Village Idiocy

I recently spent a month recovering from the flu. It was the kind of flu that didn't allow me to do much for a couple weeks except mindless crap. Seriously, it hurt to think and it wore me out to do anything requiring more than minimal effort. I tried reading but couldn't focus. I tried to work, but after trying to put up one design several different times only to accidentally delete an hours worth of work by clicking the wrong key, I gave up. I turned to the old standby--games. I spent a couple days making the world safe from angry birds, but even that required more energy than I had , so I turned to television. Specifically, mindless tedious stupefying television, the kind most of America feeds on for most of their waking hours when they're not working.

I'm not an anti-television snob. There's some excellent shows that I usually wait until they come out on Netflix to watch, and I really am an Amazing Race junkie.  But that's about it. I've never watched many of the popular culture shows. I tried, I really did, but in the end they were about not every interesting people doing not very interesting things. And I may be old, but not old enough to get my news from television actors pretending to be journalists. I'd rather read blogs online from many different views to form an opinion, rather than have it fed to me by actors who wouldn't know a real news story if it kicked them in their partisan asses.

What I did find as I flipped from channel to channel is that American television is like the worst little inbred community of stupid people on the planet. I've lived in small towns and the news is basically the same kind of tedious gossip that passes for conversation in those horrid little communities. No one ever talks about ideas. They talk about other people. No one ever talks about the problems of the world. They talk about who's bedding whom and whose divorce is that week's meat to rip apart and feed to the hogs. No one ever talks about solutions to world hunger, the destruction of the planet, how to make a better world. They gossip instead. They say mean and horrible things about people they don't even know. They form sides. They create a world of us and them. The news on television has become the worst of these things, the worst of these people, the meanest and most shallow excuse for existence imaginable.

At first, just as I felt when exposed to this behavior in small communities populated with small-minded idiots, I was stunned that people could live this way, that they could get  information this way, that they could make real life choices based on being fed pure biased bullshit.

And then I began to understand it was all deliberate. Television feeds into the small minded idiots in these communities. It creates low information voters. It creates people who are always afraid of some boogy man or woman of the week. It makes it seem normal to have an us and them world where everything is always one person's fault, one ethnic group's fault, one country's fault. It creates the kind of fear that discourages independent thinking for herd behavior. Television tells you different people are bad. Different ideas are bad. Truth is bad.

Television is called programming for a reason. It doesn't want you to think or discuss real ideas. It wants you to gossip about each other. It wants you to always blame someone else for problems you create yourself. It wants you to live in fear and in mistrust and to always always think just like everyone else. And to severely punish those who are not like you.

And in between, they want to sell you shit. Lots of shit. Stupid shit designed just for people who no longer are able to think for themselves. Step right up, and please do use your neighbor's back to step on as you climb up the Randian ladder of disdain and privilege, because you're special and deserve to buy all the crap they're selling you.

Village Idiocy

Celebrity Deaths and The Realm of Petty and Shallow Minds

It's been one of those strange weeks when the dark and slimy side of human existence struggles for dominance in the world of chit chat. No where has this been more apparent than with the death of Michael Jackson. His dual existence of musician and depraved degenerate has exposed most of the world as no more evolved than some malicious nasty ladies sewing circle that meets once a week to spread lies, untruths, juicy rumors, innuendos, and vendettas disguised as truth.

I've spent some time this last week trying to figure out how we got to this low point in human existence and as far as I can tell by the most cursory of reading, society has always spoken ill of those not physically in their presence. It's always thrived on the nasty little rumor that requires whispered embellishments and embroidered lies to make it more interesting, more valid somehow. Throughout time it was never enough to merely have a lover, but to make it interesting one had to have a lover that was bad for you, or married to someone else, or simply so precious that everyone coveted him or her enough to make up nasty lies out of jealousy and spite.

No matter what the excuse, such malicious gossip is still the realm of  shallow and petty minds. It was once confined to the most isolated and inbred of small towns and communities, but in the last couple decades, it has taken the place of real news, investigative journalism, and politics that feeds on  the insignificant  crap that appeals to the lowest common voter.

