was nothing left for me to do on Facebook except log on and read all the status updates on my stream, treat it like a kind of daily news ticker...
Not the best option. Doing so set the beginning of the end in motion.
Like any Facebook user, I was very conscious of making sure I presented myself in as wonderful a light as possible, and good status updates were central to this campaign. I kept mine smart or clever, always, either commenting on something in the news or popping off little witticisms.
"Jared Glovsky has himself flown in fresh daily..." I would post, and always receive an enthusiastic 'LOL!' from someone.
But without the distractions of games, Top 5's or memories of our wild and crazy teenage years, everyone else's status updates started getting really annoying, to the point where the observation my son had made about Facebook prior to my joining (and his joining) was proven to be spot on:
"Facebook exists so people can provide answers to questions that have not been asked."
Through the holidays, logging onto Facebook became a chore. My 'stream' of friends had little to say that was of interest or relevance to me, and nothing that, frankly, wasn't starting to piss me off a little. This I say not in any way to disparage them as people, as human beings, as moms and dads and productive members of society (or as the ones with whom I shared my much-vaunted youth, and who shared theirs with me), but as virtual buddies/veritable strangers streaming their way insipidly through my consciousness during morning coffee.
Some examples of the headlines that greeted me:
"'XX' is having a second piece of cheesecake for dessert tonight, because he DESERVES it!!!"
"'XX' spent all morning cleaning up the kid's room. Dentist appointment later. Baseball practice. Then what to do for dinner? Yikes! :p"
"'XX' hears birds outside her window..."
"'XX' prefers the brown M&Ms...."
Once in a while, there was something of some import. Somebody had a job interview, or landed a new job, or a baby was born, disease was mitigated or crisis averted. Wonderful. All of that is just fine, and I'm happy to have people share it with me.
But that was rare. Facebook statuses were ordinarily a daily diet of banality, to which posters were nevertheless guaranteed (and this is the worst part) to get someone feigning to give a shit.
Being guaranteed a response for something you say, or write, is intoxicating. It means that what you're saying is being heard, thus affirming that you are here, and people know you're here, in this world. That's the allure of Facebook, I think (and MySpace, and Twitter...). The same thing I loved about sign-making as a kid. A Facebook status is like putting up a new sign, viewed by tons of passers-by, each day.
Yet in a way it's not at all like the sign-making I dreamed of as a kid. The dispensing of information, perhaps...but pertinent information? Nah...
Nor were the responses people got to their status updates any less aggravating. 'Hearing birds outside her window'... was sure to get someone quipping, 'At least you're not hearing voices! Ahahahahah...!'
'Brown M&Ms...' could not possibly fail to garner a critique of the green ones, with a sidebar about eating them on Thursdays, or something or other...
'Cleaning up the baby's room...' was guaranteed a Krakatau-caliber explosion of respondents, each one a parent filled to the brim with empathy. I'm a parent too...I know what it's like. A never-ending process. I get it. I still could find no way to respond, no honest way to make myself look like I gave a rat's ass. All that kept coming to mind was the 6th grade crush I had on her in the cello section of our middle school orchestra; but that was neither relevant nor appropriate.
And as for 'cheesecake...', well, seriously...have a second piece, buddy. Have a third. Eat the whole thing and let the rest of your family share a stale box of animal crackers beneath the sink. But just do it; I don't know that it has to be heralded as news, or some kind of personal triumph on your part, capitalization, multiple exclamation points and all (in this world of abbreviated grammar and truncated thoughts, multiple punctuation where there is no need seems to be a counter-intuitive development....counter-intuitive, and hugely annoying). Please don't clog my stream with that stuff. Please!
"Don't clog my stream, bro...! :)"
I thought about responding to his post with that, but decided against it. There's a fine line between indignation and rudeness, and I like to think I know where that line falls. Besides, Cheesecake Guy got plenty of response for his effort; timely, exuberant response, as though he'd announced he was going to run the Boston marathon or spend six weeks touring Vietnam, or switch careers after more than a decade:
"Right on! You go, dude! You DO deserve a second piece of cheesecake!"
Or, "I'll be right over! You better save me a piece!"
Or, "Try some strawberries and whip cream on there. Mmmm....Yummo for my tummo!"
