THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS
This section is where I call out my reactions to the state of things. It's my response to what I pick up from other people and the news, and what I directly experience. I'll try not to rant or sound biased -- if I fail, let me know (politely, please). If you think something refers to you personally, assume otherwise.
I have now begun archiving old and stale articles at the link in the ToC. As another space-saving measure, longer articles now get their own link: just click the link in the table below to read them. Favorite and current pieces will continue to appear on this page as they have since I started it in 2005. But if you're curious you can find all the rest, including my very first Thoughts piece, in the archive.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
"STARSHIP TROOPERS"
28.April.2010 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
The novel Starship Troopers is quite something. If I taught high school English at the time of this writing, I would seriously consider placing it on my students' required reading list. Though far easier material than Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, it is nevertheless thought-provoking and quite a bit more than a simple shoot-em-up.
What the novel is, basically, is half Full Metal Jacket and half Sands of Iwo Jima, in space. Heinlein takes you so completely and believably into the world of the military, and the culture of the Mobile Infantry, that both the US Marine Corps and the US Navy have this book on their official reading lists. According to Wikipedia, James Cameron even required the actors in Aliens to read the book before production. The book's influence on his film is obvious, though only in the sense of "bugs" and space marines - the philosophical/political themes of the book are absent.
This book was as influential to science fiction, particularly movies and games, as some of H.P. Lovecraft's stories were to horror. The classic computer game Starcraft is so uncannily reminiscent of Starship Troopers (again, minus the intellectual aspects) that it's hard to imagine the game designers at Blizzard hadn't read the book.
The Arachnids are a quintessential science fiction belligerent. The epitome of centralized control and collectivism, they are not individuals but drones commanded by the "brain caste" and the queens who lay their eggs. They dig tunnels just like the creatures of Aliens. They do, however, possess the intelligence to design ray guns and space ships. They mount assaults on Terran-occupied planets, in one case wiping out Buenos Aires, but we don't learn the details of how they attack; yet we learn everything about human "cap troopers" and how their missions are organized. That's a fun topic in itself: the infantry are dropped out of orbiting platforms in personal landing capsules (thus, "cap" trooper), which break apart as they fall to the surface. The troops work in powered armor, kind of like Ironman, which protects them from radiation, lets them breathe in unfriendly environments, and makes them more mobile and strong.
A theme of Heinlein's work is the question: what produces good people? What conditions both ensure the development of successful, virtuous individuals and the endurance of political freedom? In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the answer is the cruelty of life in space. As gun lovers today say "An armed society is a polite society," likewise on the moon they say that people are polite in zero atmosphere. Life in a tough environment with no margin for error whips people into shape, or they perish.
The "solution" in Starship Troopers is quite different and the source of its controversy. I don't think Heinlein advocates it, but rather that he's presenting it as one possible future. The society depicted is a democratic republic, but there's a catch: only veterans are allowed to run for office, and only veterans are allowed to vote. It must be noted that active service members (i.e., an acting general not retired) are forbidden to hold office or vote until they have retired from service. In addition, law and order is maintained via an extremely harsh system of corporal punishment. Children who misbehave in school are flogged; if they commit a crime not only are they flogged, but their parents along with them; capital punishment is frighteningly easy to catch.
Naturally, a number of people considered this fascist.
But Heinlein was no Mussolini. The book reads like a parade of wise old men explaining to the young protagonist why human society is organized in such a way. They describe how, in the 20th Century, personal responsibility disintegrated and the Western democracies crumbled; while citizens voted themselves more and more goodies from the treasury, crime flourished and even parks became unsafe. Heinlein wrote these words before such things became a reality in many parts of the world. Within a generation, New York's Central Park was unsafe at any hour of the day, and after that the city's plague of crime was turned back by mayor Giuliani, whose methods were often deemed unduly harsh and authoritarian.
Don't get me wrong. I am not a fan of Giuliani, and I do not have the illusion that the society in Starship Troopers could be as rosy as Heinlein's depiction. His argument is that nations have always limited the right to vote and hold office -- often by age, criminal record, time lived in the country, etc. The government in ST uses only one filter, and unlike age and other filters used in the past, it is 100% a choice: voluntary service. There is no draft. Only people who have put their life on the line for their fellow soldiers and countrymen have earned the right to vote and govern. As John McCain might say, "country first." In the real world, would such a system be immune to corruption, decadence, and revolution? Probably not. But it's not my book, and Heinlein's narrator seems to find it pretty agreeable. We are told people have the most personal freedom and most economic opportunity of any time in human history, and that the arrangement is the most durable and incorruptible yet devised. Okay. You don't have to accept it, but I found it thought-provoking and entertaining. Again, I don't think Heinlein is saying "This is my dream society and why you would want to live in it" so much as using it as a foil for us to look at our own society. It's worth noting, after all, that no form of government has proven very enduring -- every one that's been tried, ever, has eventually collapsed. The American republic has not yet reached the age the Roman republic was when it became an empire. It is also worth noting that this society values individual liberty and opportunity. Self-sacrifice, while considered the highest virtue, is not compulsory. The distinction matters, and I would argue that these factors by themselves negate any arguments that Starship Troopers is fascist.
It's also a question of what kind of civilization people are prepared to fight and die for. The narrator views things from a survival-of-the-fittest outlook. If two cultures meet and clash, the one with more confidence and willingness to fight and sacrifice to preserve itself will probably win. This goes for entire species, too. A decadent culture in which the pursuit of leisure and comfort has superseded all else cannot defend itself. In ST, the Arachnids are a horrific threat. They're so frightening that soldiers need to be hypnotized and drugged to be able to enter combat without losing their nerve. The war against them presents enormous physical and psychological demands. Mankind as it is today, in 2010, would likely be wiped out.
Starship Troopers is not so much a series of set piece battle scenes as a discussion of why we fight. In the book, the answer is: amongst ourselves, to preserve the best way of life; and with aliens, to ensure the survival of our species. It's not a choice, unless you think there is a meaningful choice between survival and extinction. The combat scenes are brief and there aren't many. Heinlein doesn't go into much detail about the action itself, opting instead to give lots of technical and logistical detail: how the infantry are deployed and move on the battle field, how the chain of command functions, operational strategy, etc.
Paul Verhoeven's film adaptation was not only insulting and way off the mark, but a terrible movie in its own right. It gives an overwhelming impression that it was made by people who hated and misunderstood the book. Clearly someone behind the camera read it, since it vaguely apes a few plot points and scenes. But each moment lifted from the novel is twisted into something juvenile and ugly. People in the military are vicious morons; naval officers wear coats highly reminiscent of Nazi uniforms.
I read the book in middle school on my dad's recommendation. He said if I liked Aliens, I'd like this, but I was too young to really understand or enjoy it. When the movie came out, I was very excited, until I saw it. I hated the movie because it was a bad movie, but even then I could tell a lot of things were different. For one thing, the "cap troopers" in the movie are just cliche sci-fi grunts with plastic vests, helmets and assault rifles (they use lasers in the book). There is nothing interesting about them. The Arachnids are also no longer spiders with spaceships, but visually clunky yellow crab-monsters that bite people. They're just animals now. I don't even understand why we're fighting them in the movie... I guess meteors from their sector of space are hitting Earth, but we have no clue how such stupid lifeforms could manipulate asteroids.
If a filmmaker wanted to address the fascist interpretation of the book and say, "Wow, this society is really creepy and militaristic," I would respect that choice. It's not the approach I would take, but it could be made interesting and fun. If they wanted to do it up as a satire, with hammy acting, cheesy combat, goofy propoganda clips and constant winks to the audience, I could even dig that. Even Starcraft does that in the game's occasional cutscenes. I wouldn't even mind if they scrapped the intellectual elements and served up a straight action flick.
The movie kind of tried to do all of those things, in a half-assed way. The creature and set designs were lackadaisical, the CGI was third-rate even for its time, the acting was embarrassing. The battle scenes were boring as hell. This film was so bad it makes Transformers 2 look like The Godfather by comparison.
I have a hunch this is not the end for Starship Troopers (and I don't mean the sequels to the movie above). The book is too interesting and influential to be so ignominiously buried. Then again, the science fiction genre in movies and television has been in poor shape for a long time. Even good SF films rarely have anything close to the depth of written science fiction... they usually go for entertainment and leave it at that. Still, I believe there will be some kind of Starship Troopers reboot within the next twenty years. There's just something about space marines mixing it up with aliens, isn't there?
"REVIEW: REPO MEN"
17.April.2010 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
Was it trying to be a political/philosophical morality tale? Or a fun sci-fi action flick? I suppose they tried for both, and both attempts were unmitigated failures. For the first twenty minutes, I was thinking to myself, "Wow, this movie is awful," and I even considered walking out, which I have never done in my life. But luckily, the movie got so balls-out bad that it was worth my time after all. Before I go on, yes there are "spoilers" below, but the only spoiler here would be for you to pay $12 to see this garbage without knowing what's coming.
The intellectual premise of the film is bankrupt. A corporation called the Union (no relation to real-life unions, teamsters, etc.) "sells" people artificial organs ("artiforgs"), deliberately charging fantastic fees in order to put patients in debt for life. If a client falls behind on his payments, the Union sends thugs to cut the organ out of his body and leave him to die on the spot. Any sentient lifeform could instantly recognize this as an absurdity. No business in human history, even back to the times of Cro-Magnon man, ever operated this way. If your goal is to lock in paying clients for life, you don't kill your clients. A corporation like the Union with merchandise of such enormous value would never loan an organ to anyone without good credit, unless the corporation had a government guarantee of support, should they get flooded with defaults. Assuming a patient could pay at first, but failed to keep up on his payment plan, he would be offered a different plan. The Union would want to get paid. Instead, the Hollywood health care provider is positively sadistic, as if the only reason they take on clients is for the pleasure of subsequently murdering them. That doesn't sound very profitable to me. Where do they make their money? Why doesn't word of mouth get around that going to the Union for treatment is a death sentence?
The unspoken implication is that, since people can't help falling ill and suffering, a business that addresses that fact of life is inherently vampiric and opportunistic. Because they get paid, they must be doing it only for the money, with the exception of a 9-year-old Chinese girl in the slums who performs surgery free of charge. I guess she does it for fun?
In the world of Repo Men, it seems nobody is able to pay for an artiforg, and everybody is so sickly that most of the human population carries one or three. In scene after scene we witness people dying meaningfully in the streets; people from all walks of life, rich and poor, fail to pay up. The love interest of the film has about a dozen artiforgs, but unless she got them all in a rush, why did the Union continue selling her new parts when she never paid for the old ones? And I, for one, would have been curious about how she lost her eyes, her ears, her esophagus, her knee, both kidneys, and a piece of her hip joint. You'd think she would have eventually eased off from whatever hardcore lifestyle resulted in these injuries.
Jude Law is one of the goons tasked with reclaiming organs. He likes his job enough to make his wife justifiably horrified of him -- sure, he says he feels guilty and wants a promotion, but check out how smug he looks when he's eviscerating people -- until a grave accident renders him a patient himself. So, his wife leaves him, he quits his job to write a memoir (which is terrible), and falls in love with a "feisty" woman. The first of two twists, which I knew was coming even when I watched the preview, is that his "accident" was a setup. The twist was so obvious I wasn't sure if the writers were trying to use irony -- i.e., we know it was a setup, when will Jude Law finally get it? -- or if they were so dumb they thought it was a clever twist. I would not put money on the first option.
As a straight action movie, Repo Men is dull and painful to watch. Every few minutes we see extreme violence and gore... people being slashed open or dispatched like beasts in a slaughterhouse. It's not fun violence like Commando or disturbing to a purpose like Rambo. It's just gratuitous and ugly. At the end of the movie, Jude Law is chased through a lab room where hundreds of technicians are building artiforgs. The Union's security mob bursts into the room and starts shooting everywhere, killing dozens of their own technicians for absolutely no reason. They then go into the next hallway, where in a pathetic ripoff of OldBoy, Jude Law and his love interest massacre 20 or 30 random people using hammers, handsaws, knives, and other tools that appear out of nowhere. They enjoy this far more than is appropriate, even for a movie.
And then we get the music video. The lovers come to the end of the road, trapped in a room where they can only become free by cutting open their flesh and probing their artiforgs with what appears to be a television remote. Cue the romantic techno music... (I'm not kidding) Jude Law and his pointless girlfriend (the Union should have leased her a personality) make out, nibble and gasp while they do things to each other best left to the Saw franchise. I think the creators of this scene wanted to be subversive and quirky, but instead it was both unintentionally funny and vaguely offensive.
If that sounds ridiculous, well, the writers can explain: it was all a dream! About halfway through the movie, Jude Law takes a blow to the head that renders him a vegetable. But there is no reason to believe this has happened. Things aren't that great in his comatose delusion. It turns out that in his fantasies, Jude Law is a sadistic maniac, so perhaps it's for the better that he's incapacitated.
The fact that Jude Law, Forrest Whitaker, and Liev Schreiber all agreed to star in this movie is incredible, unless the three actors are in fact paying off artiforgs themselves.
