Parodies Lost

How Do You Evaluate Yourself

One of my most powerful memories of being a teenager was writing in my journal to myself when I was an "old man."  At the time, 58 seemed awfully old, but I think I was focused more on 70s, but the issue arises regardless of age & is totally dependent on circumstances.  What I wrote was that I hoped at the end of my life, I could look back with pride on what I'd accomplished--not so much for myself, but left as a legacy.

Yuck.  Legacy.  That word has probably killed more people than Jesus (as a word.)

How do we evaluate ourselves?  What we've done?  What mark did we leave?  For agnostics, it's particularly difficult, but there's no heaven where the essence of who we are extends for eternity.  So, as an agnostic, I realize that, except for a handful of people, virtually every human being's existance is forgotten with a generation or two or three.  And even those famous souls whose fame seems to extend to eternity, how much do we really know about Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, Plato, or Bach?

Hell, I just learned that Cleopatra was a Greek!

From one perspective, what we do in the few years granted us is irrelevant.  Few of us will turn the tide of history, become Roosevelts or Gandhis or Maos or even Hitlers.

And now that I'm a point where we're trying to sell the house and move somewhere cheaper and less congested so I can retire, I can't help but look back but also forward.  What have I done that's made a difference?  What will I do in the years left to me to make a difference?  My wife and I planned for years for me to be able to retire early...but now I'm obligated to this seventeen year old kid to account for my career.  And the stresss of where to live, selling the house, arranging the finances, and a very bizarre sleep disorder that's messed up my brain for the last six months has made each day so much less than it should be. 

I don't know what to say to him.  I think, I hope mostly because of this brain fog, I can experience life day-to-day the way one must in order to leave something meaningful behind.  I do look back with some pride at what I accomplished, and regrets at what I wish I'd accomplished, but you can always say you should have done more.  And many of those so-called "regrets" can and will be addressed in my so-called retirement.  (Except for being a folk star...I think I'm a little old for that.) 

But when your brain is screwed up, it's very hard to find the path that John Spivey, who wrote The Great Western Divide, outlines.  I know it's there...sitting, calling to me...asking me to accept and integrate rather than to fight.  But I can't find it.  I want the inner peace that John too searches for, but, as I lay dying, I want to be able to say, as my father did, "I fought the good fight."

As I lay dying, I know that within a very few years, no one will remember me, but that's not my purpose here.  Will I be able to say I left this world a better place than when I found it? 

What other criteria can one use to evaluate one's self?

Three Steps from the Caves: The Myth of Civilization

We are living on the edge of a precipice. Don't look down. It's taken me a long time to realize how critical the situation is, if, in fact, I am right that we are living on the edge of a precipice. What if we aren't but think we are? What's the difference in our behavior? Whoever, whatever, or however we were designed, something important was left out - the ability to accurately see the present. Our brains are not wired for the illusion that dominates our beliefs handed down from the 18th Century Enlightenment - the possibility of rational thought. The reality is that our brains aren't wired that way.

Perhaps I should start with, Are we living on the edge of a precipice? I look around me and see that our society is failing, the world is failing, we're making a mess of this Eden given to us -- by God or Darwin, I don't care -- it doesn't matter. What do you see, I wonder, and how can we resolve our different visions?

Human beings as civilized creatures is the most dangerous myth ever foisted upon a species. It's not fair. A million years ago we were living in caves, probably without language. In evolutionary terms, a million years is the flicker of a lightning bug. Our tools have evolved so much faster than we have that we mistake the elegance of the tool for the basic barbarian who created and now wields it. How could such an imbalance happen?

I have facts to support my illusion. Do you have facts to support yours? For example, as a good corporate spokesperson, I belittled global climate change for years, but only a fool would reject the notion that something is happening to our climate whether humanity is a major or minor player. Or consider that nuclear proliferation is reaching the point where a bomb planted in a major western city is simply a matter of when, not if. We proudly proclaim high moral values, but at the slightest sign of inconvenience, they're jettisoned. We rarely live them.

What did we learn after six million Jews and six million others got gassed and flamed and tortured to death by the Nazis? The world since then has become a testament to our heightened morality and chest-thumping words of grand visions.

We stood by while Cambodia created its killing fields, the Hutus and Tutusies (a fictional racial creation) slaughtered each other, while Mao and Stalin and Amin and countless other dictators and thugs and scum slaughtered at will while we wept oceans of crocodile tears. It's still going on - right now. Today. In Darfur. Do you hear? A child just died from starvation. Listen. No, you can't hear the cry of death. Don't look down. Wait. Now. Do you see? Another child was just slaughtered with a machete or a bullet or a bomb. What are we doing about it? Trick or treat for UNICEF? Is there is a more pathetic vision of our indifference?