*Sigh...* Maybe there's something wrong with me. I just don't know any of these people well enough anymore to warrant sharing daily, hourly, or up-to-the-minute thoughts with them.
By New Year's Day, I had become painfully aware of this fact; painfully aware that there's something unnatural about the inter-personal dynamic Facebook creates. This, combined with all the privacy issues that have come out in the last six months, turned it into something I could do without. In February, I started paring down my friends list...but by April, I just said screw it. I'm done.
If you're in my life, we already communicate in person, or at least on the phone, or email, and do it well. Everyone else -the former child stars of my youth - well, I'll see you all at the next reunion, when the past can feel new again.
For just a couple of hours.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
SeaWorld tragedy a grim but important reminder there's a difference between wild and domesticated animals
In my hometown, there's a park legendary for its facilities. It's built around a wetland, with artesian wells and walking trails, verdant campgrounds and sandy playgrounds. For 70-some years it's been a source of pride in the community and the gold standard spot for holding summertime activities, particularly the kind that won't fit in your back yard. From family reunions to 50th wedding anniversaries to company picnics, this wooded enclave with the big wooden pavilion is where you want to be, Memorial Day through Labor Day.
For many years there was an enclosure at the western edge of the park; three or four acres of fenced-in marshy area containing a few whitetail deer, which park goers could come watch in what was touted as natural habitat.
The inhabitants of this natural habitat rarely showed themselves. More often than not, they stayed in the interior of the enclosure, hidden in the tall grass, leaving few signs of their existence: the occasional scat visible through the chain link fence, a ragged tuft of brown fur clinging to it, perhaps, and these combining to create the unmistakable odor of (any) animals living in a confined space. But that was about it. The only reliable clarification that deer were anywhere in the vicinity was a posted wooden sign that announced, in no uncertain terms, Whitetail Deer, prompting visitors without further instruction to wait and see if they could catch sight of one. There was a feed dispenser as well. 25 cents bought you a handful of dent corn and the possibility - if you were lucky, patient - that a deer might emerge from the tall grass, approach the fence and eat out of your hands.
Growing up I spent many summer afternoons in the park, fistful of corn at the ready. On the rare occasion a deer made an appearance (always a doe; never once spotted a buck), I can't say I was all that impressed. They seemed to creep unsteadily over the gravel and straw beneath their hooves toward my outstretched hand and stop short - always stop short - of taking the offering, dark eyes gazing vapidly at me, ears twitching erratically as though their head had short-circuited. I'd stretch my arm as far as possible through the portal in the chain link, rattle the corn around in the palm of my hand a bit, maybe offer a cooing 'Come on...it's okay...' (as one might coax a kitten to jump onto one's lap), but it did no good. Invariably, these tired creatures chose to forsake the corn, turning and walking off, their slow, arthritic gait suggesting neither apprehension nor comprehension; at best, a low-wattage disinterest in everything.
I don't think this wholly uninspired behavior was due to malnourishment or maltreatment. These penned-in deer were simply couch potatoes, lazy and domesticated, a far cry from the swift, alert denizens of the forest I saw bounding with a flash of white in and out of the thicket behind my house. And it got me thinking, though not knowing exactly why, that this was no way for them to be living.
I wasn't the only one. The deer park was a frequent target for animal rights activists in the late-1980s. Ordinarily, their dissent took the form of a letter to the local newspaper calling for the park's closure; less frequently a live appeal before the city council. But every once in a great while, some naive albeit well-meaning individual (usually a young college student, immersing himself for the first time in a newly realized freedom to set the world - which he'd been watching deteriorate throughout his childhood - on the right track...), would sneak into the park late at night and cut the chain link fence open in hopes of setting the deer free.
If any deer escaped, they didn't get far, and such efforts did little but arouse the ire of town officials, who insisted that setting the deer free did more harm than good because the animals had become too domesticated to survive in the wild. This argument made sense, yet I couldn't shake the thought that the animal rights folks had a point. I'd seen it, and felt it, myself after all: they weren't in especially bad shape, probably not unhappy or mistreated, but there was nevertheless something off - something not right- about these deer in captivity.