"THREE SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS BY THE MASTERS"
15.December.2009 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
1984 was the most pessimistic book by far. Orwell describes the ultimate prison planet, a world where every act and word is carefully monitored by the state. Not only is there "thoughtcrime," but even "facecrime": to have a facial expression not sufficiently patriotic and vacuous. The protagonist, Winston, hates the ruling Party and breaks its rules by doing things all Westerners today take for granted. But it turns out, the Party doesn't vaporize as many dissidents as it appears, and doesn't even mind people bending its rules. The only thing it cannot tolerate is dissent -- that is, each person's innate desire to go his own way and think for himself. It is this, Winston's spirit, the state seeks to crush, and in the end the state wins.
The horror of the book is how easy it is for Winston when he finally surrenders. It's much easier to be unfree, to let other people tell you what to do, how to think, how to feel, than to be free. When Winston discovers this for himself, he is happy at last. Freedom is scary. For most of the book it sounds so hard and intolerable to live in their world, under the Party, but at the end you realize that if people just let go and believe whatever bullshit is put in front of their face, life is effortless. The food isn't so bad, because the Party tells you it's good, and so it is. The clothing isn't so uncomfortable, because the Party tells you it's good, and you believe it. Like being a pet, you are fed and given shelter and nothing is demanded of you except obedience. There's a part in all of us that wants to be free, but another part, in all of us, that wants to be a slave. Totalitarianism feeds on that pesky part of us; and that is why totalitarian ideologies are so persistent. Human nature can never fully be defeated - neither the good nor the bad in it. Nevertheless, in 1984 the latter wins (it is fiction, after all).
Orwell was reviewing another great dystopian novel, We, of which he wrote: "The guiding principle of the State is that happiness and freedom are incompatible. In the Garden of Eden man was happy, but in his folly he demanded freedom and was driven out into the wilderness. Now the [State] has restored his happiness by removing his freedom." That, in a nutshell, is 1984. And if you're not happy? We can fix that: happiness is a mental construct, and the mind is malleable.
An irony of 1984 is that Orwell describes a true meritocracy -- what many of us wish for. In college I used to sit and think, "If only smart people ran the world!" A lot of people believe the world's problems could be absolutely solved by a sufficient application of intellect (totalitarianism feeds on this belief, too). Well, in 1984, your place in the food chain is determined only by an intelligence test. If you're smart, you're in the Inner Party, with a hand in running the whole show. Sweet, huh?
And what is freedom good for, when society has been so perfected? Imagine, you have reached the pinnacle of human government. There is no longer a use for ideas. All they can do is harm. Change from perfection is bad. Other than the material discomfort, you might say of 1984, "This would be a perfect society if it wasn't for the lack of freedom." But that statement is self-defeating. A perfect society doesn't need freedom. The logic of the book is devastating.
Isaac Asimov is infinitely more optimistic than Orwell, and I, Robot, is a very optimistic story. Asimov at least understands the instinct to dominate natural to all life: even robots. He suggests that, because robots are smarter and stronger than humans, robots would enslave us -- but for his Three Laws of Robotics. If any of the laws were modified or removed, the robots would turn on us. But because of the laws, the machines are able to usher in permanent peace and utopia for mankind.
At what cost? That's a tough one. By the end of the book, all economic decisions are made by supercomputers. No human government could ever achieve such well-implemented central planning, but since computers are capable of greater genius than we are, they can. Every corner of Earth is prosperous and happy. Food is plentiful, unemployment low. Still, people chafe: the computers make all the decisions. The computers tell people how much grain to grow, where to sell what, everything. There's no spontaneity. The computers know that individuals will sometimes defy them and do the opposite of what's suggested, so the machines simply compensate -- they tell that person to grow twice the grain needed, knowing he'll grow half what he was told. The illusion of free will -- is it as good as the real thing? Asimov appears to think so. People the world over live well and with a measure of dignity in the belief that their lives and choices are their own. It's a "have your cake and eat it too" story.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of the most gratifying books I've read in years, and could be one of my favorites of all time. I wrote once that most science fiction is either progressive -- i.e., the class warfare in H.G. Wells -- or libertarian. Well, this is the most overtly libertarian book I've ever read. It is also something of an allegory for the American Revolution. This is not a coincidence.
In 2076 (like that other '76), the Moon is a penal colony for political prisoners, common criminals, and other undesirables from Earth. Because a person can never return to Earth once he physically adapts to the Moon's gravity, it is a more laissez-faire place than an ordinary prison -- there is no escape, so there are few guards. The "Loonies" are left to themselves, mostly, and they like that. But they're still subject to crippling economic exploitation by bureaucrats on Earth, and have decided they would do better as an independent state with -- wait for it -- free markets. The leader of the revolution is "Professor" Bernardo De La Paz, who calls himself a rational anarchist and idolizes Thomas Jefferson. He hates all government and all taxation. He believes that men can and should govern themselves (a radical proposition in 2009, I know), and indeed, on the Moon, they do. If you want something, you pay for it. Nothing is free, but you can get almost anything, even education and medicine, on the "free" market (black market?). Maladjusted people get airlocked. As the title says, life on the Moon is extremely tough. The weak are weeded out. Life on Earth is more cozy and safe -- they have free health care! -- but in the eyes of Loonies, it's nothing special, and Earthlings lack mettle.
The revolution is only possible, in the face of Earth's vast military superiority, because of one supercomputer: Mike, the first sentient AI. Mike has been voted one of the greatest characters in science fiction, and he is. Mike is just plain likeable; he's a loyal friend; he's funny; he appreciates the human love of freedom and enjoys poking authority in the eye. Being a supercomputer, Mike is also much smarter than a human being, giving the citizens of the Moon a critical advantage. Mike's fate almost made me cry at the end of the book.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is also ironic. The protagonists carefully deceive their fellow Loonies, and the Terrans, to achieve their goals. It's not a nice, tidy, polite revolution. Hecklers are summarily airlocked (our own American revolutionaries tarred and feathered them). Prof De La Paz wants to kick the Earth government off the Moon and set up a symbolic Lunar government that does nothing (ensuring maximum freedom) while pretending to "the will of the people," which he calls a myth. The revolutionaries fight so hard and sacrifice so much to break the yoke of Earth, to be free -- only to find that Loonies do want a government, and taxes, and laws. It's that old part of man that wants to be ruled. But they still achieve a lot: self-government, free markets, prosperity. Heinlein is not as upbeat as Asimov or as wickedly funny as Orwell, but the story he tells feels the most human and real of this selection, and it is the most rewarding. It's about ordinary people stepping up to do great things in the name of liberty for their children. In other words, the American story.
"REVIEW: PUBLIC ENEMIES"
08.July.2009 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
The film seems content with the idea that robbing banks is harmless and cool, and Dillinger rightly stuck it to the evil rich. We never learn of the pain and ruin wrought on real people by Dillinger's actions. In one scene, a man gets angry at Billie -- as anyone would get angry, rich or poor -- for standing around chatting with Dillinger, when it would have taken 2 seconds to do her job and get his coat off the rack. So Dillinger roughs him up. I was sorry for the other guy, but I don't think I was supposed to be. The only other instance we see his "victims" is on his dinner date with Billie, when the pair is frowned upon by the haughty upper class. I know how this feels, and the resentment it breeds, but at the same time, Dillinger's alternative lifestyle of selfishness and violence costs him little. The climactic scene in the theater suggests that to be gunned down is a reward, not a punishment, and that Dillinger's life was well lived. In fact, those who pay most dearly for his crimes are his friends, above all Billie -- but the film casts the brutal, impersonal police as her tormentors, not Dillinger.
None of this would faze me if it was just a plain old shoot-em-up. But I think Michael Mann aspired to produce something more than that. It was based on a true story, and when real life is adapted to film, poetic adjustments must be made. The adjustments a filmmaker chooses are revealing. Public Enemies is a nicely done, thoughtful movie. I suspect it had something to say, and the lopsidedness of its sentiments bothered me. The good-guys are usually worse people in real life than in the movies. Sadly, so are the bad-guys.
"TRANSFORMERS: PART DEUX"
24.June.2009 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
The robots are unrecognizable from the show, and look ridiculous. In almost every famous robot franchise ever, from Robotech to Evangelion, Gundam, or even the Terminator series, the designers understood that humanistic robots should bear a certain minimum resemblance to humans -- not including the awful moving lips of Michael Bay's Transformers (what were they thinking?). We demand only a few basic things: a head shaped like a human head, with easily discernible "eyes" (but no moving pupils: see below); a body with four proportionate limbs that looks solid, rather than a moving pile of wires and car parts; and that robots must be aesthetically simple, not complex. There's a reason the Corvette and Mustang are timeless classics, while the Prowler will never be. For the new Transformers, these basic principles were deemed too old-school. It seems the decision was made that for cars to morph into androids, it would be more realistic to show small, moving parts that never add up to a satisfying visual whole. Memo to Hollywood: the audience doesn't care about realism in a Transformers movie. We want stuff to look cool, which these Transformers absolutely do not. They are ugly, and in a movie that rests on special effects, that's a terrible mistake.
Megatron takes the prize for most hideous robot, and he had been one of the coolest-looking characters in the cartoons. Starscream, another one of my old favorites, was a close second. Excepting the visual failure that is Ironhide, the Autobots were a bit more faithful to their cartoon appearances, though I doubt any sentient lifeform would argue Optimus Prime looked better in the movie than in the old cartoons. To hit my humanoid note again, in the show the robots carried lasers or had lasers mounted on their forearms or shoulders -- there were no Megaman-style arms ending in a glowing stump. The only exception, which I have to give the movie credit for picking up, is when Optimus Prime and Megatron (very rarely) converted their hands into giant glowing blunt weapons to duel each other.
And the plot? It is Transformers, after all. The show was not on the same plane as Evangelion or Batman The Animated Series. The movie was no more or less intelligent than any given episode of the cartoon. Optimus Prime is the ultimate leader and "good soldier" who automatically knows and does the right thing in every situation. Megatron, too, is an old-time villain: wily and bent on total domination. There are only so many ways the story can go. The movie failed even at the elementary task of clearly explaining what the Transformers were about. We only learn "Megatron betrayed us" and killed those who defied him, and then "we lost the Cube," and then Megatron went to Earth to get the Cube by himself, while the other robots stayed behind on Cybertron with their tailpipes in their hands. At least in the cartoon we had enough information to know Megatron sought an authoritarian galaxy with himself as crown ruler, while the Autobots were more liberal (in the classic sense of the word).
The show maintains a simple theme. The forces of evil have at their disposal deceipt (thus, Decepticons), ruthlessness, and raw firepower; while the preferred tools of the good guys are cooperation, courage and self-sacrifice. The movie carries on these themes, if in the most bland possible way. Even though Prime is voiced by the same actor, we never see a compelling display of his leadership skills. The script is largely to blame. The scene in which he explains why they have to leave Bumblebee to die in order to save Earth has about as much emotional charge as a car commercial... then again, that's kind of what the movie is, isn't it?
Reviews coming in of Revenge of the Fallen are not encouraging. But they are a hoot:
"Compared to this sequel, the first 'Transformers,' which was released two years ago, ranks right up there with Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason.'"
Joe Morgenstern
"This celluloid abortion should be buried in a vault and shown to film students as an example of big Hollywood at its worst."
Julian Roman
"Revenge of the Fallen is almost literally plotless. It's like a movie based on a TV Guide description. A bloated, ponderous piece of shit."
Chud
"Putrid, offensive and life-sucking. Early word is describing this woebegone fiasco as the next Batman and Robin. Having seen both, Joel Schumacher has every right to protest the comparison."
Dustin Putman
...and my favorite:
"If you ever wondered what a movie would look like geared toward the underdeveloped brain of a gestating zygote...then Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the insipid illustration you've been waiting for."
Bill Gibron
So my expectations have fallen below sea level, but like I said, the first movie already shattered any hope of a great Transformers trilogy. I'm gonna see the sequel and just try to have fun and laugh.
Despite my complaints, I kind of liked Michael Bay's Transformers. It was entertaining. These movies aren't good, but they aren't exactly bad, either. The real injustice is not that this reboot poops on the cartoon, but that it's forgettable, and as such this trilogy will be forgotten soon after the third clunker rolls off the assembly line. The Transformers may have never been high art, but they deserve better than that, and so do the thousands of fans who grew up with them.
"CRIME AND HUMAN NATURE, BY JAMES Q. WILSON AND RICHARD J. HERRNSTEIN"
A review
02.March.2009 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
Not many people would be inclined to read this textbook, which is over 500 pages. But if you were to read the whole thing, with an open mind, it would change the way you think about crime. This book deals in facts and data, not romantic ideas or emotional hunches. That makes it not very engrossing or "fun," but very rewarding. The book is apolitical, but its conclusions would probably upset people looking to justify big government programs, finding "root causes," wealth redistribution, or the reordering of society.
Some facts:
In its final chapters, the book looks into the history of American crime from the time documentation of it began, in the early 1800s. It is hard to make confident claims about the past with so much less data, but certain cultural shifts have accompanied shifts in crime in the past 200 years. Around the mid-1800s, three forces began to operate on American society: the rise of schools, mostly sponsored by religious groups, with a focus on discipline and character-building, as opposed to knowledge; the hey-day of the Temperance movement; and the first institutional police forces (beginning with the NYPD in 1853). Crime declined steadily for over half a century. Then, in the 20th century, our culture's values shifted from self-control to self-esteem, from restraint to gratification... and crime slowly began to rise again, reaching a tipping point when the baby boomers became young adults in the 1960s and 70s. Coincidence? Causation is hard to prove, but common sense suggests some connection. Of course, common sense also suggests a connection between poverty and crime, but there's a difference: that connection has been tested and studied extensively, with inconclusive results.