The West? We've a history of barbaric behavior interspersed with some of the most incredible art and culture imaginable, but in the end we are a collection of moral cowards desperately hanging onto the illusion that we've gone far beyond the caves, not just three simple steps. My greatest fear is that, down deep, we know we're facing the end of civilization as we've known it, that nothing lasts forever, and something else must inevitably take its place. In the face of almost cosmological uncertainty, we withdraw into the illusion that we can take care of those closest to us.

The East? Eastern religions for some reason have always downplayed the value of the individual and have used the concept of reincarnation and Karma as a way of tolerating the most extraordinary inhumanity. Ironically, it shares some of what the Christian Church tried to sell in the so-called Dark Ages, but it's just a different brand of cowardice; it's a different path to the endgame.

What is humanity? We are so complex and yet so simple at the same time. We can create such beauty that we find it hard to catch our breath while the heavens weep. We can show selfless goodness and compassion that shouts from the mountaintops, "see how far we've come from the caves. Three steps indeed." How many of those moments must exist to erase the barbarism of the past and of today and tomorrow?

Why do we think we're superior to lower forms of life? Is it because one or two of us stand against the tides of insanity, is martyred, and cast in bronze for the rest of us to admire? We watch Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Desmund Tutu, and a small handful of others leave the safety of the area around the cave and walk out into the open fields. Our pride soars at what humanity can accomplish, but it's not humanity; it's a few humans.

If only we would emulate them. If only we would see that, in evolutionary terms, they are superior to us, but we've been given the gift of consciousness that just might make it possible for us to force our own evolution in the right direction. Neurologists have found that primitive parts of our brains, created when the world presented different threats, still have the power to determine our reactions with us having no conscious understanding of why we're acting as we do; but our conscious minds are not without power if we have the courage to engage them.

How do we take responsibility? How do we own and fix the mess we've created? It's part of my greatest fear - that we can't. There is nothing we can do, so we'll continue to withdraw, to create smaller and smaller social networks, to rail against them even though we no longer know who them is. We celebrate the phony intimacy of the Internet and social networks when it's obvious to anyone who will stop, just stop for a moment, and realize that without a hug the spine shrivels, that physical contact among people is essential to life.

At my most cynical, I see the Internet as a monument to our failure as a species. We don't know our neighbors who we can see and touch and smell. We will, however, form dozens, hundreds of...of what? Friends, associates, and colleagues - the few people I think of as friends I've met through the Internet I have to meet or the friendship will dissipate. I have to see their faces and watch them laugh. I have to break bread and share wine with them, allowing real intimacy to grow over time to the point where when we meet or say goodbye, we hold each other with a passion that fills so many of the empty parts of our souls. We may separate having agreed on nothing except that we are human beings and worthy of survival, worthy of the challenge of evolution. Go ahead, hug your computer. Let me know how good it makes you feel.

Wait for a moonless night when it's still warm enough to walk outside. Listen. Let the sounds of civilization pass through you until you can hear what nature, naked, is trying to tell you. Look at a plant, or a tree, or a rock - it's nothing special - just a plant or tree or rock; but it's amazing. Enjoy the awe of realizing that it somehow got there. Feel. Let the earth reach up and caress you with her toils and triumphs until you realize how fragile we are. Find a way out of yourself to help forge a true civilization. Those of us in civilized lands too easily forget it's simply a thin veneer of civilization - that we are only two or three steps from the caves.

You are your brother and sister's keeper.

Anyone's suffering, anywhere, diminishes your soul.

Find the great and simple truths: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Take emotional risks because we're becoming a nation, and a world, of strangers.

I don't know what to write about anymore. I know I'm not making a difference with this article regardless of how many ways I recreate it. Even if I could get my fiction published, it wouldn't move the firmament. If only God wasn't such a mute, perhaps I could become a preacher. Perhaps, in His silence, that's the best use of my time, but I will not be played the fool - offering strident calls for human rights and dignity that, at best, are read quickly and disregarded.

Quite simply and yet with a cry from my heart that should rend the sky into falling shards of blue, I believe humanity is losing. I have no idea how we sustain ourselves in the evolutionary chain. Humanity has been an awesome experiment, but no matter how I look at it, I can't find enough lasting potential and, worse, enough value that would warrant nature continuing to select for us.

On some selfish level, I'm grateful that my bride and I are old enough to go quietly into this good night. We will escape, I think, but so many of you won't. Your anger, your certainty, your righteousness blinds and binds you.

Some millions of years from now, what a tragic tale will be written about the short-lived human race. People will look at the dinosaurs that ruled the earth for 150 million years and compare them to Homo sapiens who ruled for perhaps two million years and then were gone. It doesn't matter how -- nuclear nightmare, disease, climate disruption, or the emergence of a superior species.

On balance, between us and the dinosaurs, who will be considered of more value in the perhaps infinite time of history?