By the 1990s, the protesters were raising questions about not only the morality, but the efficacy of the deer park. Times had changed. Deer were no longer a special thing to see. The state's wild population was well over one million, and the species was not only becoming a hazard on roadways but encroaching into suburban areas freely. In my town, it was strange not to wake up and find whitetails raiding a garden or bedding down behind the neighbor's garage.
A deer park was no longer a big deal. Everyone had their own.
By the mid-2000s, in addition to ethical and functional questions, the deer park had become a financial burden, and that was what spelled the end. I don't know how it came to pass, or what became of the animals (if there were any left by that time) but the deer park was closed down.
The tragedy at Orlando's SeaWorld this week, during which an experienced trainer possessing a reportedly loving relationship with the animals she worked with on a day-to-day basis was grabbed by an orca (killer whale), pulled underwater and drowned in front of spectators, got me thinking about that deer park; specifically the varied and complex relationships humanity has with the natural world and the animals that inhabit it.
I'm by no means an animal rights kook. I eat meat...love it, in fact. I believe that our species is supposed to love it, that we're intended to take advantage of the resources available us, like any animal in the food chain. I support the rights of hunters and fishermen (am myself an avid fisherman), believe that, contrary to stereotypes, most are stewards of the land who strive for clean shots and either practice catch and release or obey bag limits, fully understanding that such regulations are put in place with their interests in mind. I believe that while Humanity's relationship with animals is inherently violent, and has been through time, our treatment of the animals we quarry for food and put to work for us has - on balance - become consistently more humane through the ages; certainly in the last century a whole new consciousness about this treatment has arisen. That being said, there is still much work to be done. With the rights implicit in being at the top of the food chain come a host of responsibilities, which are not always being met by certain people at certain times.
I won't bother mentioning things like dog fighting and cock fighting; these and other wanton acts of animal cruelty, usually going on underground and illegally, are universally criticized. There's no way to stop it from happening really, but when it's discovered, every effort is made to put a stop to it. Sadly, that's probably as good as it's ever going to get.
Nor will I spend any time decrying the methods by which we slaughter the animals we eat - the huge chicken and cattle yards where so much filth and carnage reportedly begets our Saturday ribeye and Sunday fried chicken. Though to some this is no more humane a process than cock-fighting, it is legal - an industry too deeply embedded in our society's infrastructure for much to change anytime soon. An argument for another time, perhaps...another blog.
The complex and touchy subject of animal testing too demands another time and place. On the issue, I'm ambivalent. I believe it depends largely on what's being tested, and what testers hope to accomplish.
A cure for cancer, right on.
A new make-up that won't sweat off in the sun, no way.
Some new biological weapon to level human populations in another hemisphere, forget it.
'Accountability', 'watchdog'....these words should be part of any relationship we have with animals in a testing environment, to minimize and/or eliminate exploitation and undue suffering. And frankly, I think I could be swayed to denounce the entire practice.
What gets me uneasy is the use of animals for our entertainment. Generally, any scenario where a species is being trained (forced) to do something it wouldn't normally do, exposed to unnecessary pain and stress for no reason other than spectacle, is, to say the very least, troublesome.
I don't know why this should upset me more than animal testing, chickens being bred in their own excrement, or cattle being abused before getting put to death with a steel rod to the skull. Maybe because we are too entertained these days. With so much out there, so many options for keeping ourselves nice and distracted, anything even marginally reminiscent of with our past dalliances with animal blood sport seems not only unnecessary, but fatuous.
Even still, I'm willing to concede some shades of gray. Things like rodeos and bull-fighting are quickly defended by people who think of them as tradition, and I'll grudgingly go along with this. Not so much because I think in this day and age driving spears into a bull's back and watching it die in ever-decreasing circles, or wrapping a belt around its balls to piss it off then jumping on top of it for 8 seconds are either traditions worth preserving or a reasonable barometer of manhood, but because at least - at the very least - these activities involve domesticated animals. Species that have slowly, over time, been acclimated to live amongst humans - to serve our needs, satiate our appetite, and for better or worse, indulge our folly.
