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joebelknapwallI've been in a bit of a mood. It's been a while, too.
Thing is, I've been running this idea around my head lately, about just surrendering to my inner crank and really belting out the bad news like your average disaffected american grump. We're a culture that loves to be abused, a nation of ninnies that cry out for the whip out of some misplaced sense of puritan self-hatred rooted in our loving, forgiving lord who we're all supposed to fear and grovel before. What other culture has a huge-selling line of books so gleefully tagged "For Dummies" (and others going by "For Idiots," and "For Loathsome Wretches," and more of that ilk)? Feeling low, suffering from Attention Deficit Hypoconsumerist Chocoholism™, beleaguered by Seasonal Affective Disaster™, Social Antipathy Discombobulation™? Pick up a copy of Self-Esteem For Complete Gibbering Idiots Who Will Never Ever Find Love or Succeed in this Complex Veil of Tears We Call Our Tragic Suburban Lives over at Amazon! It's that easy, as easy as 1-2-3, as easy as pie, and oh, what a sinful, wicked pie, that makes us fat when we really, really want to lose weight, but just can't for some weird reason.
We love to be told how dumb we are, how miserably wicked we are, and how there's some complicated reason why we seem to fall flat on our face, time and time again. Not enough ketosis! Too much high fructose corn syrup! George Bush! Gangs! Our failing transportation infrastructure! Attention deficit disorder! Vaccine-induced autism! The right-wing conspiracy! The left-wing conspiracy! The homosexual agenda! Our lousy medical system! Our evil liberal teachers who won't teach reading using phonics!
Honey child, I am here to help. I got a whip right here, ready to crack on your flabby middle-class buttocks. It's boot camp time, you snivelly little ass weasel, and you know what I think?
You are stupid.
Yeah, you heard me. You (please picture my neatly-manicured finger pointing angrily in your direction) are stupid.
Who am I to tell you that? Weren't you paying attention? I'm a crank. It gives you a lot of moral authority, buddy.
So…
You Are Stupid: #1 - The Gorgeous Blue Glow of Child Abuse
It's never been so easy to identify child abusers as it is right now. Of course, there are the old standard methods, like peeking through the grating of the confessional, looking for suspicious bruises, or finding guys named Larry or Walter with beat-up old vans, but there's something even easier than a Google Maps mash-up, right out on the roadways.
It's that blue glow.
You see it as you slide up on 'em on the highway, that flickery light of flip-down LCD displays. Sometimes you'll get a falsie, a mis-read based on all the numbskulls who can no longer drive anywhere without a big distracting GPS display propped right in their line of sight, with a soothing female voice murmuring "turn right at light, watch for Hickamadingdong Street, take a slight left at…" and so on. These people are just sad techno-drones, doomed to eventually starve to death in the parking lots of abandoned K-Mart Super Q Megacenters because their GPS missed a wireless upgrade and failed to inform them that Faunchimo Avenue was temporarily closed for water main repairs. They'll just sit there in their cars, too terrified to set out for help, just swearing at the GPS as the batteries fade and die, leaving them in the dark, without even an energy bar or vitamin water or wicked Trader Joe's Bon Bon Deluscious Treat™, and they won't even have their trusty copy of Starving to Death For Dummies to tell them how to slip gently into the Lord's loving embrace.
It's not those guys. It's the Little Mermaid brigade, or whatever is showing in the Cinerama de SUV at the moment. You seem 'em from miles down the road, the screens all aglow, filled with some cartoon or CGI nonsense, written by dumb committee writers at Disney or wherever, and the kids are there, as stupid as you are, staring at the screen while worlds rush by outside.
Why even put side windows on cars anymore?
You stupid parents do your best to eliminate them, with windows plastered with stickers and those ridiculous sun-shades and all that, but once you turn on the flat-panels, you needn't bother. The little brainwashed media zombies follow their programs, look up, and then down to their iPhones, where they're simultaneously texting their idiotic little friends with whatever idiotic little thought is racing around the tiny go-kart track in their little plastic busy box brains, then up, then down, then up, then down, but never out.
