Despairing of the Human Race

I'm thankful for my blogging friends. You give me hope that the human race is worthwhile after all. Sometimes I'm not so sure. I saw on Facebook where one of the joke writers for the cartoon series Family Guy sent out a twitter comment that said: "If you wanna feel better about this earthquake in Japan, Google "Pearl Harbor death toll".

I'm not mentioning the guy's name because I don't support that kind of thing. But just seeing that comment was enough to make me want to return my human card. Then I looked at a couple of sites where this tweet was being discussed and my dislike for the human race in general went way up.

The guy probably meant his original comment as a joke. He was going for a quick, lazy laugh and didn’t want to put any effort into it. But not only wasn’t it funny, it was horrifically cruel to a people who have lost thousands of their own and are in the midst of one of the worst natural catastrophes of our time. I would think that we all could get behind the fact that the guy who said it was being an asshole, at least at the time he said it, and from what I understand he has made an apology. The worst part, though, was the outpouring of troll behavior in the commenters.

One person said that this kind of comment was typical of liberals and several others joined in with tirades against the evils of liberals. Someone even suggested that this is the kind of thing that happens when you have someone like Obama as president. Now, I have no idea if the guy who made the tweet is a liberal or a conservative as far as politics are concerned, or whether he voted for Obama or not. I also don’t care. He said an asshole thing, no matter what else he “is” or has done. Others added their agreement to the tweet, saying things like the Japanese deserved what they got and how “karma is a bitch.” Frankly, I don’t want to be human in a population that includes people like this.

Take every race, every country, every creed, and you’ll find they’ve done evil things. The Japanese no more “deserve” this than the Gulf Coast deserved Katrina, or New York deserved September 11, or Poland deserved Hitler. A tragedy has occurred, and if you can’t help then at least don’t try to make it worse.

Rant over.
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How Today’s World Does Humble

I was flipping through the channels yester eve and came upon a celebrity talking about her newest album and acting gig. She is a very big celebrity, a pop diva, but I’m not going to reveal her name. In the few minutes I watched, she spoke very highly of her own talent, about how her music had touched people and how she had a gift for acting, though she had not often been challenged. Then they interviewed one of her friends/ relatives who said that though she had been a superstar since childhood she was one of the few stars who was “authentically humble.”

Now, I think the woman is talented. She’s won awards and has a nice voice, although I don’t care at all for her music. She is certainly very beautiful. But humble? Come on! She just spent ten minutes bragging on herself and it looked as if—though no one can see inside her mind, of course—that she’s never had a moment of self-doubt in her life.

Certainly she wasn’t snobby or mean-spirited about it. She didn’t do any “in your face trash talking,” which I despise in so many athletes today, or put-down any other musicians/actresses. But there was not a humble bone in her body. She’s rich, beautiful, and famous, and she knows it. She accepts all accolades as her due.

Contrast that to how Jake Delhomme carried himself after he almost single-handedly kept the Carolina Panthers within reach of a super bowl victory a few years ago. The “only” thing he said about himself was that it hurt to lose. Everything else was about the quality of his teammates and the quality of the opposing players. He gave everyone their due and never once even said, “well I thought I played pretty well.” That’s humble. That is honor. That’s the kind of role model I want my son to see, but which I myself see far too seldom.

Today’s world has a different view on “humble” than did the world I grew up in. Apparently, bragging on yourself can be seen as humble today, to which I can only say WTF. Of course, today’s world has a different view on many things. Consider “respect.” Respect today is all about getting it, never about giving it. Or what about the way in which humiliating one’s “enemy” on a field of games is cheered by the crowds? I’m glad at least that the NFL has banned taunting. What kind of “sportsman” taunts a defeated opponent? A sportsman I don’t care to know or cheer for myself.

Man, do I sound like an old fogy or what? Maybe I’m just getting old. Next thing you know I’ll be sitting on my deck in a rocking chair ranting about those “kids today.” Or is that what I just did? I think I’ll shut up now.

Rants and Reason

Michelle has a "rant" over on her blog about things that bother her, and I responded in a comment about school related peeves that I have. Some of Michelle's peeves seems pretty unusual to me and that got me thinking about personality and character. In my experience, people's likes and dislikes are so idiosyncratic as to defy understanding. For example, I hate the musical group The Police and every song they, or Sting, have ever written. I dislike their music so much that I turn the radio off or switch stations the instant a Police song comes on. There have been several times when others were in the car with me when I punched the channel change button in the first few seconds of a song and only then found out from my passenger that it was a Police song. I didn't even know it was them and I still hated it. Yet, there are strange people out there who actually like the Police.

Maybe the point of all this is that characters, real or fictional, are as defined by what they dislike as by what they like. And I realize I have never given this as much thought in my fiction as I should have. My characters need peeves. They need something to rant about, and--importantly--it is the more unusual peeves that will tell me the most about them as characters.

Now the question becomes, can I give my characters peeves that I don't share? What if my character doesn't like Z. Z. Top, or *gasp* Black Sabbath? Will I lose all respect for them? How will I ever even speak with them again? How will I be able to resist having them slaughtered quickly by some newly introduced serial killer as punishment for their foolishness?

I guess we'll see.

Short Story, RIP

Stewart Sternberg is talking about what is happening to the short story over on his blog and that inspired a few thoughts. He believes the short story as a form is dying, and I tend to agree with him. But I will mourn that death until my own last breath.

I like short stories. I like to read them and I like to write them. Along with poetry, I consider them a different kind of art form from novels, and sometimes they are the "perfect" art form. No novel could express so perfectly the ideas behind Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” or Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God.” No novel could equal the absolute horror of “Hangover” by John D. Macdonald. There are reasons why “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes and “Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov were better as short stories than when they were expanded to novels.

We humans live our lives as moments. Just as novels are made up of scenes, so too are our lives. Even if our lives are epic, we don’t experience them that way, we don’t know they were epic until--usually after we are dead--someone writes about us. And none of us are ever going to be trilogies. The short story is really more like the way we actually exist. We lose it at the risk of losing ourselves.

And at the risk of sounding a little harsh, those of you who never read poetry or short stories should remember a little quote, which I’ll paraphrase here:

First they came for the poets, but I wasn’t a poet so I did nothing. Then they came for writers of short stories, but I never read or wrote stories and so I did nothing. Then they came for the novelists and the readers of novels, and I was one of those. But by that time there wasn’t anyone else left to help us.