Problems arise when we throw wild animals into our midst. The worst example of this would seem to be the exotic pet phenomenon - people harboring large reptiles and snakes, poisonous or otherwise, big cats, big apes, bizarre birds from far-off lands and sometimes things completely out of left field, like kangaroos, civets, bears or hyenas (it apparently does happen...) with little concern for how doing so might adversely affect their lives, the lives of those around them or the environment. Too often, without really understanding the animal's needs, physiology or life expectancy (some species of parrots live longer than most humans!), they mistakenly treat their new best friend as they would a house cat or dog, or become hell-bent on anthropomorphizing every instinctive thing it does in an effort to legitimize owning it. This invariably leads to living in ultra-close proximity to it, and allowing it to do things they would never let an ordinary pet get away with.
But at least exotic pet ownership has a flavor of personal choice. There are larger and more organized menageries being cobbled together purely for spectacle and profit, which many of us don't give a second thought to. Circuses, for instance, where horror stories of animal abuse periodically rise out of the flatulent morass of the collective greatest show on Earth.
There is something to be learned from circuses, actually. Every time an African elephant brings down a big top in an angry spray of splintered tent poles, peanuts and human body parts, it's a reminder that perhaps these animals should not be getting forced to stand on their heads and walk around in a circle and wave at the crowd with their trunks. They don't want to 'wave' at the crowd.
They neither like, nor trust, the crowd. They're wild animals. Why do we delude ourselves into thinking otherwise?
In this same vein can be found a host of smaller animal parks sprinkled across the country and the world, where 'handlers' (should anybody be a handler of a wild animal? Can anyone be...?) purport a special bond with their animals that allows them to do really stupid things, like jumping on the backs of alligators, swatting tigers on the nose and sticking their heads inside a lion's mouth...all for the amusement of paying customers.
Do we need to see this? Is it worth the price of admission? Worth the risk to the 'handler'...to the audience...to the animal?
It is essentially what goes on at SeaWorld: wild animals are held captive in a confined space and taught to behave unnaturally, for our entertainment.
In fairness, I don't regard SeaWorld the way I do any average circus. SeaWorld is just someone's antiquated idea; conceived, I believe, in an age when families did not have the options they have today, for either entertainment or education. In the 1960s and 70s, who knew about killer whales? They and their flippered brethren were mysterious to most people, especially those living away from the ocean, where nothing about them or the lives they live on this blue marble was likely to come up in conversation. A place like SeaWorld provided an up-close-and-personal encounter with these marvelous creatures for people who might otherwise never get to see such a thing.
That's not true today, just as it is no longer true that seeing a whitetail deer holds the cachet it did when my hometown opened its deer park decades ago. We live in the information age. No small amount of literature, photos and video - live and otherwise - is available on the Internet or in libraries about orcas and every other type of marine animal, and they are featured on countless television shows and movies.
Not the same as seeing one in person? Of course not. But that's what aquariums and zoos around the world are for.
Which brings up an important point: animals, even wild ones, kept in captivity strictly for educational/appreciation purposes is (marginally) acceptable, if it's done with their comfort in mind. And that would make SeaWorld acceptable, were that all that was going on. But it's not. SeaWorld likes to tread a fine line between education and entertainment, but people don't go there to learn; they go to watch 'Shamu' do flips, swim backwards on its tail, sling-shot a trainer off the tip of its nose and beg for a piece of fish.
And does that need to be going on? Should these multi-ton animals - any multi-ton animals - be sentenced to living in cement pools so that we can laugh, cheer and clap our hands when they spit water on the guy sitting next to us? Should they be anthropomorphized to the point where we're considering them one of us, considering them friends, considering it appropriate to watch trainers take rides on their backs, and therefore believe they like what they're doing? That they enjoy the stardom?
Is that part of our God-given dominion over animals? Should we be riding on an animal's back for any other reason than to get from one place to another?
I'm sure the animals at SeaWorld are treated just fine, and that the tragedy with this hapless trainer was an isolated event (although this particular orca apparently has a 'history' of erratic behavior and has been involved in similar incidents in the past, it is now being revealed). I still don't think they need to be played with. We think we know them; this ties into our propensity to turn them into friends, laugh when they do almost-human things, convince ourselves that they're smiling at us with their little bristly teeth...almost child-like, right? But we don't know them.
They're not smiling.
We were reminded of this at SeaWorld in Orlando.
A woman in Connecticut found this out last year at the mercy of a chimpanzee named Travis that had no business living the life it had been allowed to live up until that awful day.