Heck, the outside world is scary. It's full of crime (it's not), it's full of terror (it's not), and full of boredom (it's really, really not). Besides, it's just soooooooooooo hard to be a parent these days. You just don't understand how hard it is, or how tired we are, or what the challenges are that face the modern parent—
—And I say "blah, blah, blah," you stupid, stupid person. Don't cry to me about how hard it is to be a parent. I'm the one who advised you to take a coathanger to that little lump of crying debt while it was still legal to do so, before it gave you stretch marks and a caesarian scar. It's not like the world really needs one more kid, leaving candy wrappers all over my lawn on their way back from the corner store. If you weren't up to the work, you should have really reconsidered answering that reproductive alarm clock. You got the kid, you seem to be fond of him, her, or them—now be a parent, or "parent," as you stupid lot love to say in your "proactive" way of communicating that leads you to turn everything into a verb.
There they are, though, all the back windows on the road with that gorgeous blue glow of child abuse, as lurid and explicit as can be, each car filled with the fury of an upholstery-chewing Faye Dunaway and wire hangers a-whippin' and I'm torn as to whether to feel a little giggly and pernicious or to let myself have genuine compassion for kids having their brains sucked out, pixel by pixel, through the magic of omnipresent television all because their whiny, stupid parents can't seem to do what my generation's parents had no problem doing.
I AM GOING TO PULL THIS CAR OVER RIGHT NOW IF YOU TWO DON'T STOP FIGHTING BACK THERE! DON'T THINK I WON'T 'CAUSE I WILL SERIOUSLY PULL THIS GOLDARN CAR OVER RIGHT NOW AND LEAVE YOU SITTING ON THE SIDE OF ROUTE 29 AND YOU'LL BOTH HAVE TO WALK ALL THE WAY HOME TO SCAGGSVILLE!
That was the exasperation flip-out, something I didn't quite understand until now, but you know what? It worked. We stopped fighting in the back seat. Sometimes, we even stopped fighting and went back to looking out the window, watching the farms roll by, watching the people passing by in other cars, wondering what kind of lives they had, telling ourselves little stories about those people and wondering if we'd ever see them again. Sometimes, we read a book, or played a game, or just talked about…stuff. It was all just stuff, mostly pointless, but still something productive, a way of honing the social interactions.
It's all crank talk, I know, complaining about kids these days, but I don't think it's kids these days. It's their parents, and they is us. I hear perfectly-reasonable friends occasionally defend the blue glow of child abuse, complaining about how hard "parenting" is, and how hard it is to pay the mortgage and two car payments and for a vacation somewhere pre-packaged, and right in the back of my head, I hear my own parents being all giggly and pernicious, because even the stuff they did wrong was usually right, especially in light of the so-called sensitive educated parents roaming the earth these days.
I'll admit this. My hatred of kids is really a pose. I mean, I hate having them in my house, pulling my collectibles down from their places of pride on my antique furniture, and I hate their sticky fingers, sticky hands, sticky clothes, and slobbery, snotty faces, always coming at me, offering a great big lovey kiss to their prudish, uptight Uncle Joe, but they're okay, particularly once they can talk and joyfully repeat my little whispered atrocities to Grandma, who immediately blanches and wags a finger at me. I have a pretty contained little living environment, and kids whack me out, but that's just me. I wasn't born to be a parent, or I'd have a bit more interest in using my genitalia in that manner, but I look around and the streets here are empty.
There are a few kids out, usually going from one TV set in one house to an Xbox in another, but it's not like it was. Rich white kids grow up in the suburbs without ever riding bikes, because there's no world there, nothing beyond the steel and glass cages of the Cinerama de SUV, nothing out there but the fear that their stupid parents instill in them, warning them of a dangerous world that does not exist.
It's that glow, the gentle blue glow of stupid poisoning, of lazy parents rearing empty children.
When I'm angry, caught up in traffic, I rise to the occasion, and curse and swear and glare at the abusers, but soon it'll be a generation who won't know better, because they'll have been reared by their stupid parents, who brought them up in the glow, in the backseat, teaching them that all the adventure they'll ever need is right there, on the screen. They'll grow up watching science fiction that'll get more fictional by the moment, never aware that forty years ago, when we could barely make a car that would survive its first hundred thousand miles, we could put a man on the moon, and that we might never do it again, because there's just no will left, no adventure in our souls.