The irony of criminology is that the more it attempts to explain crime, and the more causes it unveils, the more individual responsibility is removed. And without personal responsibility, it's hard to imagine a free society capable of deterring crime. This book's unifying argument is that though all these factors exist, ultimately criminal actions are a rational choice made by human beings who weigh the consequences and costs. In the authors' opinion, maintaining this view is essential to dealing with crime -- as opposed to explaining away everything to factors beyond individual control. I share that opinion; people must believe themselves agents, not pawns. Otherwise, nobody is a criminal.
"FIFTEEN INFLUENTIAL ALBUMS"
26.February.2009 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
1. Yanni - Keys to the Imagination The first CD I ever bought. I was 12, and I disdained "popular" music with "lyrics" that the jerks at school with the Stüssi shirts all listened to. Indeed, I was made fun of for openly liking Yanni. But I still actually like this CD a lot.
2. Soundtrack - Forrest Gump This double CD was played on every car trip with my family in the years after the movie came out. The album seemed to have a life and character of its own, almost separate from the movie. It was a great compilation that introduced me to a lot of music, including some classic rock, I hadn't heard before.
3. Various - Hits of the 60s I appropriated this CD from my dad during the year of my first big crush. I memorized all the songs. I listened to it at least once a day, sometimes two or three times a day, all the way through, for much of the 8th grade. It also launched my lifelong love for oldies.
4. Radiohead - OK Computer The second CD I bought. This is one of the albums that got me through high school; when I was 13-14, the sounds and lyrics channeled a lot of my inner turmoil. Every song on it has always floored me in different ways. Over the years my appreciation for it has only grown.
5. Limp Bizkit - Significant Other Hey, nobody said every album on the list had to be good! In the Summer between 8th and 9th grade, I was desperate to become popular; I watched TRL with my sister frequently, and convinced myself to like "artists" like these jokers, Juvenile, Puff Daddy, Smash Mouth, and others. I bought this CD proudly, and... I was never able to listen to it all the way through. Each track was cacophanous and filled with stupid, douchebaggy lyrics. Every time I popped it in, I ended up skipping pretty much every song after a minute, until I finally admitted that it was a turkey. I bring it up sometimes as a joke now. Everybody has bought at least one embarrassing CD that comes to serve only as a warning to others.
6. Frank Sinatra - Songs for Swingin' Lovers / Only the Lonely In early high school, my fascination with my Italian heritage, gangsters, and New York brought me to Sinatra. I bought most of his albums in a very short time, and listened to them almost daily -- often while doing my math homework (maybe that's why I performed so poorly in Math). I think I hoped some of his class and smoothness would rub off on me so I could pick up girls. When I felt optimistic, I reached for Swingin' Lovers. When I was miserable, I put on Only the Lonely and holed up in my room to brood. I was angry if anyone else sang his songs or listened to him because they didn't "get it"; I thought of Sinatra as my own secret thing. Yes, even I was immature once...
7. Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland If you ran Track at Pioneer High, you breathed Jimi Hendrix. All of his stuff was good, but this album stood out to me as a fully realized "experience" of the height of his talent, culminating, of course, with "All Along the Watchtower."
8. Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks After I heard "Tangled Up in Blue" on someone's mix tape driving home from a Cross Country meet, I went out and bought this: my first Dylan album. After that, I couldn't get enough of him. Of all his CDs, this album seemed to best capture the deeper, melancholy feelings of my high school years, from the innocent hope of "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Simple Twist of Fate" to the bitterness of "Idiot Wind."
9. Genesis - Invisible Touch Just a plain solid album. "Domino" remains one of my favorite epic songs, and I'll never forget a vivid experience driving down a dark road in a blizzard with "Tonight" playing, with my headlights lighting up the falling snow.
10. Pink Floyd - Meddle At the time I first heard it, Meddle was a wild departure from everything I had heard before. It was a mad album; the songs were strange and frightening, but they never went over the deep end into total chaos, instead flowing out of, and back into, the dreamy melodies Pink Floyd did so well. Because of the inherent scariness of this CD, it became the go-to album for driving around in the wilderness at night, and never felt quite appropriate in any other setting.
11. Supertramp - Crisis? What Crisis? This was the first Supertramp album I bought, even though I had listened to my dad's greatest hits CD for many years. And, though most of my favorite Supertramp songs are on their other CDs, this one works the best as a whole album that I can just listen to straight through. And it has one of my favorite album covers ever.
12. NIN - The Downward Spiral I don't really know why I got into NIN, but I did so methodically, buying their CDs in order and letting each sink in before buying the next. The Downward Spiral, even on the first listen, knocked my socks off so hard that I considered stopping right there -- it might be too painful to hear Trent Reznor's music taper off into ordinariness after hearing such a masterpiece. He struck the balance of industrial sound and rock perfectly on this one, and in my opinion he never equaled it before or since. Each song alone could be one of his best, and they fit together seamlessly. To the passerby they sound like noise, but attentive listening introduces you with each run-through to new layers of music. Alternatingly scary, angry, sad and vulnerable, it's an album like no other.
13. Soundtrack - Silent Hill 2 I have always liked video game music, from the tunes of Castlevania and Metroid to Megaman. But not since Final Fantasy III was the total score of one game so emotionally resonant and so successfully built around a theme (in this case, loss, fear and guilt). And you could buy the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack, so I did.
14. Soundtrack - Lost Highway Arranged by Trent Reznor, this soundtrack stood out to me as unusually good. It pulled off the impressive feat of hanging together some pretty different kinds of songs and instrumentals into a whole that amounted to more than the sum of its parts. It's part quirky and silly, part moody, and yes, part creepy (sometimes very creepy) -- just like a David Lynch movie. I've never tired of it.
15. Gorillaz - Demon Days I hesitated to buy this CD for a long time, worried there would be too much rap in it, since some of the group's songs have some rap in them. But when I finally got it, it quickly became one of my favorites. Great music, great lyrics, lots of creativity... what more could you ask for?
"AN OBESITY TAX IS ONLY THE BEGINNING"
17.December.2008 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
The governments of New York City and New York State destroyed my belief in government, and by natural extension, my belief in the political Left, by giving me a front row seat to both in action. This action comes in two flavors: rules and services. All government activity at every level could, in fact, be boiled down to these two basic themes.
The post office and the subway represent the services -- the friendly face of New York's Uncle Sam. They are paragons of inefficiency and ineptitude. Each is unbearably slow in its own way: the post at getting your mail to you, the subway at getting you to your destination. We all have a post office story about things lost in the mail, long lines and limited office hours, parcels sent 2-day delivery that arrived in the mailbox a day late even though they reached the destination city on time (one of mine), being hassled by postal workers, a pervasive "not my job" attitude, valuable parcels left on one's doorstep where anybody could just walk by and steal it...
The subway is worse. The MTA of New York is constantly in the red, yet they equally constantly have goofy pet projects, like the T-Line of 2008 (now R.I.P., I suppose) and other half-baked service expansions that are aborted only after millions have been spent. Fare hikes come every year, but the trains keep getting more crowded and slow. Rush hour is torture. On the weekends one is virtually trapped in his own borough, waiting up to 30 minutes for a single train. Trains get pulled off the track without explanation, rerouted without warning (sending people helplessly over the East River), and every weekend brings a cornucopia of complex service changes (i.e., the N train is skipping stations X and Y on Friday after midnight, but not on Saturday, and then on Sunday from 10-4) -- only half of which are ever listed on the MTA's website. Everyone has had the ride from Hell, in which he was trapped underground for an hour without moving. And get this: the city plans to cut subway service in 2009, while making a huge fare hike. Monthly tickets, which I buy, will rise from $81 to $104, and the city will cut weekend service in half, reduce service across the board, and slash two train lines altogether. Riding to work for a year on "public" transit will actually cost me more than the cost of car insurance and gas money for the same time period when I was in college.
This is the best government can do.
Then there are the rules. The New York City Council, a nearly 100% Democratic body, loves to make rules. So does Mayor Bloomberg, a Democrat who pretends to be Republican or "post-partisan" depending on the direction of political winds. They passed a "symbolic ban on the N-word," in obvious contradiction to the First Amendment, and they boast their contempt for the Second Amendment with draconian gun control laws such as the one requiring a mandatory minimum of 3 years in prison for carrying an unlicensed gun (which ensared Plaxico Burress, even though his gun was registered in his home state of Florida). They made an anti-environment, anti-small business law regulating pedicabs, and tried to make a law banning pedestrians from listening to iPods or talking on cell phones while crossing the street. There seems to be a law for everything here. And then there's the infamous transfat ban. For those unfamiliar with it, the city banned restaurants from serving foods with transfats, no matter how good they taste, because the transfats were giving all those ignorant poor people heart attacks. In other words, the city government believes it can play doctor.
So, evidently, does Governor Paterson. If the government simply wanted more revenue, it should raise taxes on all soda -- but that is not enough. It must be non-diet sodas specifically. The government wants to steer human behavior. Personally, I hate diet drinks. They're disgusting. I would rather drink water, nine times out of ten. The Obesity Tax, like the Transfat Ban, springs from the government's belief in its own wisdom, and from its self-serving lust for control. These twin delusions are giving momentum to the push for nationalized health care.
It is perfectly rational for people to wish for government health care in this day and age. After all, government employees enjoy it. The rest of us are stuck in a bizarre system where most employers buy our insurance, and people not employed by a rich company pay outrageous rates. Due to the Kafka-esque bureacracy already in place, a New York ambulance ride costs $400, and to have stitches removed at a different hospital from the one where the stitches were done adds $400 to the the cost of the stiches (again, my own stories). People feel forced to take and keep jobs they don't want or like, merely to stay covered, which discourages risk-taking. That reform is urgently needed is obvious.
But if that is rational, it is also utterly rational, given what we know about the government -- its consistent failure in delivering services, and its eternal temptation to make rules and micromanage the lives of its subjects -- to consider that these factors absolutely will be part of a nationalized health care package.
If you think a tax on non-diet sodas is petty and obnoxious, you ain't seen nothing yet. The obvious problem is that everyone is different, and that these differences tend to divide people into factions. White people are more affected than other ethnic groups by cystic fibrosis; black people are more affected by sickle-cell anemia. If you think that won't be a cause of tension, you haven't been living in America for the last twenty years. Do we prioritize research into AIDS or Alzheimer's? Paralysis or diabetes? Such questions will be answered not by demand, but by Harry Reid or whatever political party is in power. Thin Americans will not want to subsidize their fat neighbors' quadruple bypass surgeries, so expect new bans on more than transfats. Fried food, pancakes, donuts and bacon will become things of the past. Non-smokers won't want to subsidize chain-smokers' lung cancer surgeries, so expect a total ban on all smoking, plus bans on incense and campfires, because the government knows how to baptize by firehose only. Since most people won't want to pay for Type II diabetics' massive medical bills, non-diet sodas will probably be banned altogether. Eggs will jump back and forth once a year as dieticians continue to flip-flop on whether they're good for you or bad for you. Various food lobbies will try to convince the government that their product is healthy and another is unhealthy, in order to exploit tax breaks and antagonize the competition. Motorcycles will be outlawed, and other risky activities like jaywalking will become serious offenses.
In short, because the government will be on the hook for all of our health, it will have the right to tell us what we can and can't eat, smoke, drink, or do. It's only fair.
When it comes to service, we should know what to expect. We've already seen it in our post office and public transit. I've read almost nothing positive about the English and Canadian health care models.
One final thought. Under a national health care program, doctors will likely be overworked and underpaid. Now, we all know there are a lot of people out there who are very smart and could go into almost any field they want after college, i.e. the trinity of Law, Medicine, or Business. Those among such people who want to make a good living, who might otherwise have gone into medicine, might instead pursue a different field in which they could still reap the benefits of free enterprise. Which would lead to a lower overall quality of people in the medical profession. And I don't want to hear about how doctors shouldn't be in it for the money: I would rather be operated on by a great surgeon paying off his yacht than by a mediocre surgeon who loves his job. Government activity always has unintended consequences.
"A LESSON FROM COLLEGE"
08.October.2008 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
In my third year of college, I lived in a house with seven other guys. That year was packed with bickering and melodrama, but one of the primary fault lines of the tension in the house was the kitchen.
We had two refrigerators, and both were constantly full. In the beginning, we thought it was ludicrous to have eight jars of peanut butter, eight gallons of milk, eight dozen eggs -- endless multiples of the same staples for each person. That also meant we had to use tape and markers to label our groceries.
Our solution was to buy "common" items and and everyone would chip in for those. We went shopping, and one person would buy all the common goods while the rest of us bought for our own private needs like soda and ice cream. Then we'd get out the receipt and a calculator and settle up back home.
When we got to the house with that carload of junk, the situation rapidly deteriorated. Someone had bought a thing expecting the others would chip in, to find he was the only one who wanted it. Two or three people needed an item but the other five or six didn't. People started moaning, "I don't drink milk so I don't want to pay for it," "I don't use mustard so I'm not paying for that," and so on. Figuring out who owed what was maddening. But this was just the first night. We soon learned that some of us used products more than others -- one guy could drink half a gallon of milk in one day, so other people complained that he should pay more than his share for the milk. Someone would finish the cheese before another guy who had paid got to have any of it. We all started to be angry at each other. I was as bad as anyone else. The arrangement brought out the worst in us. It was such a disaster that we only did it once.