Siegfried and Roy learned a harsh lesson in 2003 with one of the tigers in their act.
That same year, the same week in fact, Timothy Treadwell paid the ultimate price for wanting to believe he had made some kind of connection with the Alaskan grizzly bears he considered family.
Perhaps that's why the bedraggled deer in the enclosure back home rarely made an appearance and always stopped before they reached the fence. Maybe they knew, if only instinctively (but hey, instinct is what keeps them alive), that no matter how much I wanted them to, no matter how hungry they were, they simply were not put on this Earth to eat corn out of my hand, and I was not put on this Earth to feed it to them.
For many years there was an enclosure at the western edge of the park; three or four acres of fenced-in marshy area containing a few whitetail deer, which park goers could come watch in what was touted as natural habitat.
The inhabitants of this natural habitat rarely showed themselves. More often than not, they stayed in the interior of the enclosure, hidden in the tall grass, leaving few signs of their existence: the occasional scat visible through the chain link fence, a ragged tuft of brown fur clinging to it, perhaps, and these combining to create the unmistakable odor of (any) animals living in a confined space. But that was about it. The only reliable clarification that deer were anywhere in the vicinity was a posted wooden sign that announced, in no uncertain terms, Whitetail Deer, prompting visitors without further instruction to wait and see if they could catch sight of one. There was a feed dispenser as well. 25 cents bought you a handful of dent corn and the possibility - if you were lucky, patient - that a deer might emerge from the tall grass, approach the fence and eat out of your hands.
Growing up I spent many summer afternoons in the park, fistful of corn at the ready. On the rare occasion a deer made an appearance (always a doe; never once spotted a buck), I can't say I was all that impressed. They seemed to creep unsteadily over the gravel and straw beneath their hooves toward my outstretched hand and stop short - always stop short - of taking the offering, dark eyes gazing vapidly at me, ears twitching erratically as though their head had short-circuited. I'd stretch my arm as far as possible through the portal in the chain link, rattle the corn around in the palm of my hand a bit, maybe offer a cooing 'Come on...it's okay...' (as one might coax a kitten to jump onto one's lap), but it did no good. Invariably, these tired creatures chose to forsake the corn, turning and walking off, their slow, arthritic gait suggesting neither apprehension nor comprehension; at best, a low-wattage disinterest in everything.
I don't think this wholly uninspired behavior was due to malnourishment or maltreatment. These penned-in deer were simply couch potatoes, lazy and domesticated, a far cry from the swift, alert denizens of the forest I saw bounding with a flash of white in and out of the thicket behind my house. And it got me thinking, though not knowing exactly why, that this was no way for them to be living.
I wasn't the only one. The deer park was a frequent target for animal rights activists in the late-1980s. Ordinarily, their dissent took the form of a letter to the local newspaper calling for the park's closure; less frequently a live appeal before the city council. But every once in a great while, some naive albeit well-meaning individual (usually a young college student, immersing himself for the first time in a newly realized freedom to set the world - which he'd been watching deteriorate throughout his childhood - on the right track...), would sneak into the park late at night and cut the chain link fence open in hopes of setting the deer free.
If any deer escaped, they didn't get far, and such efforts did little but arouse the ire of town officials, who insisted that setting the deer free did more harm than good because the animals had become too domesticated to survive in the wild. This argument made sense, yet I couldn't shake the thought that the animal rights folks had a point. I'd seen it, and felt it, myself after all: they weren't in especially bad shape, probably not unhappy or mistreated, but there was nevertheless something off - something not right- about these deer in captivity.
By the 1990s, the protesters were raising questions about not only the morality, but the efficacy of the deer park. Times had changed. Deer were no longer a special thing to see. The state's wild population was well over one million, and the species was not only becoming a hazard on roadways but encroaching into suburban areas freely. In my town, it was strange not to wake up and find whitetails raiding a garden or bedding down behind the neighbor's garage.
A deer park was no longer a big deal. Everyone had their own.
By the mid-2000s, in addition to ethical and functional questions, the deer park had become a financial burden, and that was what spelled the end. I don't know how it came to pass, or what became of the animals (if there were any left by that time) but the deer park was closed down.