The world races by the windows and they're not looking out, watching the small towns, wondering what those people are like, or what other people's lives are like, and the stories we tell ourselves are replaced, one by one, by packaged stupid, written by overeducated corporate committee stupid, sold by salesman stupid, bought by stupid parents who've given up on being parents before they ever even tried, because it's just soooooooo hard to be a parent and soooooooo hard to lose weight and soooooooo hard to save money and sooooooooo why even bother.
If you do this to your kids, if you surrender the task of being your kid's mentor to your laziness and "exhaustion," you are stupid. Yeah, I mean you. Maybe I know you, maybe I love you, but you are stupid. Hand them a book, hand them a puzzle, have an aimless conversation with them, for pete's sake. Hell, even drugging them into a stupor with Benadryl for a few miles of peace and quiet is better than the lash of omnipresent television. At least old fashioned child abuse gave kids experience worth writing about, when they grew up and became grizzled old crank writing picturesque despair tales of ol' Oyerlund. Heck, you don't even need actual severe child abuse—you can get by with a little bit and lie about the rest. That's what you get, growing up with an intact imagination; the ability to bluff, to fluff, to find little joys in empty moments, to look out the windows and see the whole damn world, just within reach.
Or you can surrender to the glow, and dissolve into the video mire.
Couldn't you be doing something outside right now instead of reading my stupid rant?
Thing is, I've been running this idea around my head lately, about just surrendering to my inner crank and really belting out the bad news like your average disaffected american grump. We're a culture that loves to be abused, a nation of ninnies that cry out for the whip out of some misplaced sense of puritan self-hatred rooted in our loving, forgiving lord who we're all supposed to fear and grovel before. What other culture has a huge-selling line of books so gleefully tagged "For Dummies" (and others going by "For Idiots," and "For Loathsome Wretches," and more of that ilk)? Feeling low, suffering from Attention Deficit Hypoconsumerist Chocoholism™, beleaguered by Seasonal Affective Disaster™, Social Antipathy Discombobulation™? Pick up a copy of Self-Esteem For Complete Gibbering Idiots Who Will Never Ever Find Love or Succeed in this Complex Veil of Tears We Call Our Tragic Suburban Lives over at Amazon! It's that easy, as easy as 1-2-3, as easy as pie, and oh, what a sinful, wicked pie, that makes us fat when we really, really want to lose weight, but just can't for some weird reason.
We love to be told how dumb we are, how miserably wicked we are, and how there's some complicated reason why we seem to fall flat on our face, time and time again. Not enough ketosis! Too much high fructose corn syrup! George Bush! Gangs! Our failing transportation infrastructure! Attention deficit disorder! Vaccine-induced autism! The right-wing conspiracy! The left-wing conspiracy! The homosexual agenda! Our lousy medical system! Our evil liberal teachers who won't teach reading using phonics!
Honey child, I am here to help. I got a whip right here, ready to crack on your flabby middle-class buttocks. It's boot camp time, you snivelly little ass weasel, and you know what I think?
You are stupid.
Yeah, you heard me. You (please picture my neatly-manicured finger pointing angrily in your direction) are stupid.
Who am I to tell you that? Weren't you paying attention? I'm a crank. It gives you a lot of moral authority, buddy.
So…
You Are Stupid: #1 - The Gorgeous Blue Glow of Child Abuse
It's never been so easy to identify child abusers as it is right now. Of course, there are the old standard methods, like peeking through the grating of the confessional, looking for suspicious bruises, or finding guys named Larry or Walter with beat-up old vans, but there's something even easier than a Google Maps mash-up, right out on the roadways.
It's that blue glow.
