Dennis Leary is doing the talk shows right now promoting his new book: Why We Suck. One story that keeps coming up is the PC outcry over comments in a chapter
about parents special needs kids, but not the real ones, the ones whose needs actually aren't that special. The kids who don't actually have anything
wrong with them except that their parents haven't done their f-ing job as parents and are essentially shopping doctors to get the diagnosis which gets them
off the hook.
The chapter begins talking about a real autistic child, and how anyone who knows a family with one of these kids knows the enormous time such a child requires, the exhausting emotional toll it takes, etc. It is impossible to read this passage and not see that it is written by someone aware of and sympathetic to the plight of those families. All you have to do in order to understand he's talking about the other parents shopping doctor is to read and process all the words on the page.
Yet we have the outcry that Leary and the MSNBC hosts are discussing with surprise, but which those of us on the internet are all too familiar with. The ability of certain individuals to look at the word "yellow" and see "pink", go on a jihad again pink, construct a 90 page dissertation on the fallacy of pink, and founding the Anti-Pink Facebook group and Pink Haters Blog before yellow can get its boots on.
There are four ways to interpret this.
The first is Leary's: people who are simply waiting to be offended, and have this selective perception going on where they literally filter out anything that doesn't jibe with their expectations. Those of you who have read String Theory, the spell Jason Blood casts in the last act is something of a metaphor for that phenomenon. He makes it so the AU Justice League simply don't see anything that doesn't corroborate their belief in the rightness of their cause. Sadly, you don't need magic to pull that one off.
The second interpretation I will call the Kazantzakis-Scorsese in honor of the 1988 movie of The Last Temptation of Christ: the assumption is that the reader is just too stupid to understand what is being said. In LToC, the Jesus who never died on the cross encounters St. Paul preaching the story of the crucified and risen Jesus as we know it. Jesus says no, look, I'm here, I'm alive, I have a wife, I have children... And Paul looks at him for a second and says that "You" (the wholly human Jesus) are no use to me. "I need you in the cross and in the tomb. But I'm very glad I met you, because now I can forget you."
Now that is an author and a moviemaker using the smallest words they can. It's saying "Look, man of faith, you don't have to be afraid of this idea. Look at it. Explore it. It's not satisfying." The movie comes down on the same side as its detractors, but its "faith" for lack of a better word is stronger for having explored the "human Jesus" and following it to its logical conclusions.
At the time, none of the zealots could SEE that, and while I personally think fear plays a bigger role than stupidity in the dynamic, they're probably related. The world has to be a pretty scary place to the stupid who know they're stupid. (I personally think Tom Hank's Oscar for Forrest Gump comes from one moment when he asks if his son is "smart or…")
The third interpretation is the least interesting, but the most likely. Media whores. Nobody misunderstood anything, they just saw a way to squawk and get their cause on the talk shows until Obama decides what to do with Hillary.
The fourth one nobody seems to talk about except the Encyclopedia Dramatica: TLDR, known in spell-it-out circles as "Too Long; didn't read". It's 1/3 laziness, 1/3 arrogance - because the faux listener assumes s/he knows what you're going to say, and 1/3 a world full of politicians, formula movies, and idiots spouting ideas and telling jokes from bumper stickers that are so predict the brain just gets in the habit of shutting off once it gets enough to project the rest.
The moral?
Well let's see, the economy is in the crapper and it's not going to get better overnight. Which means we're all looking at a couple holidays to get through that are bringing more stress than usual. We're still at war and some mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, won't be home for Christmas. Many of us are working harder and harder for less and less, can't remember when we last took a vacation, and aren't planning one any time soon.
Many of us are just TIRED. And miscommunication is EXHAUSTING.
We can't do anything about the economy or the war. We can fix this. We can make one little corner of the human existence a little easier for our fellow travelers.
Oh, and by the way, to those making movies, making music, writing television shows and even video games - to those in entertainment, essentially. Historically, this is when we shine. When times are bad, our gifts are most needed. You have the power to make a fellow traveler's bad day a little better. Isn't that why you went into this business in the first place?
