YOU KNOWS, TATTOOS AND OTHER IDIOCIES OF OUR TIMES!

YOU KNOWS, TATTOOS AND OTHER IDIOCIES OF OUR TIMES!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 12, 2010

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CATHEDRALS IN THE AIR

In the late 1980s, when I was a corporate executive with an American company living in Brussels, Belgium, my two sisters came to visit Beautiful Betty and me. We lived in Uccle, a suburb of Brussels, on diplomatic row, which I thought would impress them. It didn’t.

BB then took them on a tour of Europe, and being Irish Roman Catholic, they visited the resplendent cathedrals of Amiens, Bavaria and, of course, Rome, among other places.

My sisters came back from the experience with a serious dent in their FAITH, especially my one sister. “Jimmy,” she said, “how can they display such extravagance surrounded by so much poverty?” She was referring to side trips taken into the villages in the shadow of these prominent structures.

It didn’t help in telling her that most of these cathedrals were built in the high middle ages when the majority were illiterate, including the aristocracy, and that this magnificence solidified church temporal as well as spiritual power. I then added, “We are no less influenced today with such collusion."

Conservative, an Iowan, who could buy and sell her brother several times over, she was offended by what she saw, and would have none of my explanation.

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In my walk today, I thought of that visit and then quickly to the recently completed mid-term elections in which upwards of $ billion was spent on campaigning to solidify power by being elected or reelected to public office.

Members of the House of Representatives are elected every two years, and spend much of the time in office running for reelection or putting earmarks into bills. What is worse, it is unusual if they are in Washington, DC more than a couple days a week so busy are they campaigning for reelection, or taking jaunts across the globe at taxpayer expense supposedly on “fact finding missions.”

We have Congressmen that have had ten or twenty consecutive terms. Senators are elected for six years, and many have had three to six consecutive reelections. Incumbency feeds the biometrics.

A consultant to government writes me:

“America was outraged when Nancy Pelosi said of the healthcare bill that they have to pass it to see what’s in it. Well, America was outraged because it doesn’t understand how its government works behind the ropes. None of these people have the time to actual read the legislation, let alone write it. Their staffers don’t even write it. The shadow government does. The staffers tweak it and it goes forward. That’s how all the class B earmarks (things like $700K for cow burping or $823K to study how to teach South African males to wash their penises after sex) get added.

“Except for the sponsor, and maybe not even him, the members don’t know what’s really in a bill until the next election when an opponent digs it out and publicizes it. They voted for the defense budget or healthcare, and cow burping just happened to be hidden in it.”

Such careers are cathedrals in the air.

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YOU KNOW YOU KNOW YOU KNOW -- NO I DON’T KNOW!

The late syndicated columnists Edwin Newman and William Safire must be rolling in their graves at how sloppy American conversation has gotten in this the twenty-first century. They were sticklers for proper speech.

Even the erudite President Barak Obama hiccups quietly “you knows” in his utterances, as if an apology for having resorted to the practice.

There is not a commentator, educator, or public figure who once he departs from the teleprompter doesn’t fall prey to “you knows.” For me, it is like screeching chalk across a blackboard.

Some athletes being interviewed after a game can string together ten “you knows” in a single sentence.

The problem is I don’t know, but I might want to know what you are thinking, if thinking is what you are capable of doing.

Imprecise language is a symptom not a cause of a collapsing apathetic society that is increasingly electronically connected but not cognitively much less socially.

We are out of control, and if you want to write books that are not read, write about it.

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TATTOO NATION – SELF-ADVERTISING IDIOCY

When I was a US Navy Corpsman in the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, sailors would come back from liberty drunk with unwanted tattoos asking me what they could do about it.

We weren’t in the business of removing tattoos. I mention this because few who had submitted to the tattooing were proud of the behavior, but rather apologetic for it. They wondered how their wives or girlfriends, or even parents would react to such displays.

It was the 1950s, and the only ones displaying tattoos with palpable belligerence were bikers, ex-cons, and other groups that considered themselves renegades or outsiders. Put another way, they were selectively nonconformists.

Fast forward to today, and you cannot go to a shopping mall or public place and not see men and women, and even children, sporting tattoos, some on their entire arms, so-called “sleeve tattoos.” I have seen tattoos so offensive that it is clear that shock is part of the self-advertising.

You may ask why I find tattoos so offensive. First of all, I think the body is beautiful without purposeful disfigurement.

In the 1960s, when I was a field chemical engineer for a specialty chemical company, the Indiana Prison System – power plants – were my customers.

I saw convicts with tattoos covering their bodies advertising their hate, contempt, and bizarre affections.

Tattoos of criminals were a sorting process of internal gangs. It was their identity, their badge of belonging. They wanted the world to see what they couldn’t explain in words. I was amazed to learn from dealing with these inmates how many of them had had little schooling. No surprise, tattoos were often of misspelled words.

Curiously, today I see misspelled tattoos on people shopping at Wal-Mart, and other places.

Syndicated columnist David Brooks, who has a sense of humor about the tattoo idiocy, has noted that tattoos were once the domain of nonconformists, but now are the rage of the most "in" conformist groups of all, the educated, celebrities, and the affluent. Go figure.

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WITH IDIOCY COMES SOME LIGHT

Despite the idiocy, there are silver linings to our clouds.

We have an African American President. I never thought that would happen in my lifetime.

The presidents of MIT and Harvard, as well as my own University of South Florida are women. It took women ninety years in a struggle for suffrage to settle into government mansions, Congress and the Senate, and into academia, and occasionally on mahogany row.

Then, despite fifty percent of black males dropping out of school before finishing high school, some of the those brilliant minds in our society are African Americans.

Somehow we persist, at least for the moment, despite these irritations, which I think are indicators of a collapsing society.

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As I said earlier, we don't want to hear what we don't want to hear.

T. S. Eliot wrote in The Hollow Men, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

Recently, in Foreign Affairs (March/April 2010), Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson stated something similar: “Decline and Fall – When the American Empire Goes, It is Likely to Go Quickly.” He sees proximate triggers sufficient to shift from good equilibrium to a bad mess, citing the relationship between complexity and collapse.

Author William L. Livingston IV claims in "Design for Prevention" (2010) we are incapable of handling complexity, so we bypass it and handle problems we can handle. This sounds a lot like Congress.

My wonder is if the reason we retreat in tattooing and other aberrant behaviors is a panic escape from reality, as if we don’t want to know what's right around the corner because we are incapable of dealing with it. If this is the case, what is the advantage of being conscious of our acts?

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