Where it went really crazy was with the Clinton presidency. There was and still is a group of small-minded power hungry thugs that just couldn't accept their candidate lost so they resorted to the last refuge of small minds everywhere: they made the bedroom a public arena. They spread semi-truths and innuendos. They wasted taxpayer dollars and precious government resources better spent doing things for the people instead of feeding a demented sewing circle of vicious little gossips.

From this peeping tom sickness grew the obsession with same-sex relationships, other people's marital affairs, petty habits, strange societal quirks that didn't directly affect those most concerned about them, financial scandals that were once the private business of the consumer and his or her banker, and a compulsive and sick desire to deify anyone who was anything near celebrity status because if there's one thing gossip does well is expose the boring lives most people live--lives so tedious they have to go outside themselves for anything remotely entertaining to talk about.

And on a societal level, the more one group trashed another group, the smaller their ability became to converse about anything more profound than who was doing whom. Characters on sitcoms became more interesting than the people in real life. At no time did this become more evident than when I spent a couple months on a temporary job. Every day my co-workers would gossip in great and delighted malicious gossip about the minute details of some people's lives that I didn't know. It amazed me that everyone knew these people, that everyone had something "juicy" to contribute to the details being discussed. I didn't realize the people they were talking about as if they were longtime friends they grew up with, married, dated, buried, and moved away from didn't exist except as characters on a TV sitcom. It was during the decade I didn't have a television. I was astonished to discover these people I heard discussed every day were not real. I knew nothing about my co-worker's families and loved ones, but I knew every detail of the television characters they so ardently discussed...without owning a TV. They cared about them more than they cared about themselves or each other. It's all they talked about day after day.

At the same time I was living in a small and very inbred community of people who had known each other for several decades. The level of conversation wasn't any different. No one talked about things or ideas. They talked about the people who weren't there. And they talked about them in bad and hurtful ways. I saw a mean side of these people that eventually made me move away from them. They became in my mind no different than the people who trashed gays, liberals, immigrants or those who didn't come from their social class. They were bigots of mind and spirit even though they considered themselves open, tolerant, and filled with peace and love for all humanity. The hypocrisy of their disconnect from what they believed and what they lived sent me running away from them as fast as I could because I felt they were a disease that would inflict itself on me if I stayed too much longer.

For those who think my reaction to petty gossip was extreme, look around you. Look what it has done to our towns, our communities, our countries and our world. Spreading the simple lie is the quickest way to control a population and anyone who spreads lies and malicious gossip about others can never call themselves truly free. They are trapped in the tedium of their own lives and unless they hack off a limb or something, they can't escape and they're doomed to just degenerate into the type of people who will never be able to enjoy someone like Mozart because of his personal flaws or refuse to see the contributions someone like Michael Jackson has made to music culture because of rumors surrounding his personal flaws and sicknesses. And these same people will mourn Farrah Fawcett, a woman they knew just as little, whose personal life was just a patchwork of gossip they gathered from tabloids and each other. Because she was pretty, they assumed she was perfect. For her they saved their praise.

But no one is perfect. Everyone has their dark side, everyone has their secrets, their evil little personality twists that stay locked up in public and sometimes goes stark raving mad in private. Where it crosses the line for me is when people who have no business, no say, no right to interfere in someone's private life, make it take the place of truth, honor, integrity, and the right to live as mutual consenting adults in a world of our own choice. To them I say it's time to get a life of your own. You're way overdue.

As for Michael Jackson, I spent many happy years dancing to his music when I still had functioning knees. I'm sorry for his private life, but seriously, it's not about me. It's between him, any potential victims, the families of those victims, the authorities, the deals they made or didn't make. For me it was and still is all about the music. That's the only part of it that is any of my damn business, and so for all those delightful dance parties that defined the 80's and early 90's for me, I say rest in peace and thank you.

Magnet and other items with this design and others available at Crazy Old Lady Of Peace

Michael Jackson, King of Pop, Jacko, MJ, cult of celebrity, gossip, music

Celebrity Deaths and The Realm of Petty and Shallow Minds

Small Towns, Small Minds

I grew up in cities where intellectual stimulation was something normal and highly sought after. Most of my friends were solidly working class who worked their way through college as I did. Rich people were something we made fun of and spit in their water glasses when they ate at restaurants where we worked. I never met one person who didn't have to worry about finances who wasn't also a real asshole. I grew up knowing there were two kinds of people in the world-- those with money, and those without. One had power, the other did not. One was loyal and kind and compassionate, the other would sell his or her own offspring for a few dollars.

