G. K. Wuori

National Grumps

I was talking to Pete the Pissed the other day down there in Lost Remembrance Park (some of you met him a couple of columns ago) and he started in on a rant about the erosion of civility in the country.

Civility, I should mention, is a pretty sophisticated notion for Pete, though it’s one of those topics that’s been in the news a lot lately.

Anyway, he began with “so you got Kanye West taking the moment away from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards, then Serena Williams more or less gives the women’s U.S. Open title in tennis to Kim Clijsters by way of sticking it to a line judge. I think I heard her say to the judge, ‘I didn’t say I’d kill you.’ Which is probably a nice thing to deny.”

Not being a huge fan of either pop music or tennis, I humored Pete and was more interested in the new paint job on the bandshell. But then he said, “and you got these town meetings falling apart with congressmen getting skewered in ways like if your boss did that to you, you could take it to your union, or even a lawyer.”

“People are upset,” I said to Pete. “These are difficult times.”

“It ain’t difficult times, buddy,” he said. “That ain’t what we’re seeing. I mean, you got some thousands and thousands of people marching in Washington not long ago, and it seemed like all they could do was scream and shout and call people names. Didn’t see a single petition or manifesto or alternate plan to whatever plan was chewing them up.”

Pete was in good form, no doubt about that, nor did I disagree with him a whole lot.

“You even got one of them kooky South Carolina politicians standing up in the Congress and dissing the president, and this was at about the same time some more kooks were raising a national fuss because the president wanted to tell some school kids how good it would be for them to stay in school.”

“Free speech, Pete,” I said. “That’s what we call it.”

“We are not seeing speech here, my addled friend. We’re seeing a tantrum, a national tantrum. In the process, we’ve lost our civility and our ability to converse, discuss, debate. So we scream and shout and call each other names. That’s a tantrum. That’s what tantrumized children do.”

“I believe you have a solution, Pete. You usually do.”

“I believe I do,” Pete said.

“And it is?”

“We need a national timeout. Remember from the history books how FDR declared a bank holiday to save the banks? We, my addled friend, need a people holiday.

“We need a day where everybody, and I mean everybody, stays home, where the whole country shuts down, where never is heard a discouraging word, where nobody talks about health care, the environment, war, taxes, bailouts, wind power, Rush Limbaugh, the flu, Ann Coulter, race, immigration, layoffs, government corruption, gay marriage, straight marriage, food processing, food additives, food safety, airport security, erectile dysfunction, California, Hurricane Katrina, Wall Street, YouTube, China, illegal drugs, legal drugs, or reality TV. In fact, we shut down the television stations, the cable outfits, the satellite radios, the broadcast radios, the newspapers, and, God forgive us all, the Internet. We achieve silence for one day, my addled friend. We chill. We freeze. We are, above all, cool.”

“I’m impressed, Pete,” I said, truly impressed.

“You see, our problem is that we’ve entered a democracy of communication where everyone has access to everyone, which means that the only things that get heard are those that are the loudest, the flashiest, the gaudiest, the most extreme. Enter, then, the tyrant. That’s what Plato said.”

“You’re quoting Plato to me now, Pete?” I said.

“I don’t know. Could have been Jay Leno or Stephen Colbert.”

“So it’s the Hitler, then, or the …” I began.

“Ah! That’s where you miss it, my addled friend. We are entering the age of the Corporatocracy. Those with the biggest purse strings own the media, and those who own the media own the people. We’ll be governed by boards, and notions of human destiny (quaint stuff, that) will give way to value-added behaviors.”

“Very interesting, Pete,” I said, “but I’m not a big fan of apocalyptic scenarios. The last time I waited for the Rapture I think it had something to do with whipped cream and lots of chocolate.”

“Which brings me to my final point,” Pete said.

“Okay?”

“Why isn’t anyone laughing?” he said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Well, you have six billion people who can’t get along dirtying up their planet and blaming everyone but themselves. That, my addled friend, is the stuff of humor.”

“Sounds more like tragedy to me,” I said.

“Huh-uh,” he said. “Tragedy is when you’re stuck having to choose from only bad alternatives. Comedy happens when you have good choices available but you choose only the bad.”

“Maybe I’m missing something here,” I said.

“Look,” he began, “that Rapture business. You could have holed up in your basement and waited for the End Times to take you to that big park in the sky. Right?”

“True enough,” I said.

“But you chose whipped cream and chocolate.”

“Yes, I did.”

“So you chose a cold treat instead of eternal salvation,” Pete said. “That’s pretty funny.”

G. K. Wuori © 2009
Photoillustration by the author