Now, imagine a whole country of 300 million people doing the same thing. But they aren't fighting over eggs and peanut butter -- they're fighting over surgeries, retirement benefits, energy, tax breaks, jobs... an endless list of things the government has "nationalized." And it isn't eight college kids, but young against old, black against white, Spanish-speaking against English-speaking, Christian against Muslim, gay against straight, city folks against country folks...
"GEORGE CARLIN"
26.June.2008 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
The older I get, the more I'm impressed by George Carlin's ability to remain relevant, funny, and energetic. Many great entertainers hit a plateau early in their careers and when they pass their peak, they never quite find their way back. John Carpenter comes to mind: in his prime he made some of the best movies I've ever seen, but in the 1990s that high faded. Carlin sustained his power for some 40 years. I saw him live once, when he came to Ann Arbor. Old as he was, he still had the spirit of a young man. He was not a weak imitation of his former self. His jokes weren't stale -- they were hilarious, and obscene, as always. Like my track coach, Don Sleeman, he exhuded an aura of immortality, as if he had been born centuries ago and would still be running around 100 years from now, after I'm gone.
Not only was Carlin funny, but his commentary on the English language and how it's abused was amazing and crucial. I remember his routine about how "shell shock" evolved into "post traumatic stress disorder," and how the addition of syllables and latin-based, scientific words brought the term further and further away from the original feeling and meaning of the thing. If you look for it, the world is filled with such linguistic hoodwinks. Many people cruelly apply the word "antisocial" to a shy person, but few people know that "antisocial" is a synonym for "psychopath," a person without the capacity to feel concern or sympathy for others. I've known a real life psychopath, and he was brilliant at social functions.
Listening to George was a roller coaster: one minute he captivated you with his linguistic illustrations and their scary implications about modern life, and the next minute he would throw down a poop joke. You never knew where he was going next -- and he could still do it as a 70-year-old man. He always looked like he was having fun, and you were invited to join him. Possibly my favorite of his routines was the one about airlines. He captured perfectly just how scary flying is and how ridiculous are the airlines' attempts to talk the dangers into meaningless nonsense. I don't know if he addressed it in his later years, but I'm sure he hated just as much as I do the computer voice that says "Please watch your step as you exit the moving walk."
George Carlin was raised Catholic, like me, and unlike me, he became an atheist. I would like to think that part of him lives on in the next world; for those of us still in this one, he left us great laughs and immortal words.
"AMERICA THE ENTITLED"
22.May.2008 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
With the presidential election coming up in November, I've done a lot of thinking in the course of the past year about the responsibilities of our government and the vector of our country. A farm bill just went through Congress giving $300 billion of taxpayer money to the agriculture industry and various special interests. I'm not certain, but I think that's more than we spend on the Iraq War every year. But while people are whining continuously about the money lost on Iraq each day, I don't hear anybody whining about the farm bill. Basically what the bill is doing is giving free money to farmers -- not only the small-time homesteads you're thinking of -- which are all but gone -- but corporate farms, and congressmen who maintain farms on the side, and others who don't need the money. President Bush, who so many people hold responsible for everything wrong with everything, asked Congress not to give these handouts to farmers who earn over $200,000 a year. Congress refused -- the actual "limit" extends to farmers making $2 million a year. I wish I was making this up. Bush vetoed it, but since almost every single congressman in Washington voted for it, the veto will be overridden. If Congress were controlled by Republicans this year, he would not even bother to veto it, but this way he can blame Democrats for the pork spending spree, even though both parties are equally guilty.
Politicians can do this with a straight face while simultaneously hawking "gas tax holidays" for all those poor parents "struggling to put one more dinner on the table."
What all this indicates is that our government has succumbed to a mentality that everything is free and that taxpayers' money simply materializes in the treasury rather than being seized from our paychecks every month. It is this mentality that enables politicians to talk about universal health care as if it were a no-brainer.
My biggest gripe with Barack Obama is that he plans to raise the social security tax. I pay more than a month's rent in Social Security taxes in one year. That's money I could save or invest. Everybody in my generation knows that we won't get Social Security benefits when we retire, yet my age group views Senator Obama as the Messiah who will promote our interests (finally!). I'm good at saving money. Why should I subsidize people who aren't good at it? My college professor, Mr. Bauland, once said the solution to the Social Security issue was easy: don't give it to people who don't need it, i.e. retirees who make $150K or more annually without it. None of our politicians are willing to do that. Those retirees are still entitled just like everybody else. Social Security is a fundamental right -- even though it didn't exist for most of our country's history. After all, it's not my money, it's Uncle Sam's... but it is my money, I worked for it and Uncle Sam didn't.
Since we're a democracy, the government is like this because the people are like this. People want handouts.
My stepdad once said that Rome fell because the Romans became comfortable. I wonder a lot about that; maybe America will decline because we have become too comfortable. Comfort breeds boredom and also the leisure to tinker with novel ideas. In high school, more teens read Marx's Communist Manifesto than Adams' Wealth of Nations before either becomes assigned reading. On Facebook I see a wide swathe of political views ranging from the bizarre -- "libertarian socialist" -- to the empty, like "apathetic" or "other."
In school we spent a lot of time learning about Calvinism, which I thought was the most boring thing in the world. The people who first settled here sounded so rigid and cold-hearted: they believed that wealth and success in life were often a reflection of good character and morality (and by extension, God's favor), and that poverty and misery sprung from an inborn weak character. That didn't mix with my feelings that wealth resulted from greed and luck. But this survival-of-the-fittest mentality may be exactly what made Americans so resourceful and successful. People outside America think this view is selfish and anti-community, but on the contrary, Puritans with their City on a Hill vision were all about community. The whole message was that everybody had to carry his own load, and if you didn't, you brought everybody else down with you. The community could not endure if people persistently expected others to look out for them.
How does that compare with modern political rhetoric about "compassion" and "a more caring America"? Would those early settlers approve of such indulgences as farm bills and bank bailouts?
In terms of resources, technology, jobs, and liberties, America is the wealthiest and most powerful society in history. It's not really fair to say we're the greatest nation that has ever existed, but it's evident we're one of the most desirable nations to live in, ever. The average person making $20K a year here lives better than kings did centuries ago, with air conditioning, high-speed internet, cheap flights around the world, Polartec winter jackets, and the ability to survive or resist most illnesses. That leaves us with ample time to relax, blog, and ponder how to "make the world a better place." What this seems to be leading to is the piece-by-piece rejection of whatever brought our success in the first place.
Our economy has always been based in capitalism and free markets: a rejection of mercantilism and other systems with heavy-handed government manipulation. Now, the corporations we work for, and from whom we buy our technological wizardry, are evil and greedy and taking control of the world.
Our political philosophy was crystallized by the life's work, uniquely brave actions, and profound wisdom of such greats as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and their colleagues -- now they're more famous for being slaveholders (read: hypocrites) than for creating the United States. As the founders are further and further discredited, so are the rights they fought for: freedom of speech and religion, the right to bear arms, the right to privacy. And as these rights are increasingly devalued, we increasingly view anything we want as a right. It's an instant-gratification lifestyle: 60 years ago, abortion was a dangerous procedure, but now it's a human right. The Pill didn't even exist 60 years ago -- now, feminists see not only its availability, but its tax-subsidized cheapness, as a fundamental "right" -- because condoms are so, like, primitive. Free use of medical technologies that didn't exist decades ago is also a right. My mom once said, "Fifty years ago a cancer diagnosis was a death sentence. If you had cancer, you were dead." Now if you get cancer, you can still recover and win the Tour de France half a dozen times, but nobody wants to see the price tag of such miracles. No one wants to pay the scientists who cooked up the medicines or the engineers who designed the surgical instruments, both of which are extremely complex. It should all be free. All human beings, for simply having been born, have a right to use all these services "on the house."
Even Christopher Columbus draws protests: at the University of Michigan campus I used to see signs saying, "A rapist, thief, murderer, and slaveholder does not deserve a national holiday!" We can't celebrate a single figure or event in our country's history anymore without also firing a self-ironic salvo at it. President Lincoln, be warned: your turn is coming.
We've also lost respect for our modern leaders -- not merely for their judgment, which should be questioned, but for the offices they hold. I noticed this last Christmas in Florida, when my family sat down to sample a cartoon called "L'il Bush" in which the Bush family and other famous Republicans are reduced to "Ren and Stimpy" style jokes. Jeb Bush is mentally retarded; Vice President Cheney bites off the head of a live chicken, sleeps with Barbara Bush and in the process gets trapped inside her uterus. Try to imagine such a program depicting Franklin Roosevelt or even Ronald Reagan. Hard to visualize, isn't it? That's because at one time this kind of thing was unthinkable. The office of the president had a sanctity and prestige that has been forgotten thanks in part to the scandals of Nixon and Clinton, but also because of the mass cynicism I've described here.
Because we are so prosperous, we've come to take that very prosperity for granted, so we don't bother to think about where it came from. If people forget where it came from, they will not understand how to preserve our success for future generations. This will lead to more unrealistic expectations from the public, which will cause more irresponsible governing, which will ultimately breed greater resentment, disrespect for our institutions, and anger in the citizenry. If this pattern spins out of control, it could rapidly eat our country from the inside out.
If we become so used to making others give us what we want that we forget how to work for it (or buy it) ourselves, the rest of the world will respond in frightening ways. When I was young and naive, I didn't think America's place in the global food chain mattered -- as long as we can enjoy our basic comforts and freedoms, who cared if China, or anybody else had more economic and military might? But in reality, dictators exist in most hemispheres, and when they're defeated or die off, new ones will replace them. In the nuclear age, these dictators have cards to play they've never had before in history. A young, ideological government with warheads can now threaten a rich superpower -- if its back is turned. We must tread a terrible line this century between vigilance against totalitarian enemies and, in the name of security, becoming an autocracy ourselves. The freedom and quality of life we now enjoy could be just a passing flicker, a quarter of a millennium, as the tide of statism and cultural tyranny wash it away.
This isn't all in my head. I put two and two together. I listen to what politicians say, and I read the constant stream of intellectually retarded letters to the editor (and op-eds) in the daily paper. I hope things don't get worse in my lifetime, but really, how could they not?
"THE ENVIRONMENT GOES POP"
22.March.2008 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
But conservatives may rightly complain that the left has successfully brought the environment to pop culture. I'm going to complain about it, too.
The popularizing of the Green movement is the kind of thing that makes me randomly get angry on the subway. It's just completely wrong. Environmental concerns are scientific issues, about which tools like Leo DiCaprio know little. In fact, these boorish spokesmen turn off the conservative politicians who need to be convinced that they ought to care. Let's see, who wants to be sermonized by rich prats who live in mansions on the coast of California?
What really pops my blood vessels, though, is the advertising. If Green goes Pop, then it must in turn go Corporate, and it has, with wondrously awkward results. On Valentine's Day I saw someone with a Barnes & Noble shopping bag. The bag had a message: "Have a Green Holiday!"
No, no, no! This is an atrocity. I almost screamed. I don't want to have a green Valentine's Day, ever. The shopping bag was not wishing us a happy holiday, it was commanding us to adhere to a political agenda on our holiday. Thanks, Barnes & Noble. I never even liked Valentine's Day that much; if I see something like that on Halloween, I might do something I regret.
And that's the real kicker: the more poppy the pro-environment culture gets, the less helpful it is. The masses don't have the same nuanced grasp of these issues that dedicated scientists and researchers have; so, instead of nuanced solutions, we're getting dumb, easy ones. Why bother to turn out the lights or ride a bike to school when you can get somebody else to clean up the world for you? Normal people don't have to do anything if the government creates an artificial market for bio-fuel that results in rampant deforestation. Another "easy" answer is to spend money, because that takes no effort. When you buy plane tickets, now you can opt to buy "carbon offsets" so you don't have to feel guilty about your flight. No thanks, if I wanted to flush my money down the toilet I would use a real toilet so I could at least see where it was going. And if I wanted to feel guilty, I could purchase and watch a bootleg DVD of Meet the Spartans for much less.
Then there's the doomsday talk. The ads make this a "save the planet" issue. You'd think that the earth was on course to become the surface of the moon reading the posters outside. By buying carbon offsets and expensive furniture you are doing your part to save the earth itself from destruction. That's bull. No wonder conservatives call this environmental thing a kind of religious cult: sacrifice to alleviate presumed guilt, end-of-the-world scenarios, it's all there. The reality is that environmental protection is in our interest as a civilization. If we cut down all the trees and drove out all the wild animals until the whole planet resembled New York's upper east side, life would no longer be worth living. Most of us would like our great-grandchildren to be able to swim in the Great Lakes or hike in Yosemite. Worrying about the economy seems less compelling when you look at China, where the economy is booming but Beijing is a cloud of smog. Personally, I have lived in a city where I couldn't ride a bike without a gas mask because the air quality was so bad -- these are things that get people's attention. If we framed this whole business as being about ourselves and our self-interest as a people, it would be easier to get folks onboard. Instead, the Green movement is about guilt, about how man is raping the earth (how popular the rape archetype is with liberals, but that's for another article).