The list goes on and on, and over the years the stereotype held true as I began to follow politics, the arts, and the world of power and intrigue. People like George Bush were the ultimate proof that money made people mean, cruel, inept, and encased in a bubble that was filled only with their own kind--unless they needed a photo op and then they'd hold the nasty little poor kids and try not to look too disgusted. Or they'd invite some leader of an advocacy group for the poor to their home or event or fund raiser to show their civic responsibility. But if these photo ops tried to date their sons and daughters, or goddess forbid, tried to become their friend! well...let's just say they learned really quickly there was a difference between public and private realities.

Given my feelings about rich people, it was a simple mistake to think the utter selfishness, the total cruelty, the malicious and destructive lies and gossip, the scapegoating, the appalling shifting of blame and responsibility for their own mistakes to someone, anyone less powerful, less part of the group was easily explained as traits of the rich and entitled.

For some cruel reason, I ended up having as acquaintances far too many children of the wealthy and upper middle classes. Maybe because in the community where I lived the only other choices were religious crazies, high school drop-outs, or meth losers. I've written often enough how these rich people's brats were the first to stick me with unpaid bills and borrow money they never repaid, and how they made selfish choices rather than practical real world decisions about everything they did and thought.

Given these experiences and how I felt about rich people, it was an easy mistake to make that they were shallow, small-minded, cruel, selfish, and well-versed in the art of scapegoating just because they were children of the rich and had been pampered all their lives and felt they were entitled to something just because they wanted it. It was an easy explanation, and in many cases, there was some honest truth behind it.

But lately I'm beginning to understand what was really wrong with these people and it had nothing to do with money. While only one or two actually knew what it meant to be poor, most grew up comfortably if not wealthy. They grew up believing they were special. They grew up believing their world was so perfect that nothing else dare intrude upon its perfection.

But it had nothing to do with money. It had to do with the fact that many of them lived for decades in a small town and chose not to let anything else into that sheltered little world that could disturb the fantasy--like the Internet for example.

Instead they chose to live in these tiny little incestuous groups where gossip fueled everything. Even though many of them were now in their 40's, 50's and even 60's, they never really mentally graduated from High School. Their world continually recycled from nonsense decades old. They slept with and married each other and then had affairs and broke up over each other. They passed the same ideas around like a dirty pair of socks. And they grew smug and intolerant of anyone but their own little groups.

I understand now that people like me terrified them. I didn't have children. I didn't go to their hippie churches and pretend it was somehow different from the religious crap they were raised with. I didn't automatically take the side of someone who was wrong just because they were married or fucking someone from "the community." And horror of horrors, I wanted more than their shallow friendships and mean-spirited gossip.

The breaking point for us came when I met and related to fascinating people I met through online connections. To them the Internet, the world wide web, even email was something for sex predators or at the most, to make airline reservations for those trust funded treks around the world.

The social aspect of it did not exist for them. They couldn't allow it to exist because it meant they would have to change how they viewed the world and each other. They would have to wake up and see they became the dinosaurs of the modern world. They would have to see that the same thoughts kept getting recycled in their community over and over again without ever picking up anything new. "New" was not allowed because it challenged their positions in the pecking order they worked so hard to build. They may have been losers in High School but their cliques were now solidly and firmly in place, just like a nice solid tomb.

What finally drove me away was a divorce between two people who were married for twenty years. Within days it was no longer about the divorce. It became High School all over again with sides being drawn up, dirty tricks being plotted, lies being spread, trash being scattered and every one's personal issues fighting for the lead dog position.

I walked away and my life immediately began to improve. The quality of my friends improved. I more more money. I found a way to make a living doing something I love. And when I look toward my future I see many wonderful paths left to explore, many wonderful people to meet, many new ideas to share.

And the amazing thing? I never left town. I just left them. And last I heard, they are still involved in the daily destructive rituals of feeding on each other instead of looking to see what else is in the world besides their small little lives.

Small Towns, Small Minds