Thank you for reading. If you are viewing this post anywhere other than The Catitat you are reading a mirror. Please visit the original posting in The Catitat to leave a comment.
The chapter begins talking about a real autistic child, and how anyone who knows a family with one of these kids knows the enormous time such a child requires, the exhausting emotional toll it takes, etc. It is impossible to read this passage and not see that it is written by someone aware of and sympathetic to the plight of those families. All you have to do in order to understand he's talking about the other parents shopping doctor is to read and process all the words on the page.
Yet we have the outcry that Leary and the MSNBC hosts are discussing with surprise, but which those of us on the internet are all too familiar with. The ability of certain individuals to look at the word "yellow" and see "pink", go on a jihad again pink, construct a 90 page dissertation on the fallacy of pink, and founding the Anti-Pink Facebook group and Pink Haters Blog before yellow can get its boots on.
There are four ways to interpret this.
The first is Leary's: people who are simply waiting to be offended, and have this selective perception going on where they literally filter out anything that doesn't jibe with their expectations. Those of you who have read String Theory, the spell Jason Blood casts in the last act is something of a metaphor for that phenomenon. He makes it so the AU Justice League simply don't see anything that doesn't corroborate their belief in the rightness of their cause. Sadly, you don't need magic to pull that one off.
The second interpretation I will call the Kazantzakis-Scorsese in honor of the 1988 movie of The Last Temptation of Christ: the assumption is that the reader is just too stupid to understand what is being said. In LToC, the Jesus who never died on the cross encounters St. Paul preaching the story of the crucified and risen Jesus as we know it. Jesus says no, look, I'm here, I'm alive, I have a wife, I have children... And Paul looks at him for a second and says that "You" (the wholly human Jesus) are no use to me. "I need you in the cross and in the tomb. But I'm very glad I met you, because now I can forget you."
Now that is an author and a moviemaker using the smallest words they can. It's saying "Look, man of faith, you don't have to be afraid of this idea. Look at it. Explore it. It's not satisfying." The movie comes down on the same side as its detractors, but its "faith" for lack of a better word is stronger for having explored the "human Jesus" and following it to its logical conclusions.
At the time, none of the zealots could SEE that, and while I personally think fear plays a bigger role than stupidity in the dynamic, they're probably related. The world has to be a pretty scary place to the stupid who know they're stupid. (I personally think Tom Hank's Oscar for Forrest Gump comes from one moment when he asks if his son is "smart or…")
The third interpretation is the least interesting, but the most likely. Media whores. Nobody misunderstood anything, they just saw a way to squawk and get their cause on the talk shows until Obama decides what to do with Hillary.
The fourth one nobody seems to talk about except the Encyclopedia Dramatica: TLDR, known in spell-it-out circles as "Too Long; didn't read". It's 1/3 laziness, 1/3 arrogance - because the faux listener assumes s/he knows what you're going to say, and 1/3 a world full of politicians, formula movies, and idiots spouting ideas and telling jokes from bumper stickers that are so predict the brain just gets in the habit of shutting off once it gets enough to project the rest.
The moral?
Well let's see, the economy is in the crapper and it's not going to get better overnight. Which means we're all looking at a couple holidays to get through that are bringing more stress than usual. We're still at war and some mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, won't be home for Christmas. Many of us are working harder and harder for less and less, can't remember when we last took a vacation, and aren't planning one any time soon.
Many of us are just TIRED. And miscommunication is EXHAUSTING.
We can't do anything about the economy or the war. We can fix this. We can make one little corner of the human existence a little easier for our fellow travelers.
Oh, and by the way, to those making movies, making music, writing television shows and even video games - to those in entertainment, essentially. Historically, this is when we shine. When times are bad, our gifts are most needed. You have the power to make a fellow traveler's bad day a little better. Isn't that why you went into this business in the first place?
Thank you for reading. If you are viewing this post anywhere other than The Catitat you are reading a mirror. Please visit the original posting in The Catitat to leave a comment.