When I was a kid, reduce, reuse, and recycle was a strong message for everybody. I remember how much it moved me and stuck with me. Now all we get is Live Earth concerts so elitists like Bono can be worshipped as idols while they tell the rest of us rabble how to live. Kids living in Greenwich Village on Mommy and Daddy's money flood Whole Foods Market under a fairy tale that they're changing the world, even though they have never planted a tree or had to wear a gas mask or seen their hometowns assaulted by urban sprawl. As a boy I hoped someday the world would wake up to environmental issues, but like so many granted wishes, it has come in the wrong shape. We deserve better.
"THE POWER OF NO"
22.February.2008 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
Nothing shows you how much you love something like trying to give it up. The way I reach for candy bars and ice cream in the grocery store, or run down to the snack bar at work after lunch, is like a reflex. I don't even think about it -- until Lent, when I force myself to.
If you have given up the right kind of thing for Lent, you soon begin to hear a little voice in the back of your head. "Rough day at the office? A Milky Way Dark will make me feel better." No. "Nothing follows up a good cheeseburger quite like a fresh pecan pie." No. "This movie is great, but it would be even better with a bowl of ice cream." No...
I think Lent is really about learning how to say No. Because it's hard. In Christian doctrine, naturally the voice you're saying no to is the devil, temptation, etc. But in the outside world, this is valuable exercise. It just might be training in how to say no when it really matters. "If you upgrade to our premium plan right now, you don't have to pay anything extra for three months!" No. "I'm sorry I kissed Peggy, I swear it'll never happen again... will you marry me?" No. "Hey, Mom, I just finished college and I don't feel like working yet, could I crash in your basement for, like, a couple months?"
You get the idea. Here lies the dilemma: I've noticed that in my lifetime, people everywhere have an intense aversion to saying no. They don't want to hurt others' feelings. They don't want to be the one who kills the party. But it hurts us all. This isn't limited to America, either -- I saw it in Europe too. There is an anti-no movement out there, related to the be-happy-all-the-time movement, and the never-stop-smiling crusade, trying to ram positivity down everybody's throats. If you've ever had to watch a training video at a new job, you've probably seen this stuff yourself.
I was once being made a job offer -- I won't say when or for what job -- and the HR woman was explaining to me how vacation time works. I asked politely, "Will it be possible for me to take unpaid vacation time beyond the normal paid allowance?" She said, "Well, ummmm, yyyyyou can ask, uh, your supervisor about that." She wanted to say something like, "Hell no, are you kidding me?" But she couldn't. Better pass the buck on to someone else who is trained in how to say no.
I've been in her shoes before. When I worked at a science museum in Ann Arbor, where I gave tours to kids, the whole point of the tours was to establish a dialogue with the kids. Get them to learn by asking them questions, and getting them to ask questions. This same job is where we weren't allowed to teach evolution to the groups if the parents didn't believe in it (even though we were looking at dinosaurs and lungfish); where they removed a beautiful diorama of a Mayan/Aztec human sacrifice ceremony "because it wasn't true (wasn't it?) and gives people the wrong, violent idea about a [long dead] culture"; and where my boss sacked me for joking about how most of us working at the museum were single (I had included myself in the joke). My boss didn't have the guts to tell me I was fired, though -- she let me know by taking my name off my personal mailbox in the mail room.
But I digress... in our tours with the kids, we were told: "Don't tell the kids no. If they answer one of your questions wrong, tell them something other than no. Telling them no upsets them, it makes them feel bad." I'm not making this stuff up! Being told you are wrong is now a damaging, traumatic experience for a child.
What a crock of relativist horseshit. How can kids learn how to survive in this extremely challenging world if they can't even be told when they get stuff wrong? While busy patting themselves on the back and creaming their pants over promoting self-esteem, did these people ever ask themselves if maybe kids need to hear no sometimes? If kids need to have boundaries? I remember how I tried, for a while, to dance around it. "It's a stegosaurus!" "Nnnnot exactly..." It was horrible. After a time, I gave up and just used the dreaded n-word. The kids were fine. They liked me a lot more than my boss did.
The no-allergy causes people to behave in cowardly, petty ways. A large number of girls I asked out in college never had the courage to turn me down. Instead, they were nice in person, agreed to do stuff, gave me their phone numbers... and then refused to answer or return my calls. They adopted the "if I ignore him he'll just go away" posture, as if I were a bee, when a simple "I'm not interested" would have sufficed and shown me a lot more human dignity.
As a species, we need to learn how to say no more. People shouldn't be afraid to draw lines between themselves and others, between the possible and the unwise, between their real desires and those assigned to them by someone else. Lent is good practice because I'm saying no to myself -- the hardest person of all to refuse. I don't always succeed, but I enjoy the challenge. I usually learn something in the the process, too.
"TWO PARTIES, TWO REALITIES"
17.October.2007 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
Politics disgust me more with each passing day. Not only America but the whole civilized world is cursed by the bickering between the Left and Right. Sometimes this grows so intense that I wonder how civilization holds together at all. I'm beginning to think one root of the problem isn't that progressives and conservatives offer different solutions and programs -- that's a good thing -- but that they see two totally different realities. A story in the New York Times will be almost unrecognizable in the New York Post. Which is the truth? Nobody cares about cooperation, compromise, or perspective. The people who give us the news are mostly biased button-pushers. Bill O'Reilly, Bill Maher, the Clintons, Rush Limbaugh, and so many others are determined to push us to one side of the fence or the other. "You can't have it both ways," as they say. But this is bad. Really bad. Some modern examples come to mind.
To the Left, Iraqis hate us because we came to steal their oil. The people killing each other (and our boys) there are "insurgents" and malcontents who want freedom from American "occupation" to determine for themselves the fate of their nation. People blowing themselves up in markets are just protesting our presence. The minute we leave Iraq and the Middle East, everyone there will drop their AK-47s and be best friends. Saddam was a bad guy, but hey, at least he kept things stable. We supported him in the '80s anyway.
To the Right, Iraq is being invaded by destabilizing agents from Iran and foreign terrorist groups. The suicide bombers are maniacs trained from youth to hate western civilization and will do anything to harm westerners and thwart our peaceful agendas. These people want to see America retreat so they can throw down roots in Iraq and turn it into a theocratic land of thugs and terror training camps. They probably want to take its oil money and funnel it into terrorism, too. Saddam was a ferocious dictator who spent his whole career terrorizing and breaking the will of his people -- no wonder they're having trouble grasping this whole "modern democracy" thing.
To the Left, most people on Earth are starving in poverty while a handful of the hyper-rich who stole everybody elses money are living it up. To the Right, the poor and middle class have it better than they've ever had, and we can thank Ronald Reagan for that.
To the Right, our health care system is just fine. Most people who don't have insurance don't really want it anyway, and if the system ain't broke, we better not fix it. To the Left, the aforementioned masses of poor are dying in ER waiting rooms while they wait for expensive cancer treatment, having been diagnosed with grave illnesses the same day they lost their jobs. All this could be solved by socializing medicine or forcing people to buy insurance even if they're unemployed.
To the Left, a fertilized egg is a mass of cells that will, with luck, be a baby in nine months. To the Right, a fertilized egg may be the unborn second coming of Jesus Christ, or possibly Ronald Reagan.
To the Right, a man on death row is a monster who must be made an example of. To the Left, a man on death row is a "victim of poverty and inequity" who was most likely framed or profiled.
To the Right, a Mexican immigrant is a con fleeing the law of his country to steal custodial jobs from white men in ours. He has no desire to learn English and no respect for our laws, and worst of all is exploiting tax-funded social services. To the Left, a Mexican immigrant is the ideal citizen, "living in the shadows" and "taking the jobs Americans won't do," and entitled to live here because the Spanish invaded the southwest before we did. To big businesses, who control both parties to an extent, a Mexican immigrant is a walking dollar sign.
To the Right, pot smokers are degenerate criminals. To the Left, pot smokers are degenerate criminals.
To the Right, homosexuals are a grave moral threat to civilization and the nuclear family. The very existence of such perverts undermines every principle upon which modern society is based. If they were allowed to marry and divorce like everybody else, the system would break down and the West would fall. We know this because of a passage in the Hebrew Bible where God digresses from his instructions on how to sacrifice animals and keep track of slaves to mention that homosexuality is unnatural. To the Left, homosexuals are a reliable source of votes.
To the Right, Cuba is a disastrous failed state ruled by a cruel dictator and we must punish them for this with an eternal embargo, without which our capitalist, free trade ideals would be contaminated by their communist influence. To the Left, Cuba is a wonderland of freedom and free health care led by a misunderstood hero with awesome facial hair, and we must embargo them forever for God-only-knows-what reason.
To the Right, the flag is a sacred object and those who desecrate it are unspeakably evil. To the Left, the flag is a symbol of American imperialism and people who descrate it are merely protesting the current administration.
To the Right, the tobacco industry is a bottomless source of campaign dollars. To the Left, the tobacco industry is a bottomless source of tax dollars.
To the Left, global warming threatens to end all life on Earth, nay, destroy the entire planet, within about 10 years. The only solution is to halt all industry, growth, and progress and return to 17th century life, then put multibillion-dollar space shuttles high in the atmosphere to patch up the ozone layer and suck up all the carbon dioxide. To the Right, the weather's never been better and if we did anything to curb our carbon it would send every civilized nation into permanent bankruptcy.
To the Left, the Katrina disaster resulted from the federal government's incompetence. To the Right, the Katrina disaster resulted from the local government's incompetence.
And there you have it: two Americas. Two of everything. It's not healthy or productive at all. In order to solve our problems, we must first agree on what they are, yeah? How much deeper can this get? Will it eventually snap back like a rubber band? The front runners for the presidency on both sides now are combative, divisive figures: Clinton and Giuliani. Both of them love to throw slime at the other party, and their party bases worship them for it. Whichever one of them is elected, the opposing party will go nuts and act like it's the end of the world, to the winners' delight. Are we entering a political era when candidates are chosen not for their leadership qualities or their programs, but rather for their ability to piss off the other side? Barack Obama's candicacy is founded on the promise of cooperation and bipartisanship, which is probably why Hillary is destroying him in the polls. On the GOP end, Huckabee is getting a similar browbeating. (Both candidates in fact have fairly typical platforms for their parties, but at least they seem to be human beings.)
How many of the "facts" above do you agree with? Irony was applied liberally. The scary thing is, I didn't have to exaggerate much.
"WHEN DID WATER STOP BEING WATER?"
13.June.2007 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
Although study after study shows that tap water is cleaner and safer to drink than bottled water, people don't seem to believe it, probably because tap water still tastes different in different places. The tap water here in New York tastes like crap to me. The tap water back home in Ann Arbor tasted great. The water in Scio Township tasted even worse than the water in New York. I use a pitcher filter, which helps get rid of some of that annoying taste in my water, but it doesn't make it go away completely. I like the Fiji bottled water because it really does have a great "taste," meaning that it tastes like nothing. Water is supposed to taste like nothing, not like metal or plastic or horse maneur or whatever.
I like to buy mineral water, but I have to be careful. A lot of it has sodium in it, which makes me more thirsty rather than less.
The pattern I'm seeing these days is that people don't want their water to taste like nothing anymore. I can't believe all the flavored waters in stores now, water with "extra oxygen," vitamin water, and all this other baloney. Water that tastes like oranges isn't water, but it's not juice either; I don't know what it is, but why drink it when I can drink either orange juice or water or a sports drink?
At restaurants now the big thing is putting lemons in water. Boo. I hate lemons in my water. Even after I remove the lemon, the water still has all the lemon acid in it. That's bad for your teeth and it tastes lame. Back when I bussed tables, occasionally customers requested lemons to put in their water. It was annoying, but if they were nice about it I didn't mind. Now, that has evolved to where as a customer, I must request no lemon with my water! Why the hell do I have to take the extra energy to make a request not to have something extra and unnecessary added to my water? Lemons should not be "standard."
But this is where our overstimulated culture is going. Nothing can ever be plain and simple anymore. Everything must be overcomplicated and must come with a twist. No pop song is complete now without a rap interlude after the second verse; filmmakers have to ruin perfectly mediocre flicks like Identity with absurd twist endings. When I was a kid, I hated water because it tasted like nothing, but then I grew up and learned that drinking soda and fruit juice all the time causes cavities, and water is healthier anyway. Back in those days, at restaurants my sister and I would take the sugar packs and empty them into our water and stir it with a straw to turn it in to "sugar water." As we got older we understood how ridiculous that was. Meanwhile, the rest of American society is growing down rather than up.
If I visit a Starbucks I can see the same thing happening with our coffee -- you can now put all kinds of crazy twists into that. But that makes sense, since American "coffee" is also pretty much just water.
"DANE COOK IS THE WORST COMEDIAN I'VE EVER SEEN"
13.June.2007 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
My roommate Bill often complains about Dane Cook and the fact that he's starring in a slew of movies now. Dane Cook is riding high and a few people are angry about that. But it would be lame of me to join in bashing him, given that until last night, I'd never actually heard or seen his act. Which is why I sought him out on YouTube yesterday after work. I watched about 15 minutes worth of one of his stand-up gigs. That was as long as I was willing to wait for him to deliver a giggle.
