On Living and Society, Page 2

Suppose your best friend came up to you and told you he could read your mind. He asks you to fixate your mind on a thought; a word he would have no possible idea of knowing. You picked the word watermelon, and astonishingly he correctly divines the word watermelon – your privately chosen word. Skeptical, you ask him to repeat the act, as it must be a parlor trick, and he successfully repeats it. Two more times, he correctly divines the random words smartphones and chicken pox from your mind, as if he actually had a crystal ball to your thoughts. Would you be convinced he could actually read minds? What if he told you he had recently been struck by lightning? Magic hasn’t exactly been an integral part of our society, but through study of this fringe activity we can ourselves glean some insights to human nature. The audience at a magic show is usually comprised of a few individuals, all watching the show through their own special lens. There are skeptics and there are true believers and everything in between. The only thing important to the magician is creating a memorable event in the eyes of each of his audience members. Afterwards, you may go about your day taking away the message that anything may be possible. Integrating back into society after a magic trick is seamless, but there is one question at the crux of this integration: does the way you view a magic trick influence the lens through which you see the world?

  Perhaps this should be phrased in a converse way: does the way we see the world coincide with the way we view a magic trick? This simple question could explain the success of churches, monasteries and temples throughout the world. Magic, Religion, politics, air or anything that we believe in without directly seeing evidence are all results of a fundamental quality in humans: faith. Without it, we live sad, hopeless lives devoid of meaning. A magician’s job is to be so unthinkingly convincing that he creates an atmosphere where for 30 minutes or so, we have faith in his abilities in paranormal. However, whether we subject ourselves to the illusions or not, depends all upon both our faith and our view of the world (or schema).

  When people view a magician amidst his performance, they usually perceive the effect in two radically different ways. First, they can view the trick as an actual work of magic, (1. as if the magician was one day walking home, and was surprised by the devil at a crossroad. Then the devil pulled out a fiddle and played a little tune, challenging the individual to a duel, if he won we would gain powers, if the devil won he got his soul. The individual won and can now predict the twelfth card buried deep in a deck of cards.) This individual holds on to the blissful belief that these are more than simply illusions and that the performer can ultimately alter reality in some insignificant way. Secondly, the more rational individual views the trick as just that, a trick. They know the magician’s job is to specialize in deceit and that over hours of practice he has perfected a routine intended to give the illusion of mind reading, predicting the future or “divining” a message from the other side. In this view, the spectator plays the role of an individual who truly believes, if only for a few moments. Afterwards, they come back down to reality, and while they may not know how it is done if the trick is good enough, they still know that it is simply a collection of sleights and clever principles performed in concert. By letting their guard down during a performance, a person has the chance to see something amazing through the lens of a ten year old. The imagination flourishes and a truly majestic moment is experienced. Not to effectively say the individuals within a church can be compartmentalized to binary classifications of the former and latter type of believers. But these types of believers definitely exist.

  You know dozens of the latter. The individual who continues to come to church out of tradition or to show his face just enough as to avoid suspicion. This individual may believe in a higher power, but only for selfish reasons. Prayers toward this Santa Claus consists of “please do this,” and “please let me get that,” with no earnest intentions to hand their life over to an entity capable of literally smiting them. This keeps their life easier and allows them to enjoy much of the happiness of a true believer, without all the evangelical or spiritual work. The true believer honestly believes in a higher power, 100%. These sincere individuals are secure in their faith, often due to a triumph over adversity. Churches need to draw and nurture more individuals like this. Without doing so, religion becomes a useless institution, and the functional part of it will perish as it does. Pattern maintenance of societies will be left to another institution and religion will exist only to a select few “dinosaurs.” Ultimately, our search for a higher being is the same reason why we believe in magic, it keeps us sane. If you want to know the true believers in your church, show them a magic trick.

  WTFGOPTVLOL

  The GOP primaries were a hilarious demonstration of what not to do when running for president. The only thing that could possibly have made it any worse is if the candidates literally came out and offered a cash reward for anyone who voted for them. Since this past august they have systematically turned away virtually all-voting demographics besides the traditional old, white, rich, male voters. Shooting themselves in the foot they dejected votes from gays, minorities, women, and our youth. An idiotic move that is so profoundly stupid, it may actually work at getting Mitt Romney elected as president.

  I hate politics, so likewise, you can imagine I would hate writing about it. Politics are stupid and your vote doesn’t matter. People are stupid and I hate the fact that hot button topics like abortion and gay rights are so good at getting knee jerk reactions at pulling people out to the polling booths. Ignorance is bliss, right? However the stupidity of the entire campaign of the Republican Party has left me no choice but to open my fat mouth.

  Like the primaries, the entertainment industry of television has been in a sinking ship for a few years now. While the introduction of TiVo and the ability to watch shows on-line have made sitting down with your family and watching programming at specific times virtually nonexistent. It’s simple to forget that the only reason House airs new episodes on Fox every Monday night is to remind you to buy Coca Cola and Fords, however without these commercials television would not be a product. No Bones without Boniva. Unfortunately, the one thing that makes television unbearable at times is the only reason it is able to function. Advertisers are becoming privy to the fact that digital cable subscribers skip through commercials and individuals without it simply use it as a time to refill their cup of orange juice. Many individuals don’t even make time to watch the show that they used to as they find it far easier to watch it online the following day. This causes ratings to plummet and these decreasing ratings cause TV networks to have to refund advertising money as the reach of the show sinks. Eventually a lack of money may destroy the entire industry, and then what do you do? Watch your neighbors wrestling match at school, play golf with friends at the public park, or get involved with our local book club on Saturday afternoons? Good luck.