Technorati Tags: evolution, homo sapiens, barbarism, responsibility
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Hulk Hogan Against Animal Violence? When Will They Ever Learn?

It's a mystery concealed inside an enigma.  Perfectly legitimate organizations, groups who do good stuff to help lots of...things...people, animals, plants, plankton, Lithuanian refugees...want to get publicity for their cause.  And they should.  You wouldn't believe what Lithuanian refugees go through, but that's something protected under the "Better Not Blab Or We'll Throw Your Ass In A Hidden CIA Prison" Act of 2003, so I can't talk about it. 

Take dog fighting.  How sick is getting off on putting two dogs in a ring and letting them tear each other to shreds?  These are people without enough genetic diversity in their backgrounds.  Perhaps no genetic diversity at all.  Maybe they spring from odd plants grown in secret underground government laboratories.  But I can't talk about that.

Or cock fighting.  First of all, Bubba, change the name if you want to be taken seriously.  Second, it's as sick as dog fighting.  Read Roots.  The stuff the trainers do to the...roosters...when they get whacked by another...rooster...is, well, just gag me with a stick.

So, The Humane Society of the United States wants to toughen laws against this behavior.  O.k., cool.  I'm with you.  Especially the cock fighting.  That cracks me up.  I mean, that's just terrible.

Who you gonna call?  Imagine the Board of the Humane Society sitting around trying to decide who's going to be their spokesperson.

"Well, we could get Bridget Bardot," says one octogenarian.

"She's too old," mutters another.

"Who is she?" asks one young whippersnapper.

"How about the Barbi Twins?" asks a young dude with slicked-back, black hair, an earring and a nose stud.

"Cool," responds a young woman with a rather prominent...endowment.

"No good," says the Chairperson, "they're working with Willie Nelson on that horse eating issue."

"Whoa," says another, "haven't you heard about Willie Nelson--busted."

"Huh?" from the Chairperson.

"Yeah, September 18th, Willie and his band were pulled over in Louisiana, and the fuzz found a pound and a half of marijuana and some magic mushrooms on his bus.  Got off with a misdemeanor."

"What?" yelled the slicked-back hair dude.  "I got 6 months for one joint."

"Doesn't matter.  Serves the Society for Animal Protective Legislation right for getting a bunch of has beens and never weres to be their spokespeople," said the Chairperson.  "We need someone with gravitas."

They made their decision.  It took a long time.  Then they pulled in the PR help.  Blogcritics got an advanced e-mail news release, as did 2,345,235 others before they release it publicly Thursday, September 21st.

Who you gonna call?  (Would I lie about this?)  Hulk Hogan!  Hulk Hogan?  He can talk, which gives him an advantage over the Barbie Twins -- or it may be that no one listens when they do talk, so they had him do a (excuse me, I have to fall on the floor now) video.  Actually, it's not a video.  According to the Humane Society, it's a "cool clip from Hulk Hogan to Congress."

Anti-violence against animals.  Well, at least, once and for all, it settles the question about whether professional wrestlers are real people.  Real people are part of the animal family, and Hulk Hogan made millions whacking other wrestlers over the head with metal chairs, throwing them on their heads, jumping on their backs, and causing bodily fluids and even organs to come squirting out their ears.  So if he's against violence towards animals, I guess one can only conclude that professional wrestlers are not people, i.e. animals.

But I digress.

I have a lot of respect for our Members of Congress.  They aren't all the brightest stars in the sky, and it's true that some resemble Black Holes or White Dwarfs, but I have to tell the good people at the Humane Society that I can't imagine even the dumbest member (I'm not allowed to provide the name...that law I talked about earlier) watching a Hulk Hogan video. 

As a non-professional journalist, an aspiring pundit, and long-time crisis and communications consultant, I'm going to offer some free advice to all those good groups out there trying to make this a better planet:  The Medium Is The Message.  (Remember what's his name.)  Think Hulk Hogan, what comes to mind?  Fields of lilacs with butterflies and wood nymphs prancing?  Deep thinkers pondering the majesty and miracle of all life?  No, you think violence.  You think a group of people for whom grunts constitute the highest form of communication.

Dang O'Leary.  No wonder conservatives make such fun of liberals.  The NRA could use Hulk as a spokesperson.  The Marijuana Growers of America could call on old Willie.  But the Humane Society?  Here's some more help.  The basic rules of influencing Congress if you don't have a lot of money.

1. Beautiful women attract Members of Congress like moths to a nuclear explosion.  It's sexist, I know, but do a video, even G-rated, of Pamela Anderson, and it'll play in every office on the Hill.
2. Actually, that's about all you need if you don't have money.

Actually, I feel bad for the dogs and the...cocks.

Technorati Tags: animal rights, Hulk Hogan, Barbi Twins, dog fighting, cock fighting, Humane Society, Pamela Anderson
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