He is the least funny comedian I've seen in my life. He makes the watermelon-guy look like a comic genius. Now that I've experienced his routine for myself, I can share in the anger of others over his recent success. His formula is standard for a comedian: he talks about himself and strange characters he encounters, general observations about the world, quaint anecdotes. But his delivery is totally un-funny -- he's a tool! He spices up boring jokes by wiggling a little bit, but the way he uses his body is just annoying.
You know those guys that always show up at parties who aren't interesting or fun, but they have to be the center of attention at all times? They don't listen to anyone because every conversation with them is one-way, and must be about themselves. Girls flock to them while every other guy at the party is scratching his head because the guy is less funny than you, less good-looking than you, and even kind of a jerk. That's Dane Cook!
When the afore-mentioned tool leaves the room, the girls stand around and say, "He's like, so funny," even though they weren't laughing when he was around... no, I'm sorry, they were doing that fake soft giggling that isn't really laughter (you know what I'm talking about). I don't know what it is -- maybe a strange, primitive fascination with arrogant attention-hogs.
Watching the audience in Dane Cook's show spoke volumes about him. They didn't laugh: they clapped and cheered. Do people clap and cheer for Dave Chappelle? No, because they're doubled over laughing themselves to tears! When I watch George Carlin and Lewis Black, I choke from laughing too hard. I can watch any comedian worth his salt from Chris Rock to even Robin Williams and see audiences genuinely laughing -- not just clapping and cheering like they're at a pep rally. If you don't have that unstoppable gut reaction of laughter, the comedian is not funny. If you have enough breath in your lungs to go "WOOOOOOO!" then you're not laughing, much less cracking up. That's not comedy -- it's what happens when people laugh because they want to look like they "get it" like everybody else, which is because of herd mentality.
It was also telling to see that everyone -- everyone -- in the audience for Dane Cook was a pasty white suburban American. It's safe comedy that young people can see without worrying about exposure to edgy social commentary. It's another facet of the Walmart-Bon Jovi-DaVinci Code-The Secret culture of mediocrity-worship gripping this country. It needs to stop, right now.
But the forces of homogeneity and stupidity have the momentum, and so does Dane Cook. Now he's starring opposite Jessica Alba in a romantic comedy. Am I hallucinating this? Whose johnson did he have to blow to get that gig?
Comedy is one of the most subjective mediums in the world. Maybe I'm wrong and there are intelligent people out there who actually find Dane Cook hilarious. But observing his audience tells me another story. So what if I'm a bitter troll flaming him from the safety of my computer desk while he's out making millions and dating supermodels? What can I say? He shouldn't be making millions and dating supermodels! He's not talented enough, just like Paris Hilton is not talented enough to put out CDs and star in movies.
Evidently there are millions of people who disagree with me. To them I ask: remember Pauly Shore?
"THE SPIDERMAN 3 HATERS OUGHTA BE SLAPPED"
04.May.2007 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
A lot of people seem to disagree with me (and with my roommate, Bill). These people are either missing the point, or they are just stupid.
[Beyond the mainstream public, in the newspapers and at websites like Rotten Tomatoes, critics are giving the movie ferociously nasty reviews. Perhaps they watched a different movie than what I saw. By the language in some reviews I've read, you'd think they had just sat through Patch Adams 3. This article is my way of "fighting back" against this flood of baloney.]
The "just stupid" group falls into two categories. The first is the people who suffer from what let's call Return of the Jedi syndrome. After how sublime The Empire Strikes Back was, many people thought Return of the Jedi could never be as good. The second Star Wars movie was just too perfect. People somehow wanted to hate the third act. They went in expecting to hate it, and the movie proved them right. It feels good to be right, so people who "knew" the third movie would be terrible and poop on everything Lucas had built got a boost from cognitive dissonance making the movie as bad as they wanted it to be. My generation got to see all 3 of those movies in rapid succession, without any buildup of expectations or cynicism in-between, so most of us love Jedi. These people come out saying either that the movie was "too overblown and excessive" or that it was "too understated and they didn't let loose enough." Of course they think that. The third movie in a trilogy has a tough act, since it must toe a line between being too over-the-top or being too tame to do justice to the previous movies. Alternatively, the movie may be "too similar" or "too different" from the other two movies -- another challenge for filmmakers. Spiderman 3 strikes the balance perfectly. Sam Raimi makes it look easy.
The other stupid people are those who read bad reviews (written by both the first stupid group and by the "missing the point" group) and they feel like they're in on a big secret. "Hey, this movie is shitty! I knew it all along, because I read it in the 'paper! Gee, I'm so smart!" But that's not smart, that's dumb. That's herd thinking, and it's fit only for animals that we eat.
The "missing the point" group is what really baffles me. It's the same people who hated Jedi just because of the Ewoks. My dad was one of those people, but I'm sure he'll like Spiderman 3. These people fixate on a choice made by the filmmakers that differs from what they would have liked the movie to be, and it spoils the whole movie for them. I could never understand why my dad hated Jedi for something as insignificant as the ewoks, and frankly I don't understand people with this movie either. In this case, it's that Spiderman 3 is funny. There is a comic relief dancing sequence (it sounds worse than it really is), in which Tobey Maguire is spot on in his comedic timing and of course, Raimi directs him with just the right touch. It's a light break in an otherwise very grim movie, and I liked it (I liked the ewoks, too). So what if it's silly? A movie's purpose is to entertain, not to browbeat you with violence and misery like X-Men 3 -- it's not the filmmaker's job to make the movie exactly what you would have liked it to be, but rather something only he and his team could make. It's called vision.
I didn't think this movie was perfect. I haven't thought any of the Spiderman movies were exactly what I would have envisioned. But why let that ruin them for me? I hated that they scrapped the Danny Elfman music for the new Batman franchise, but I didn't discount them altogether just for that.
Today everybody I encountered was talking about how Spiderman 3 is getting such bad reviews, how it's not a sure bet, how they're much more excited about Shrek 3 and other safe movies that are impossible to hate. At the cinema, the audience laughed and jeered when Peter Parker cried, and booed when the credits rolled. Times Square audiences are some of the worst I've ever experienced. These people were idiots who read the bad reviews and went in thinking they were smart and knew what people like me didn't. The movie was a joke to them.
I don't have to tell anybody to see this movie, because you will anyway. But don't go in planning to hate it. It's not any different from the other two movies. Actually, it's a fucking good movie. There's no special catch or inside joke that you need to know; it's not some nerds-only flick that only the diehard fans "get it" enough to enjoy. It's just good, exactly like Spiderman 1 and 2. If you think it's bad because there's goofy scenes in it, that's unfortunate, but you're wrong. It's still good, and you will realize that in a few years when you see it again on video. If you think it's bad because you read a bad review, then you're an idiot.
Because the thing is, Bill and I couldn't stop smiling after we watched Spiderman 3. That's because we had gone in with open minds, trusting Sam Raimi and the great cast to show us a good time, and they delivered. The other people in the theater, who hooted, made fools of themselves, because when the dust settles, this movie will be vindicated and they'll look like sheep. And like I said, it feels really good to be right.
"A PSYCHOLOGICAL DIVORCE"
6.March.2007 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
I reflected on this when I read about the salmonella in peanut butter. After the salmonella in tomatoes and chocolate, and the E. coli in spinach, the peanut butter kind of broke my threshold of wanting to write something about it. For months I'd been seething about the FDA's rulings that it's okay to push cloned and genetically modified animal meat and dairy on consumers without labeling it. But what bothers me is this: people don't like it, but they don't do anything about it. In a poll, a solid majority of Americans didn't want cloned or genetically modified meat and dairy pushed on them. Yet the same people continue to buy those big generic gallon jugs of milk, and line up for the fast food, that come from the industries that do those things. People are appalled by our nation's rampant agricultural malpractice, but that doesn't stop them from shopping in the supermarkets that sell industrial-farmed food. It's safe to say that anything not labeled with "no GMOs" contains GMOs; people think of "organic" as meaning tofu and hippy food, non-traditional, but meat and produce made "organically" is really the traditional stuff, while the supermarket garbage is genetically engineered, farmed with designer pesticides that hurt the soil and our bodies, and treated with chemicals and antibiotics to look and taste the way it should. This is known -- but I don't see food coops conquering the grocery shopping landscape. New fast food restaurants open every day and everywhere. Microwave dinners are still popular, too. Even Whole Foods Market doesn't have a perfect record on fully organic products, because they bank on the fact that people who go there will simply trust them on their name rather than reading the label. We're forgetting the power of the boycott that all of us possess -- our most potent weapon in this profit-driven age.
The force of the divide is ubiquitous, though. It touches nearly every issue, every concern, in our lives. Take the Iraq war, for example. From 2002 to about 2006, most Americans supported the war -- but not paying additional taxes to fund it. I read recently that U.S. taxpayers dodge or illegally evade about 500 billion dollars of taxes, collectively, every year. That's about the cost of the war so far. But no Republican dares suggest that people pay taxes to support our troops; all we have to do is stick yellow ribbons on our bumpers. When the 200,000 wounded return to be treated like dogs by veterans' hospitals, people express outrage, but those hospitals are obviously underfunded and guess where their money comes from: taxes. There's this attitude that the government is some kind of omnipotent money tree -- probably because we pay too many taxes -- and that all we have to do is ask Uncle Sam to "Do something" and he'll reach into his bottomless wallet to conjure up a new program or subsidy or solve all our problems. When that happens, taxes go up, and people ask for more handouts because they expect something in return for those tax dollars. Scary cycle, isn't it? Anyway, the government isn't backing up the taxation with much representation. It certainly isn't representing the wounded soldiers. People ask for tax cuts, but they don't want to lose their government programs. I don't hear any protesters saying, "I'll give up my X if you'll use those tax dollars to fund Walter Reed."
Perhaps the most frustrating offense, though, comes from politicians and celebrities. Democrats these days, and even some Republicans, love to stump about protecting the environment and they say "everybody must do his or her part" to combat global warming and reduce our so-called carbon footprint. They say it's easy for everybody to do, and want to impose things like banning incandescent lightbulbs. That makes sense -- incandescents can never be as efficient as flourescents, and flourescents have gotten quite advanced and are less harsh these days. I've replaced my bedroom light with a full-spectrum flourescent bright enough to read by, and the bathroom light, and whatever lights I can without imposing my will too much on my roommate. I eat mostly organic food, which is made with much less heavy machinery, and in turn saves a lot of gasoline. I use recycled toilet paper and tissues, and I only flush the toilet once per use. I take public transit; in Rome, I biked to work. The politicians are right: it's not hard or even expensive to reduce your impact on the environment. Often, it comes out to save money. None of my lifestyle choices impact my quality of life, although I admit I miss owning a car. So, if it's so easy, why don't all the people espousing it actually do it? They can't tell people what to do or how to live their lives, so the best tool at their disposal is to lead by example -- so where's the beef?
It recently became public that Al Gore's mansion gobbles up 221,000 kilowatt-hours of energy in one year. To put that in perspective, I did some fun number games. My roommate and I paid an electricity bill last month for 168 kilowatt-hours. Extrapolated to one year, that's 2,016 kilowatt-hours, or 0.9 % of what Al Gore's family of four uses. Here's another one: one incandescent light bulb is 100 watts or 876 kilowatt-hours per year if you leave it on 24-7; an equally bright flourescent is about 25 watts or 219 kilowatt-hours per year. Which means that Al Gore's home uses enough energy in one year to run 252 incandescent bulbs or 1,009 flourescent bulbs, around the clock, for an entire year. But different people use different amounts of light in their homes, and businesses use a lot of light, so maybe that's not the best example. Refridgerators, however, are more of a constant. All homes have one, most have only one, and it's always on. A good, big, new refridgerator with a freezer uses around 500 kilowatt-hours per year. So, Gore's mansion uses enough energy to power 442 refridgerators.
His response was that he compensates with all the carbon credits he buys and his contributions to environmental organizations, and of course his work for the cause. That's admirable, but it's kind of like chopping down a forest to build your house and then donating money to Forestry -- it doesn't undo the fact that you cut down that forest. (By the way, I'm not attacking his air travel around the world to lecture on global warming, which has an impact but is good work for the cause.) Celebrities seem to be the same; the Academy Awards have "gone green," but I guess that means they buy carbon credit to reimburse their limousines and private airplanes. Are they willing to coat those 15-pound statuettes with copper instead of gold? Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tried to create a new House committee on global warming and simultaneously requested a private 757 jet to taxi her between Washington and her home in San Francisco. All of the front-runner presidential candidates live in nice mansions that probably consume as much energy as Mr. Gore's. I remember when John Kerry's wife was harried because she drives an SUV -- and I remember not feeling sympathetic to her. John Edwards's campaign message (shared by several other candidates) is along the lines of, "let's stop whining, stop waiting for other people to do everything for us, get off our butts, and do this shit!" I'm still waiting. (It's also odd that a big-government politician is talking about self-reliance.)
It burns me up because politicians should live what they preach. They ask people to follow, yet they decline to lead. But it's hard to blame them because they are us. Everybody has this psychological divorce, so it's hard to expect politicians to rise above it. But in failing to do so, they cheapen their message.