  The bedlam ensuing the GOP’s squabbling this passing year may be a look at what we should expect in the entertainment industry. Utter chaos, finger pointing, and petty theft. As advertisers begin to close out on television and begin to target more effective sources, like online providers TV may move to a more Home Box Office style, where every channel charges you an exurbanite fee for access to their shows. This (not so) petty theft will render many current televisions obsolete as there will simply be no reason to pay for the shows if you can pirate them a day later with no effort. The saying goes “If you can get the milk for free, why buy the cow?” Usually only applies to sexual situations, however it seems just as fitting here. Moreover, individuals doing this pirating will use the “everybody’s doing it so it must be okay” mentality to justify this show stealing, only to perpetuate the thieving cycle with irrelevant finger pointing.

  Millennials’ are young, and like most young kids, we’re fucking stupid. This logic makes sense to us, and this dumb mentality will spread. Much like the punishment Metallica endured after suing napster, when fans boycotted buying the
ir music, and killed their career for acting so “heinously” (by wanting money they technically earned). TV networks should learn from Metallica’s mistake and simply accept the losses they will face to piracy. Kids will get their entertainment, it doesn’t matter how many pirating websites you shut down. The incarceration of the founders of The Pirate Bay in late 2011 should have taught us that. Services like Hulu and Netflix are going to soon enjoy their reign of prime entertainment glory and there will be no competition to stop them.

  The chaos that will follow the fall of television advertising will be a calm before an impending shitstorm. We should be prepared to shell out money for providers like Netflix as they take over, and toss out our televisions as relics of the past. The advertisers have the ball in their court as to what move they are going to make over the next few years. With the options limited they will be sure to make an off the wall decision that will shape the way we get our entertainment for years to come. This move has a tremendous reach, but whatever move they make will be invariably stupid. But like Mitt Romney, this move has the ability to be so stupid it might actually work.

  Credo quia absurdum

 

  Novels + History

 

  My outlook at the American future tends to operate in a function inversely proportional to the time much of my friends spend trying to be cool. If that sounds confusing I’ll put it more simply: all of my friends seem to care way more about who they are impressing in this game we call life, than actually learning anything while along for the ride. Being a nerd isn’t cool in our culture, and being a black nerd is pretty much social suicide. But thanks to the man filling the chair of the oval office, Mr. Obama, being a black nerd in America hasn’t been so bad; the Obama effect, perhaps. I have been aware that reading isn’t quite cool, yet a new novel seems to be added to my bookshelf every week or so in an attempt to keep myself stimulated intellectually. However, the amusing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stirred up uneasiness in me when I read it in fourth grade and again this passing week when I revisited it out of boredom. The discomfort came about when a simple question popped into my mind that seemed simple at first, what is the point of novels? For entertainment, right? I mean.. its not like anybody reads Huck Finn for insights into how it would feel to grow up in America during the antebellum period right? However, it’s 2012, if anybody really wanted to get entertained they could easily find other options that require far less mental dexterity. Like watching a Twilight film, or listening to the latest Soulja Boy mixtape. So if people aren’t reading for entertainment purposes only, can novels really provide us a quality educational experience?

  Comparing The Jungle, Tom Sawyer, and The Great Gatsby you can see that they are all great books about cultural periods of conflict in American history, however they are also amazing works of fiction. These three novels were powerful books when they were released, and their underlying messages about the state of the union helped them reach wide audiences creating mass appeal. These novels told stories that immersed you into the lives of great individuals, while shedding light on what was wrong with society. Without ever making an overt mention to politics, hey fundamentally urged for social change. Novels consistently outsell history books because of this ability to entrench us in a story and historical fiction is a classic genre that doesn’t require any of the wild plots or crazy twist endings. The only thing that is needed is an imagination colorful enough to place you in a real town, several decades prior to its current age. All of these events could actually happen at a previous point in history. Paradoxically, as a student in the public education system, I never had a history teacher who could pique my interest in American history through any text as much as my English teaches did when assigning simple novels by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, or George Orwell.

  Novels have become an essential teaching tool for elementary and middle school educators in the past few decades. The concept that gets under my skin is the fact that we are literally teaching our children about the past by telling them stories that never happened. History classes have essentially become an excess appendage and taken a transient backseat to the lessons of an English teacher.

  This should be a problem, but it is far from the type of catastrophe like Three Mile Island. Instead it’s a problem like only getting six digits of a hot girls phone number is a problem: easily solvable if we decide to put in the work. Like going through and calling every possible phone number that last digit could be, we can use our love for novels as help instead of a hindrance. I’m not advocating we get rid of history classes at all, in fact, quite the opposite. We should immerse the use of historical fiction within the curriculum of more history classes in place of those old, biased, turgid history books. Getting children involved by reading an interesting story that has the same general gist of the events of the era is basically the same thing as reading them events that actually happened, right? This radical practice will probably lead to more effective teaching of the American past. Personally, I don’t remember much from my eleventh grade United States history course, however I sure as hell remember the plot to The Grapes of Wrath. The simple fact is, that it’s far better for our children to learn something rather than nothing at all.

  Our love for entertainment reaches influences the kind of text we like to read. So as far as infotainment goes, historical fiction wins out over historical textbooks any day. It is because of the simple human nature that we would rather read an entertaining approximation of the truth than a dull precise restoration of fact, and this is not because we are lazy. To be honest it may be because we are lazy, and this cripples us intellectually. However, because of creative authors like Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, we may have hope for the future of our country after all.

  Perils of Paranoia.