There's a conventional horror movie bit where some sort of cute creature is revealed to be possessed by unfathomable evil. We stare into the big sad eyes of a puppy, they turn red, we pan out and lo and behold it's a hellhound; the little bunny grows fangs and goes for the throat of the couple in the convertible; the cuddly alien with a silly bugle bell for a nose uses it to suck the life force out of a bunch of Canadians. And then there's the baby, innocent and sweet, back to the camera, sitting in his high chair with what appears to be a bowl of Spaghetti-O's over his head and then the head begins to turn and turn and turn, way past what's natural, and as baby looks at us over the back of the chair we realize.... That's not red sauce.
For me, though, for sheer terror quotient none of these can compare with the baby in the current crop of E*Trade commercials. He looks out of the camera with the dead eyes of a 37 year old junior executive. His voice is imbued with the jaded disdain of one who has neither doubts nor gratitude. He is the embodiment of the worst that America has to offer: the new-money upper middle class conservative.
His disdain stems from a certainty that his success is the sole result of his own superior choices, lifestyle and work ethic. He feels no obligation to society or community; no empathy for those who choose service over the accumulation of wealth (except of course for the obligatory deference to members of the armed forces); no sympathy for those who are genuinely disadvantaged; no debt to the past or the future.
He thinks self interest passes for a philosophy. Press him about compassion and he'll indignantly tell you that he goes to church and gives money to charity. Above all, he believes that if everyone did things his way they'd be rich too, so if someone isn't it's not his problem. Baby Atlas shrugs. He's absolved of responsibility to anyone but himself, and of any need to be concerned with the common good.
I've looked into the eyes of toddlers and seen a lot of things. When I see joy or curiosity in their eyes it's like stepping out the door on the first day of spring, when I see fear or pain it's like an ache that envelopes the universe, and when I see love it's like looking into the heart of God.
But when I look into the dead eyes of the E*Trade baby it's like looking into a bottomless empty pit. He has no soul. The horror. The horror.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Friday, November 27, 2009
Hobby Lobby
I'm walking across the parking lot to Hobby Lobby today, keeping the kids close, reminding them that they need to keep their heads up. They're still young enough that I feel like they need constant reminding of this. Ingrid has a pair of binoculars that she's looking through backwards as she walks, so that the whole world is in miniature; Ian is deeply involved in describing how Bam, the central character in the pantheon of his imagination, uses rocket boots to fly over buildings.
It's "Black Friday", the day after Thanksgiving. Granting that all holidays are artificial to begin with, Black Friday nonetheless has an inordinate amount of stink on it.
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday; a day when I have no obligations, when I can ignore everything except my wife and my kids and hang out in the kitchen all day cooking a menu that we have settled on over the seventeen years of our marriage. At the end of the day we sit down and eat a little too much and remember how good everything is.
Most of the other holidays are loaded down with baggage. Jingoistic pseudo-patriotism dogs all of the nationalistic holidays; Christmas is a morass of confusion stemming from the simple problem of it essentially being two holidays, a secular one scheduled right on top of a sacred one; Halloween, which used to be fun, has become as it's popularity has risen, a target for controversy and minefield for anybody who accidentally sends their kid to school in costume for the "secular fall celebration" that has replaced the old Halloween party under pressure from a vocal minority who fear that their children will become devil worshipers if they're confronted by a bunch of classmates dressed as SpiderMan; and Valentines day amounts to the culmination of a month of advertising campaigns hell bent on informing me that it's a sign of me not loving my wife enough if I don't buy her a diamond and Lexus every February.
Thanksgiving, though remains mostly pure. Turkey at $0.40/lb when you buy $25 of groceries at regular price is about as far as retailers can go with Thanksgiving; and the nature of the holiday, it's focus on gratitude experienced in the form of a meal and nothing more, has, so far, immunized it from the crass commercialism, sectarian religious bickering and militaristic posturing that all the other holidays fall prey to.
But with "Black Friday" we now have the crassest of holidays set immediately adjacent to the most pure. Where Thanksgiving, at it's core, is about coming to a generous meal with a sense of gratitude, Black Friday is about being part of a mass of consumers behaving like hogs to the trough. We all joke about eating like pigs on Thanksgiving, but Black Friday is the day when Americans are exhorted to let their inner pig run wild.
I'd vowed not to buy anything on Black Friday, but here I am, walking across the parking lot to Hobby Lobby to get a can of spray paint. I feel like an idiot shopping at a store called Hobby Lobby, but so it goes. It's the last Friday of November. It's 64 degrees out and it feels like late spring, the air feels so great but it's not right for it to be this warm this late in the year, especially when we've hardly had a day of cold weather at all yet this season. I wonder if I'm watching the beginning of the end of the world. And I have to ask myself what I've gotten my kids into.
Well.... I've always said that if you can't have an existential crisis walking across the parking lot you just aren't paying attention....
It's "Black Friday", the day after Thanksgiving. Granting that all holidays are artificial to begin with, Black Friday nonetheless has an inordinate amount of stink on it.
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday; a day when I have no obligations, when I can ignore everything except my wife and my kids and hang out in the kitchen all day cooking a menu that we have settled on over the seventeen years of our marriage. At the end of the day we sit down and eat a little too much and remember how good everything is.