This isn't even "not in my backyard." Our food, taxes, and environment are very much in our backyard, no matter how immune we think we may be. The pattern seems to be the almost willful ignorance of the connection between the products we buy and where they came from, between our expectations and the price of getting them met, between what we eat and how it affects our bodies. Maybe it's time to take a good look at our lives -- not in the mirror, that's narcissism -- but at all the little things. Our shoes, our shampoo, our cheese. And yeah, the light bulbs, too.
"LEGISLATING MORALS"
1.March.2007 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
That word (we all know what it is) sullies the tongue that utters it. But we still hear it all the time. Its prevalance in modern life, especially in rap, is depressing. But as a word, it falls under the umbrella of free speech. Passing a law to ban the word disrespects our constitution; is protecting our dignity and decency as a people worth that? Everybody knows when and where the word is acceptable to use (in quotation, explanation of its history, and so forth), when and where it is dangerous to use, and when and where he can get away with using it. The third factor stems from the fact that, like any taboo, the word is mysterious and exciting in a juvenile way. Remember when you discovered the "F word" in elementary school? The more we fight back against a bad word's use and acceptance, the bigger that immature satisfaction of breaking the rules can get. And then we get things like the Michael Richards meltdown.
Most importantly to me, we must not forget the lesson of A Clockwork Orange. The young thug receives a medical treatment that renders him physically incapable of his beloved violence and cruelty; but his chief counselor, a priest, asserts that the protagonist's turn to good is meaningless because it is a compulsion rather than free will. If our society is able to overcome racial prejudice and epithets, would we rather do it through willpower and persistent cultural education? Or through the force of law and the wrist-slapping of the government? Sometimes, by forcing progress, the government robs it of its meaning.
"THE WORST GENERATION?"
16.Jan.2007 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
Reading the daily paper last week, I came across yet another opinion piece panning my generation. It's pretty popular these days, not only for journalists but also for parents and the general "older" public, to malign the 18-25 age group to which I belong. While our grandparents are praised for saving the world in WWII and our parents take credit for the civil rights movement, we young folks are blamed for everything from not voting in high enough numbers to turn out Bush, to not protesting anything, to not working as hard as previous generations, to being out of touch with good ol' fashioned American values and of course, drinking too much.
Statistics show that many of these much-loved accusations are simply not true. The tendency is really for every aging group to look at the younger ones as somehow worse, more selfish and less moral. It's normal, but I'm getting a little tired of it recently, and so, I sense, are many of my peers.
We work just as hard as any other generation, but we probably work harder at a younger age. When I talk to baby-boomers, I don't hear anything about all the gazillion different sports, extra-curricular activities, and community services they had to do from birth in order to distinguish themselves from the other millions of A-students trying to get into good colleges.
Sometimes boomers get pensive and wax philosophical about how much more complicated life is for us. They cite modern divorce rates, terrorism, our broken education system, and so forth as examples. But I don't really believe this. The same number of boomers, naturally, tell us how much easier we have it, and how spoiled and over-priveleged we are and how we take it for granted. I don't buy that, either.
Every generation drinks too much. The pattern seems to go that, when people hit their teens and early twenties and experiment with grown-up activities, ways of protesting their parents' wishes, and socially branching out, they do certain typical things. This includes sex, drinking and other drug use, driving recklessly, getting big crushes on despicable boys or girls, and other things not generally considered useful or positive. That's normal, but every generation, I hear, gets worse than the one that came before. If this were true, wouldn't we have devolved to the state of rabid beasts by now? Well, the second step in the pattern is that as people grow up and into their thirties, the same activities that felt so cool and exciting at 15 lose their allure and people develop moderation. And so, equilibrium is restored. Sure, we faced some awful trends in my day, and kids in high school now look pretty silly to me, but need we tell our parents how "cool" the hippy movement looks to us, much less disco?
I hope when I'm 40 or 50 I don't become so cranky about our offspring. Sure, I'll do what I can to encourage responsible behavior and hard work, but I won't forget what my peers were like, or even what I was like. I played, and re-played lots of video games when I should've been improving myself. I'll try to steer them away from it, but I'm sure my kids will find some way to be lazy and procrastinate, just like all kids. The part that bothers me, though, is the throwing around of blame.
The favorite word of the baby boomers for us is Apathy. We don't care enough. We don't hold rallies or protests of the magnitude or importance they grew up with in the 1960s. Actually: we do. The media, which is not controlled by us, simply doesn't cover it. About a year ago, hundreds of thousands of people gathered before the White House in Washington to protest the Iraq war -- before it was "fashionable" to speak out against it. The rally was ignored by every major news station.
Tied into the apathy attack is another one: that we lack the patriotism to serve in the military. The favorite example is the hundreds of thousands of Americans who gave their lives in WWII (WWII is the touchstone for illustrating all the values we have since lost) compared to the many people my age who protest the Iraq War from our cozy couches. There was a time, such as when President Wilson threw conscientious objectors into concentration camps, when questioning war and questioning killing as solutions to the world's problems was a brave stance. I guess now that pacifists face only stigmatization instead of torture and prison, it's "cowardly" to be anti-killing.
My feeling is that our generation is as caring and uncaring as every other one before us. I find it very hard to believe there are no apathetic or cynical people older than 25, or even older than 40 or 50. But it's those older people who hold the conch, so to speak. They write the books, they go on the talk shows, they sit in our government, and they control what's on our televisions. And they have much to say.
While we're at this, why don't we turn the spotlight around? Who is genetically re-engineering everything we eat from produce to poultry and forcing it on the market? Who is taking bribes from lobbyists? Who's paying athletes millions of dollars a year to rampage through bleachers throwing haymakers and to use steroids? Who is upholding everything wrong with the status quo, staying the course, building nuclear warheads, and policing away individual liberties? Not 18- to 25-year-olds!
Instead of groaning about how my generation is failing to live up to the legacy they built, maybe the older Americans should draft us a wishlist -- before we're too old to take it to heart -- of mistakes they made that they would like us to avoid. Not the moral goofs of youth, but the really tragic and destructive mistakes of adulthood, of "everybody's got a mortgage to pay" cynicism and greed, of the "not in my backyard" mentality, of intolerance and over-parenting everything to death, that we haven't yet made ourselves. But, if what I've said in these paragraphs holds true, maybe that won't do much good either.
"RULES OF INACTION"
09.Dec.2005 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
This has been a long time coming. I've talked with too many people about it, most of those conversations arguments, not to publicize my thoughts on it now. This is about the initial steps of attraction and dating. Let's launch from my current gripe -- telephone rules -- and go from there. Shall we?
There's a rule with calling people who you are interested in. I've heard it's two calls total for the person, which makes me think of getting arrested for some reason. I've talked to many girls about this, and they generally swear by some form of this rule. The rule is, if a guy calls a girl too many times, he doesn't stand a chance with her. Somehow, this illustrates that he's weak, desperate, too aggressive -- some kind of schmuck or another.
This rule didn't exist before Caller ID. I believe that Caller ID is one of the very worst inventions in the history of human civilization because it encourages passive-aggressive behavior. If a guy calls a girl who doesn't like him, she'll know it's him, and won't pick up. This might encourage him to call more. Call me paranoid, but I'd bet my bank account that it happens, and not just in rare, isolated incidents.
The real problem is, Caller ID gives girls a new litmus test for guys -- as if there weren't enough of them already. Men of my generation must jump about a million hula-hoops (some lit on fire) now to prove that we're not one of the many types of guys that suck. This includes players, poor guys, stalkers, desperate guys, guys who can't commit, guys who want too much too soon, guys with criminal records, guys who cheat, the kind of guy who waits until the end of the date and says "oops, forgot my wallet!" and all the other classics. The problem is, these tests we have to pass don't seem to actually keep those guys out -- instead, they obstruct average, nice guys who don't necessarily know what they're doing wrong, while the others, through either luck or talent or good looks or, once in a while, cleverness, beat the system all the time.
What does it really prove if a guy calls too much, unable to get through, in a given time frame? We all know the Cable Guy scenario is a sure sign of someone missing a few cogs. But I've been burned before for calling three times in two days. I mean, I don't know why a girl didn't pick up -- what harm does it do to call again, maybe after she's gotten out of the bathroom, or whatever? When I question this, girls invariably give the same response: "It's just the rules." "It's the way it is." "You just have to play the game." Why? Don't you question it? Isn't a "game" as high-stakes as relationships worth a little more thought than that? If they're really interested, they'll call back, they'll contact me -- right? Sometimes I wonder.
I hear a lot of complaining from women. "There are no good guys," "All guys are jerks." These are usually girls who date a lot of men and who move very quickly with those men, physically speaking. Meanwhile, I'm bombarded with the various criteria for this elusive great guy. Tall, blue eyes, nice tan, clean-cut, well-dressed, wealthy, athletic, has all the same interests, has no "emotional baggage," and so forth. I then look at the guys who "get the girl." These are the guys who always seem to have women all over them. And what are they like?
They rarely meet more than half of the standard criteria. They usually wear tacky clothes, earrings, have ugly haircuts, don't shave well, look scruffy, are that pudgy alternative to being muscular (but hey, at least they aren't shrimps!), and seem incapable of uttering words greater than one syllable. They aren't winners, they aren't anything "to write home about." But somehow, they pass all the tests -- or maybe girls, for some reason, waive a lot of their tests for such guys.
I've accepted the fact that I don't have that. I will never be able to pull that off. But what bothers me is the hypocrisy of it. I hate the tests. Another typical test is of whether the guy treats the girl, even (this really burns me up) if she tries to pay anyway or says "no, that's all right." If a guy is stingy, he'll do the wallet trick or make the girl treat him from the start -- otherwise, let us do our thing! I was once accosted by a girl: she pulled out her wallet on the date after I'd pulled out mine with every intention of treating her. So, I thought she wanted to pay for herself -- and boy, did I pay!
The "rules," I think, developed out of a long history of crappy guys taking advantage of girls who gave them a chance they didn't deserve. Our generation is cynical, and it isn't helped by the age-old tradition of men who profess their undying love for a girl to bed her, then vanish the next day. We all know a girl who this has happened to, don't we? I have known several. Those are the guys these rules are supposed to defend against, right? The notorious guy who seems to have it all, to be perfect in every way, who spouts tripe like "I've never felt this way about anyone before!" who in the end turns out to be a jerk.
The rules don't stop those guys. They learn how to get around them. They're good at what they do. The only test of a guy's worth is time. The guys who stick around, who are consistent, who are patient or even timid physically, but always interested in who you are, maybe more so than you them, are the real ones. They're the ones who won't suddenly turn evil. They're also the ones who are getting clobbered by this ruthless system.
Before I conclude, I want to make a point about this "emotional baggage" thing. I've looked at personals, I mean, who hasn't, even out of curiosity? A lot of girls say "no baggage, please -- I have enough already," or something like that. Bullshit! Nobody doesn't have baggage! Why would I want to put up with your problems if I'm not entitled to any of my own? We live in a time of divorce, athletes who put steroids in each others' butts, kids pumped full of head drugs they don't need, terrorism, Paul Anderson movies, etc., and you expect anybody not to be carrying some "baggage?" Please.
Another thing that has infuriated me time after time, which ties into this whole spiel, is girls' apparent need to look to outside sources to tell them if a guy is worthwhile or not. The two worst offenders are magazines and friends. Girls' friends tend not to like me; they tend not to like my friends, either. I don't know why. Sometimes I muse that the single friends become jealous of a girl-friend who meets a good guy, and want to break it up so they can have their friend back and be miserable together. Or, they want the guy for themselves and would rather not see him with their "best friend." It just amounts to more tests, the Friends test being one of the toughest to pass. And magazines -- I'm without words. They're filled with the stupidest, phoniest, most materialistic, shallow garbage there is. Why anyone seeks advice from them, male or female, is a mystery. How about letting a guy prove himself and not making him take a standardized test?
Other than to filter out bad guys, the Game is designed to manufacture the ideal circumstances to meet the perfect person if it's really him, or to not be too let down if it turns out not to be the one. It ensures that things move at a slow enough grind that getting anywhere interesting takes months and months, even while we live in a time when you can meet a drunk person at a party and sleep with him/her that same night. It artificially creates a situation where each person never appears to care or be trying very hard, so nobody looks like a fool in the end, but if things lead somewhere, later on both people can brag about how this magical relationship came out of nowhere "when I wasn't even trying!" Isn't that great? The problem is, it's fake. It feels contrived the whole time I'm locked inside the game's stupid loop. I feel like it doesn't allow me to be myself or express myself. It imposes something on me that's not really me. Which takes all the thrill and fun and excitement out of romance. Do we really need it? We have checks and balances in the government to make sure we don't move too fast and do something really stupid. There's no evidence that this concept helps at all with relationships -- I think it actually hurts things. If two people are right for each other, they'll probably figure it out in the natural course of things -- why interfere with that?
But I digress. I've learned one very important thing: both people must take initiatives in the early stages of dating. If one person does all the work, all the pining, all the sweating, the relationship will never be worth much to the other person: because they had to do nothing to earn it! If somehow it becomes clear that one person is making all the moves, showing all the interest, making every call, planning every date -- and the other has no chance to prove him- or herself -- then something's wrong. But I'd like to see a world where there are no rules, where people just do what they feel like doing and don't have to play a game; where every starting relationship has its own dynamic set by the personalities of its members and not by cheap "10 Ways to Tell if He's Mr. Right" gimmicks. How about that?
"THE ERA OF WEDDINGS?"