The tragedy at Orlando's SeaWorld this week, during which an experienced trainer possessing a reportedly loving relationship with the animals she worked with on a day-to-day basis was grabbed by an orca (killer whale), pulled underwater and drowned in front of spectators, got me thinking about that deer park; specifically the varied and complex relationships humanity has with the natural world and the animals that inhabit it.
I'm by no means an animal rights kook. I eat meat...love it, in fact. I believe that our species is supposed to love it, that we're intended to take advantage of the resources available us, like any animal in the food chain. I support the rights of hunters and fishermen (am myself an avid fisherman), believe that, contrary to stereotypes, most are stewards of the land who strive for clean shots and either practice catch and release or obey bag limits, fully understanding that such regulations are put in place with their interests in mind. I believe that while Humanity's relationship with animals is inherently violent, and has been through time, our treatment of the animals we quarry for food and put to work for us has - on balance - become consistently more humane through the ages; certainly in the last century a whole new consciousness about this treatment has arisen. That being said, there is still much work to be done. With the rights implicit in being at the top of the food chain come a host of responsibilities, which are not always being met by certain people at certain times.
I won't bother mentioning things like dog fighting and cock fighting; these and other wanton acts of animal cruelty, usually going on underground and illegally, are universally criticized. There's no way to stop it from happening really, but when it's discovered, every effort is made to put a stop to it. Sadly, that's probably as good as it's ever going to get.
Nor will I spend any time decrying the methods by which we slaughter the animals we eat - the huge chicken and cattle yards where so much filth and carnage reportedly begets our Saturday ribeye and Sunday fried chicken. Though to some this is no more humane a process than cock-fighting, it is legal - an industry too deeply embedded in our society's infrastructure for much to change anytime soon. An argument for another time, perhaps...another blog.
The complex and touchy subject of animal testing too demands another time and place. On the issue, I'm ambivalent. I believe it depends largely on what's being tested, and what testers hope to accomplish.
A cure for cancer, right on.
A new make-up that won't sweat off in the sun, no way.
Some new biological weapon to level human populations in another hemisphere, forget it.
'Accountability', 'watchdog'....these words should be part of any relationship we have with animals in a testing environment, to minimize and/or eliminate exploitation and undue suffering. And frankly, I think I could be swayed to denounce the entire practice.
What gets me uneasy is the use of animals for our entertainment. Generally, any scenario where a species is being trained (forced) to do something it wouldn't normally do, exposed to unnecessary pain and stress for no reason other than spectacle, is, to say the very least, troublesome.
I don't know why this should upset me more than animal testing, chickens being bred in their own excrement, or cattle being abused before getting put to death with a steel rod to the skull. Maybe because we are too entertained these days. With so much out there, so many options for keeping ourselves nice and distracted, anything even marginally reminiscent of with our past dalliances with animal blood sport seems not only unnecessary, but fatuous.
Even still, I'm willing to concede some shades of gray. Things like rodeos and bull-fighting are quickly defended by people who think of them as tradition, and I'll grudgingly go along with this. Not so much because I think in this day and age driving spears into a bull's back and watching it die in ever-decreasing circles, or wrapping a belt around its balls to piss it off then jumping on top of it for 8 seconds are either traditions worth preserving or a reasonable barometer of manhood, but because at least - at the very least - these activities involve domesticated animals. Species that have slowly, over time, been acclimated to live amongst humans - to serve our needs, satiate our appetite, and for better or worse, indulge our folly.
Problems arise when we throw wild animals into our midst. The worst example of this would seem to be the exotic pet phenomenon - people harboring large reptiles and snakes, poisonous or otherwise, big cats, big apes, bizarre birds from far-off lands and sometimes things completely out of left field, like kangaroos, civets, bears or hyenas (it apparently does happen...) with little concern for how doing so might adversely affect their lives, the lives of those around them or the environment. Too often, without really understanding the animal's needs, physiology or life expectancy (some species of parrots live longer than most humans!), they mistakenly treat their new best friend as they would a house cat or dog, or become hell-bent on anthropomorphizing every instinctive thing it does in an effort to legitimize owning it. This invariably leads to living in ultra-close proximity to it, and allowing it to do things they would never let an ordinary pet get away with.