Most of the other holidays are loaded down with baggage. Jingoistic pseudo-patriotism dogs all of the nationalistic holidays; Christmas is a morass of confusion stemming from the simple problem of it essentially being two holidays, a secular one scheduled right on top of a sacred one; Halloween, which used to be fun, has become as it's popularity has risen, a target for controversy and minefield for anybody who accidentally sends their kid to school in costume for the "secular fall celebration" that has replaced the old Halloween party under pressure from a vocal minority who fear that their children will become devil worshipers if they're confronted by a bunch of classmates dressed as SpiderMan; and Valentines day amounts to the culmination of a month of advertising campaigns hell bent on informing me that it's a sign of me not loving my wife enough if I don't buy her a diamond and Lexus every February.
Thanksgiving, though remains mostly pure. Turkey at $0.40/lb when you buy $25 of groceries at regular price is about as far as retailers can go with Thanksgiving; and the nature of the holiday, it's focus on gratitude experienced in the form of a meal and nothing more, has, so far, immunized it from the crass commercialism, sectarian religious bickering and militaristic posturing that all the other holidays fall prey to.
But with "Black Friday" we now have the crassest of holidays set immediately adjacent to the most pure. Where Thanksgiving, at it's core, is about coming to a generous meal with a sense of gratitude, Black Friday is about being part of a mass of consumers behaving like hogs to the trough. We all joke about eating like pigs on Thanksgiving, but Black Friday is the day when Americans are exhorted to let their inner pig run wild.
I'd vowed not to buy anything on Black Friday, but here I am, walking across the parking lot to Hobby Lobby to get a can of spray paint. I feel like an idiot shopping at a store called Hobby Lobby, but so it goes. It's the last Friday of November. It's 64 degrees out and it feels like late spring, the air feels so great but it's not right for it to be this warm this late in the year, especially when we've hardly had a day of cold weather at all yet this season. I wonder if I'm watching the beginning of the end of the world. And I have to ask myself what I've gotten my kids into.
Well.... I've always said that if you can't have an existential crisis walking across the parking lot you just aren't paying attention....
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Getting started
I really ought to be peeling wallpaper. Or reading something that I'll need to have read. It's not like I don't have stuff to do. But instead here I am setting up a blog because for whatever reason I think I ought to be writing more.
And now I'm writing a post to post on the blog so that it won't be empty to begin with, and wondering what to write about. It's not like I don't have opinions, ideas, things to say, ask anybody who's been stuck in a room with me more than three minutes, they'll tell you. And it's not like I suffer from writer's block when I need to write a memo or feel like ranting about something. But just sitting down and writing, trying to be in the habit of writing, this is different. Without an assignment I'm at a loss for words, and when I press myself to come up with my own assignment the ideas that come inevitably seem too trivial to bother with.
I go on faith, go on going on faith, that I have a voice to find, that somehow I will someday find that voice.
Ever since I was a kid I somehow believed that if ever I was going to accomplish anything of substance it would be in my fifties. Now, with fifty looming on the horizon, I find myself watching that horizon to see if anything's going to pop up over it, any glimmer of light breaking through with some suggestion that what I've been preparing for will come to me. For so long now, every muse I've followed has led me down a dead end. I go on going on faith that at some point it will all add up to something, that a whole greater than the sum of the parts will emerge, but as time passes, doubt creeps in and honesty demands that I entertain the possibility that I in fact have no voice to find.
The wallpaper is waiting. Maybe I'll find my voice there, hidden under two layers of paper and a coat of paint. That would be odd - that paper was put up before I was born and we didn't live here until 10 years ago, so what would it even be doing there? Still, I haven't found it anywhere else I've looked and it feels like I've looked everywhere, so.... Where's that ladder?
And now I'm writing a post to post on the blog so that it won't be empty to begin with, and wondering what to write about. It's not like I don't have opinions, ideas, things to say, ask anybody who's been stuck in a room with me more than three minutes, they'll tell you. And it's not like I suffer from writer's block when I need to write a memo or feel like ranting about something. But just sitting down and writing, trying to be in the habit of writing, this is different. Without an assignment I'm at a loss for words, and when I press myself to come up with my own assignment the ideas that come inevitably seem too trivial to bother with.
I go on faith, go on going on faith, that I have a voice to find, that somehow I will someday find that voice.
Ever since I was a kid I somehow believed that if ever I was going to accomplish anything of substance it would be in my fifties. Now, with fifty looming on the horizon, I find myself watching that horizon to see if anything's going to pop up over it, any glimmer of light breaking through with some suggestion that what I've been preparing for will come to me. For so long now, every muse I've followed has led me down a dead end. I go on going on faith that at some point it will all add up to something, that a whole greater than the sum of the parts will emerge, but as time passes, doubt creeps in and honesty demands that I entertain the possibility that I in fact have no voice to find.
The wallpaper is waiting. Maybe I'll find my voice there, hidden under two layers of paper and a coat of paint. That would be odd - that paper was put up before I was born and we didn't live here until 10 years ago, so what would it even be doing there? Still, I haven't found it anywhere else I've looked and it feels like I've looked everywhere, so.... Where's that ladder?
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