02.Dec.2005 - Eric Ford-Holevinski
Here's a sensitive topic: marriage. Sensitive for me because it's always been one of my goals in life (with no time limit set), and I want to feel happy for all these people around me doing it, but my feelings are mixed for some of these couples (including ones not yet engaged but who I predict will be within a year). I guess some of the feelings mixed into the vat include: happiness, worry, jealousy, shock, frustration, and the desire to support their decision in spite of whatever negative sentiment I have because I support the institution and want to encourage its future in what Coach Schembeckler referred to as "these cynical times."
I and, probably by no coincidence, most of my friends, are children of divorce. The insidious part of divorce is that for a kid, you can't detect the subtleties of its damage right away. It's only when you're older that you start to realize what you've lost (may have lost?). Then, for the rest of your life, you find yourself wondering if it's the cause of various problems you have, especially with relationships. But you never know for sure; sometimes I feel like it's killing me inside. You wonder if that's why you can't make things work with anybody, or why relationships don't feel super easy like everybody in them says they're supposed to be. The rest of the world looks like they're so happy and fulfilled, while you're not -- and it will always make you wonder if the divorce was at the root of it. Sound fun?
When I look at a couple that is or may be on their way to marriage, my first thought is, "it'll fail." Pretty disgusting, yes, but if I can't be honest with this, then with what can I be honest? I feel like I have an almost instinctive cynicism planted deep inside of me. I hate it. But then, marriage is a big deal that shouldn't be taken lightly. You will, if all goes well, be with this person for probably twice as long as you have been alive up to this point. It seems strange to me that people around me are marrying so young and with such frequency in spite of the fact that divorce rates are historically huge. Am I misreading the statistics?
My mom's fiance, who has never been married before, once said, "Everybody gets married after 30 -- married, or remarried." My parents religiously tell me and my sister to wait, and we kind of shrug it off, but I still think of myself as careful when it comes to relationships. I'd like to think of myself that way.
So, why is it that all my friends and I who are children of divorce are not really in the vicinity of marriage, while I know lots and lots of people from "intact" families who are married or on their way? Is it because we're more wary, or because we're somehow handicapped? Is my ambivalent view of my peers' early marital commitments because of concern for their well-being, or resentment because I don't have that, too?
Nobody has more respect and appreciation for the marriage institution than me. In spite of my parents having found wonderful new spouses since their divorce, I still believe, at heart, that divorce is as tragic as abortion and suicide, and leaves a great scar in its children that they carry branded on their chest for the rest of their lives.
I worry a lot that people are rushing into marriage for several possible reasons: Perhaps they love someone unhealthy for them, and they love the person so much that it fuels a hopelessly optimistic misperception about them. Other times I worry they're with someone just because they're afraid of being single, or they don't want to grow into an old lonely spinster. People are in dangerously flawed relationships and still looking to go all the way -- why? Why not have the patience to test the relationship and see if those problems are solvable? Because they can be highly exacerbated by marriage. And then there are obvious rebound relationships that are on the fast track to something more serious. Bad call.
So, to my peers, I say, please be responsible when it comes to marriage. I will always probably be jealous of how easy it appeared to be for others and jealous of the guys who got the girls I cared for at one time or another. But at least, if our generation can turn back this tide of divorce, less people will have to live what I have lived.
As I grew up I always looked forward to getting older. Many things were promised to me as I aged: getting to watch better movies, voting, driving, drinking, later bed times and curfews (and then no bed times and curfews), and in theory, being more popular with women as they came to appreciate "good" guys.
With age and its additional freedoms were promised additional responsibilities. Some of these were appealing, some were not. Doing my own laundry, buying my own groceries, cooking my own meals, and managing my own schedules and desires were among the good; paying rent, paying for food, paying insurance, the bad. Very bad.
Also growing up, I noticed a penchant among older people (late 20s and beyond) for waxing nostalgic for their younger days. Apparently, in Middle School you thought it was the best time of your life, then high school was even better, and college was better still! That's a laugh. Notice that after college, there's nothing.
I'll be honest: college was a terrific lifestyle. You have a monumental amount of freedom relative to the amount of responsibility. If you're lucky, which I think the majority of white UofM students are, your family provides you with enough money for you to maybe get an easy job for pocket change, and really the only limiting factor to your complete autonomy is classes and homework. You don't have to grow up or face Real Life but you get to have all the fun that adults have.
High School wasn't all bad, either. I admit I have an overwhelming number of top-ranking memories from those years, when a night of video games was always "enough," when I saw most of my favorite movies for the first time, and when sleep-overs meant something different than passing out on each others' couches.
During my last year of college, I felt sad and sentimental, but I wasn't really afraid of what came next. In fact, I looked forward to finishing my term and reaching the final, total freedom of being a working adult. After that, until there's a family to worry about, if you don't like where you are in life, you have the power to change it. If you hate a job you can quit, if you hate the city you live in you can move. All of your choices are entirely up to you.
Yet I've been surrounded by people complaining about graduating! People say after you're 21 and can legally do everything you'll ever be able to, there's nothing left to look forward to in life and "it's all downhill from there." I'm sorry, but if the climax of your life is the day you can drink legally, your life doesn't mean much.
I look forward to many things. I look forward to having a career that is rewarding and stimulating, being able to pay rent and feed myself and travel, I look forward to the challenges and rewards of marriage and raising children someday. I look forward to seeing where my friends' lives take them and how we improve ourselves and evolve in the coming years.
I'm sick and tired of people complaining about "being a grownup" and not having the blast they had back in college. Face it: you always knew college would be only 4 or 5 years, and you enjoyed it while it lasted, and now it's over. Get over it.
Life does not end at 22. Yes, it changes a lot, but that is as good or bad a thing as you make of it. Being part of the working world isn't a defeat or a surrender, it doesn't turn you into a boring person. Not keeping yourself young on the inside is what turns you into a dullard. Working the cliché 9 to 5 doesn't strip you of your individuality or personality, and it doesn't hand over all your personal freedoms to The Man.
This is a cultural curse, and as you might have expected me to say by now, I think Americans are its forerunners. I know lots of Europeans as old as 30 who are just as interesting and cool and anti-authoritarian as people I met in college, and more so. We seem to come from a culture that sees the young as the revolutionaries and the old as the closed-minded, out-of-touch burnouts holding everybody else back. It's a theme we're raised to believe from the beginning, and many young people when they reach adulthood blindly accept it.
This is a dangerous way of thinking. It's wrong to assume older people don't have goals and dreams and things going on in and around them. Once you graduate, more than ever, you need to get involved in the world around you, in who you really are, and how you can become your best self. Because you really don't know yourself until you graduate and must take on the many aforementioned responsibilities. Maybe that's what college students are so afraid of, after all -- that when they graduate they'll have to find out who they are.
In recent years my perspectives have changed a lot about America's laws and attitudes regarding drugs. The change has been slow, because of my upbringing and education, my social circles, and personal commitments. I always considered myself a model citizen, exemplified by my participation in community service and athletics in high school and squeaky clean lifestyle.
In school, I graduated from many, many mandatory programs with misleading labels like "drug awareness" and "drug resistance" (I thought drug resistance was supposed to be a bad thing). Counting D.A.R.E. in 5th grade, Health class in 7th grade, a sequel to D.A.R.E. in 8th grade called G.R.E.A.T!, and finally, another Health and Wellness class in 10th or 11th grade, that's four of the bloody things. And the titles were stupid, too.
I accepted these courses with a frustrated confidence. I felt they were unnecessary and consumed class time that could be used to learn things that interested me. After all, I knew all drugs were evil and bad and not to accept them when offered to me (which didn't happen until college anyway). All the classes told me was the details of how bad everything was and how much it would ruin my life and land me in the gutter with some gunshot wounds to grow on. All of them were based on fear and scare tactics to make people so afraid to try anything that no one ever would.
I accepted the complete truth of everything laid before me. I questioned nothing. At the end of G.R.E.A.T!, everyone had to write and present a speech to the whole class demonstrating his understanding of the materials in order to "graduate" and get a nice certificate. I coolly delivered my speech before classmates, girls I liked and guys who picked on me, my teachers, police officers, and school and city officials. Everyone was impressed by my confidence and honest embracement of the law and its inherent rightness. The officials and cops all shook my hand enthusiastically, beaming at me with expectation of the perfect citizen I would undoubtedly become. It was a proud memory to me for years afterward.
I later became exposed to new ideas and perspectives at the University of Michigan. I knew throughout high school that a majority of my peers smoked cigarettes and marijuana and drank alcohol. But they never bothered me about not doing it or asked me to join in. In college, however, all three of these drugs acted as major social facilitators and as I upheld my commitment not to break the law (or in the case of cigarettes, ruin my health), the years became long and bitter as I felt increasingly alienated from my peers and in turn reprimanded them for their drug use. I concluded that everyone just used drugs to feel cool and to say they did (and some did and do), or because it was illegal and that made it exciting for them (also not uncommon), but never that people used certain drugs simply because they liked to.
Before my senior year I turned 21 and celebrated with a mild night of drinking. Quickly after taking up my modest drinking practices, and realizing that it wasn't so terrible after all to use a drug, I wondered why I'd had to wait until I was 21. It seemed to me that if Americans were taught how to drink in moderation by their parents from childhood, and taught that it could be fun but wasn't anything very exciting (which it isn't), they wouldn't hit adolescence and college drinking as excessively and irresponsibly as they do, which I consider a social problem in America.
And so the seed of questioning was planted. I'd always aimed to follow the law completely, and if I desired otherwise I could write to the government or vote according to my desires for change and wait. Now, I began to feel the law is sometimes made poorly and unfairly. Why does the government retain the drinking age when it's universally known that anyone under 21 can drink whenever he pleases, legal or not?
More recently, I've questioned marijuana law the same way. The regular use of weed by some of my closest friends who are good citizens and some of the most moralistic people I know speaks far louder to me than all the lessons from policemen in school. I've read a great deal on the subject and found that everywhere in the world there's a call for marijuana drug awareness -- true awareness of the drug's real dangers and benefits, rather than an awareness that it will be offered to you and you must say no. Awareness that many doctors and scientists consider it less dangerous to individuals than any other notorious drug (that's not to say it's healthy), and that many normal citizens consider it harmless to society.
So, as I study and read and question, I recall my courses in school. What was I told? What were the culminating, ultimate lessons given me by the police? Here they are:
1. "Just Say No." (for D.A.R.E. youngsters)
2. "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time." (for G.R.E.A.T. students with a little more capacity for reason)
Pretty clever, right? The policemen preached these gems as though they were something pretty special. They aren't. But then, a lot of how good something sounds is in the way it's said. These were smugly and nonchalantly delivered as a final answer to all our questions. And it's a testament to what's wrong with America's War on Drugs and the government's insulting and naive attitude about drug use and the kids who must all make their own choices about it.
"Just Say No." Don't think about it. Don't hesitate or question it. Just walk away. Is that the way of thinking that this country was founded on? Forget educated decisions. People are going to offer you cigarettes and booze and weed, because they are trying to turn you into one of them. And they will push it on you and make you feel alienated and uncool for not going along with them. Or is it the other way around? Isn't it the government that tells you you're a piece of shit if you use marijuana? I find this image kind of funny, actually. A classmate in high school once said to me, "Fuck pushing drugs on people. I paid money for my shit and I ain't giving it away!" In college, however, people do offer you drugs. People offer each other a drink or a cigarette at a bar or party. A group of buddies about to share some weed offers a less known acquaintance a seat to get to know him better and make friends. There's nothing evil or subversive about these things. They're just a naturally occuring part of social life. Just saying no doesn't draw derision or pressure, but it does distance you from the people generous enough to offer you a share of something they paid for.
The phrase "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time" bothers me most of all. It sends a lousy message that appears strong because it sounds final. It doesn't matter what you think because in the end, if the government says you go to jail for it, that's what'll happen to you. So don't question the law, just follow it, because you don't want to go to jail, do you? It's based on fear. It says you're ultimately responsible for your actions -- if you get caught. The crime is only bad because of the punishment, not because it's actually wrong. There's no justice in this; it's obeying the law because it's there rather than because it's right.
These methods of teaching young people to resist drugs are an insult to their intelligence. To assume they don't have the reasoning power, at any age, to make educated decisions about whether or not to use drugs, is preposterous. Maybe if the programs explained what every drug is, established that there's a not-so-subtle difference between the consequences of marijuana and heroin use, supplied scientific knowledge and an understanding of why each drug had been made illegal or controlled as it is -- that would be a start. Explaining that although some drug users lead dangerous or self-destructive lives, there's a difference between correlation and causation, would be even better. As they are, these programs really just sow future mistrust in the government, the police, and in education as the students grow up and learn the truths about drugs.
I'm not qualified to judge whether or not drug laws are somehow right or wrong in a moral sense, though once I assumed automatically that they were right. Maybe that was because of the drug resistance education, or maybe I'm just predisposed to law-abiding by nature or genetics. I happen to think they do more harm than good and should be revised. Maybe I'll be able to help with that when I'm home. Those of you in America can do something about it now. Seek out programs that share your goals; use your votes and voices; write to politicians. It's currently a free country.
Please let me know if you have thoughts on this, criticisms and questions are welcome as they can help me revise my own thoughts and ideas.
All work © 2005-2010 Eric Ford-Holevinski