You see it as you slide up on 'em on the highway, that flickery light of flip-down LCD displays. Sometimes you'll get a falsie, a mis-read based on all the numbskulls who can no longer drive anywhere without a big distracting GPS display propped right in their line of sight, with a soothing female voice murmuring "turn right at light, watch for Hickamadingdong Street, take a slight left at…" and so on. These people are just sad techno-drones, doomed to eventually starve to death in the parking lots of abandoned K-Mart Super Q Megacenters because their GPS missed a wireless upgrade and failed to inform them that Faunchimo Avenue was temporarily closed for water main repairs. They'll just sit there in their cars, too terrified to set out for help, just swearing at the GPS as the batteries fade and die, leaving them in the dark, without even an energy bar or vitamin water or wicked Trader Joe's Bon Bon Deluscious Treat™, and they won't even have their trusty copy of Starving to Death For Dummies to tell them how to slip gently into the Lord's loving embrace.
It's not those guys. It's the Little Mermaid brigade, or whatever is showing in the Cinerama de SUV at the moment. You seem 'em from miles down the road, the screens all aglow, filled with some cartoon or CGI nonsense, written by dumb committee writers at Disney or wherever, and the kids are there, as stupid as you are, staring at the screen while worlds rush by outside.
Why even put side windows on cars anymore?
You stupid parents do your best to eliminate them, with windows plastered with stickers and those ridiculous sun-shades and all that, but once you turn on the flat-panels, you needn't bother. The little brainwashed media zombies follow their programs, look up, and then down to their iPhones, where they're simultaneously texting their idiotic little friends with whatever idiotic little thought is racing around the tiny go-kart track in their little plastic busy box brains, then up, then down, then up, then down, but never out.
Heck, the outside world is scary. It's full of crime (it's not), it's full of terror (it's not), and full of boredom (it's really, really not). Besides, it's just soooooooooooo hard to be a parent these days. You just don't understand how hard it is, or how tired we are, or what the challenges are that face the modern parent—
—And I say "blah, blah, blah," you stupid, stupid person. Don't cry to me about how hard it is to be a parent. I'm the one who advised you to take a coathanger to that little lump of crying debt while it was still legal to do so, before it gave you stretch marks and a caesarian scar. It's not like the world really needs one more kid, leaving candy wrappers all over my lawn on their way back from the corner store. If you weren't up to the work, you should have really reconsidered answering that reproductive alarm clock. You got the kid, you seem to be fond of him, her, or them—now be a parent, or "parent," as you stupid lot love to say in your "proactive" way of communicating that leads you to turn everything into a verb.
There they are, though, all the back windows on the road with that gorgeous blue glow of child abuse, as lurid and explicit as can be, each car filled with the fury of an upholstery-chewing Faye Dunaway and wire hangers a-whippin' and I'm torn as to whether to feel a little giggly and pernicious or to let myself have genuine compassion for kids having their brains sucked out, pixel by pixel, through the magic of omnipresent television all because their whiny, stupid parents can't seem to do what my generation's parents had no problem doing.
I AM GOING TO PULL THIS CAR OVER RIGHT NOW IF YOU TWO DON'T STOP FIGHTING BACK THERE! DON'T THINK I WON'T 'CAUSE I WILL SERIOUSLY PULL THIS GOLDARN CAR OVER RIGHT NOW AND LEAVE YOU SITTING ON THE SIDE OF ROUTE 29 AND YOU'LL BOTH HAVE TO WALK ALL THE WAY HOME TO SCAGGSVILLE!
That was the exasperation flip-out, something I didn't quite understand until now, but you know what? It worked. We stopped fighting in the back seat. Sometimes, we even stopped fighting and went back to looking out the window, watching the farms roll by, watching the people passing by in other cars, wondering what kind of lives they had, telling ourselves little stories about those people and wondering if we'd ever see them again. Sometimes, we read a book, or played a game, or just talked about…stuff. It was all just stuff, mostly pointless, but still something productive, a way of honing the social interactions.
It's all crank talk, I know, complaining about kids these days, but I don't think it's kids these days. It's their parents, and they is us. I hear perfectly-reasonable friends occasionally defend the blue glow of child abuse, complaining about how hard "parenting" is, and how hard it is to pay the mortgage and two car payments and for a vacation somewhere pre-packaged, and right in the back of my head, I hear my own parents being all giggly and pernicious, because even the stuff they did wrong was usually right, especially in light of the so-called sensitive educated parents roaming the earth these days.