But at least exotic pet ownership has a flavor of personal choice. There are larger and more organized menageries being cobbled together purely for spectacle and profit, which many of us don't give a second thought to. Circuses, for instance, where horror stories of animal abuse periodically rise out of the flatulent morass of the collective greatest show on Earth.
There is something to be learned from circuses, actually. Every time an African elephant brings down a big top in an angry spray of splintered tent poles, peanuts and human body parts, it's a reminder that perhaps these animals should not be getting forced to stand on their heads and walk around in a circle and wave at the crowd with their trunks. They don't want to 'wave' at the crowd.
They neither like, nor trust, the crowd. They're wild animals. Why do we delude ourselves into thinking otherwise?
In this same vein can be found a host of smaller animal parks sprinkled across the country and the world, where 'handlers' (should anybody be a handler of a wild animal? Can anyone be...?) purport a special bond with their animals that allows them to do really stupid things, like jumping on the backs of alligators, swatting tigers on the nose and sticking their heads inside a lion's mouth...all for the amusement of paying customers.
Do we need to see this? Is it worth the price of admission? Worth the risk to the 'handler'...to the audience...to the animal?
It is essentially what goes on at SeaWorld: wild animals are held captive in a confined space and taught to behave unnaturally, for our entertainment.
In fairness, I don't regard SeaWorld the way I do any average circus. SeaWorld is just someone's antiquated idea; conceived, I believe, in an age when families did not have the options they have today, for either entertainment or education. In the 1960s and 70s, who knew about killer whales? They and their flippered brethren were mysterious to most people, especially those living away from the ocean, where nothing about them or the lives they live on this blue marble was likely to come up in conversation. A place like SeaWorld provided an up-close-and-personal encounter with these marvelous creatures for people who might otherwise never get to see such a thing.
That's not true today, just as it is no longer true that seeing a whitetail deer holds the cachet it did when my hometown opened its deer park decades ago. We live in the information age. No small amount of literature, photos and video - live and otherwise - is available on the Internet or in libraries about orcas and every other type of marine animal, and they are featured on countless television shows and movies.
Not the same as seeing one in person? Of course not. But that's what aquariums and zoos around the world are for.
Which brings up an important point: animals, even wild ones, kept in captivity strictly for educational/appreciation purposes is (marginally) acceptable, if it's done with their comfort in mind. And that would make SeaWorld acceptable, were that all that was going on. But it's not. SeaWorld likes to tread a fine line between education and entertainment, but people don't go there to learn; they go to watch 'Shamu' do flips, swim backwards on its tail, sling-shot a trainer off the tip of its nose and beg for a piece of fish.
And does that need to be going on? Should these multi-ton animals - any multi-ton animals - be sentenced to living in cement pools so that we can laugh, cheer and clap our hands when they spit water on the guy sitting next to us? Should they be anthropomorphized to the point where we're considering them one of us, considering them friends, considering it appropriate to watch trainers take rides on their backs, and therefore believe they like what they're doing? That they enjoy the stardom?
Is that part of our God-given dominion over animals? Should we be riding on an animal's back for any other reason than to get from one place to another?
I'm sure the animals at SeaWorld are treated just fine, and that the tragedy with this hapless trainer was an isolated event (although this particular orca apparently has a 'history' of erratic behavior and has been involved in similar incidents in the past, it is now being revealed). I still don't think they need to be played with. We think we know them; this ties into our propensity to turn them into friends, laugh when they do almost-human things, convince ourselves that they're smiling at us with their little bristly teeth...almost child-like, right? But we don't know them.
They're not smiling.
We were reminded of this at SeaWorld in Orlando.
A woman in Connecticut found this out last year at the mercy of a chimpanzee named Travis that had no business living the life it had been allowed to live up until that awful day.
Siegfried and Roy learned a harsh lesson in 2003 with one of the tigers in their act.
That same year, the same week in fact, Timothy Treadwell paid the ultimate price for wanting to believe he had made some kind of connection with the Alaskan grizzly bears he considered family.
Perhaps that's why the bedraggled deer in the enclosure back home rarely made an appearance and always stopped before they reached the fence. Maybe they knew, if only instinctively (but hey, instinct is what keeps them alive), that no matter how much I wanted them to, no matter how hungry they were, they simply were not put on this Earth to eat corn out of my hand, and I was not put on this Earth to feed it to them.
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