I'll admit this. My hatred of kids is really a pose. I mean, I hate having them in my house, pulling my collectibles down from their places of pride on my antique furniture, and I hate their sticky fingers, sticky hands, sticky clothes, and slobbery, snotty faces, always coming at me, offering a great big lovey kiss to their prudish, uptight Uncle Joe, but they're okay, particularly once they can talk and joyfully repeat my little whispered atrocities to Grandma, who immediately blanches and wags a finger at me. I have a pretty contained little living environment, and kids whack me out, but that's just me. I wasn't born to be a parent, or I'd have a bit more interest in using my genitalia in that manner, but I look around and the streets here are empty.
There are a few kids out, usually going from one TV set in one house to an Xbox in another, but it's not like it was. Rich white kids grow up in the suburbs without ever riding bikes, because there's no world there, nothing beyond the steel and glass cages of the Cinerama de SUV, nothing out there but the fear that their stupid parents instill in them, warning them of a dangerous world that does not exist.
It's that glow, the gentle blue glow of stupid poisoning, of lazy parents rearing empty children.
When I'm angry, caught up in traffic, I rise to the occasion, and curse and swear and glare at the abusers, but soon it'll be a generation who won't know better, because they'll have been reared by their stupid parents, who brought them up in the glow, in the backseat, teaching them that all the adventure they'll ever need is right there, on the screen. They'll grow up watching science fiction that'll get more fictional by the moment, never aware that forty years ago, when we could barely make a car that would survive its first hundred thousand miles, we could put a man on the moon, and that we might never do it again, because there's just no will left, no adventure in our souls.
The world races by the windows and they're not looking out, watching the small towns, wondering what those people are like, or what other people's lives are like, and the stories we tell ourselves are replaced, one by one, by packaged stupid, written by overeducated corporate committee stupid, sold by salesman stupid, bought by stupid parents who've given up on being parents before they ever even tried, because it's just soooooooo hard to be a parent and soooooooo hard to lose weight and soooooooo hard to save money and sooooooooo why even bother.
If you do this to your kids, if you surrender the task of being your kid's mentor to your laziness and "exhaustion," you are stupid. Yeah, I mean you. Maybe I know you, maybe I love you, but you are stupid. Hand them a book, hand them a puzzle, have an aimless conversation with them, for pete's sake. Hell, even drugging them into a stupor with Benadryl for a few miles of peace and quiet is better than the lash of omnipresent television. At least old fashioned child abuse gave kids experience worth writing about, when they grew up and became grizzled old crank writing picturesque despair tales of ol' Oyerlund. Heck, you don't even need actual severe child abuse—you can get by with a little bit and lie about the rest. That's what you get, growing up with an intact imagination; the ability to bluff, to fluff, to find little joys in empty moments, to look out the windows and see the whole damn world, just within reach.
Or you can surrender to the glow, and dissolve into the video mire.
Couldn't you be doing something outside right now instead of reading my stupid rant?
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 02:32 pm (UTC)ha!
Date: 2009-02-15 03:46 pm (UTC)Pardon me while I go bathe my kids in vitamin water.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 04:45 pm (UTC)I saw at least 2/3s of the USA from the back seat of a station wagon when I was a kid. I sure wouldn't trade that for Sleeping Beauty.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 05:10 pm (UTC)I would really like you to meet my kid. I mean...she's not much of a kid anymore, but you would probably like her.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 06:53 pm (UTC)It goes way beyond "threats" of terrorism, economic depression, climate change, and so forth, because it's (1) more destructive than any of those, and (2) already a done deal.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-17 03:37 am (UTC)I had a Sony Trinitron in my bedroom...I mostly watched PBS and Captain Kangaroo on CBS...really.
Thankfully, my mother does not know about my LJ!
;-)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 12:31 am (UTC)i'm only 22; hopefully decent parenting is not gone.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 04:05 pm (UTC)I find the car to be the best time to talk to the girls - captive audience and all.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-18 02:37 pm (UTC)When you fade out.
Your return will be heralded
By writing and observations
As superb as this.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 02:15 am (UTC)So, you know, I dig.