Oct 15, 2006 18:45
Time for something new. Or rather, something very, very old that finally caught my attention in my e-mail inbox. Some people whose writing I respect (or am forced to read because I have known them for a long, long time) not-so-recently went through a fad wherein they wrote about ten topics beginning with the same letter. Those who commented on said writing received a letter of their own to use. Ambitious as used to be my wont, I got myself tagged twice. We'll deal with the first one, the letter M, today. N coming soon to a webpage near you.
1. Movies - Most movies are made with some kind of goal in mind, usually to entertain you for approximately two hours (the length of time most people are willing to sit without moving, talking, or looking at Internet porn). One of my housemates and I have come up with a good opinion on these kinds of movies, which are not necessarily bad movies. "They know what they are, and they don't pretend to be something more," he says. For instance - Happy Gilmore. It has no pretensions at being more than something which guys under 30 will laugh at (or those possessing similarly enlightened senses of humor). I've seen it at least ten times, and I expect I'll watch it every few years or so for the rest of my life. It's just two hours of pleasure.
But two movies which I saw recently have gone above and beyond the normal goal of 'pleasure for two hours;' even more rare than that already-bold attempt is the fact that they have achieved it. I'm talking about Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Martin Scorses's The Departed. An Inconvenient Truth was less of a movie, I guess, and more of a videotaped PowerPoint presentation. And what a presentation. If it doesn't make you cry out at the sad state of two-party politics in America, I don't know what will. Economically speaking - if you'll allow me the temporary luxury - I think it's easy to look at the benefits and costs of what our nation is doing and realize that we are not calculating these things logically. The following argument will sound ridiculous, but follow me and see where it takes you.
The history of terrorism is long and hideous, but in all twenty centuries since it has been put to use (remember it's a tool and not really an idea or an organization), the death toll as a result from each individual attack has never been more than a few thousand.
On the other hand, we have the environment. Now, let's assume that, even if the lives of our children and grandchildren are not worth as much as our lives, they still have some value. So let's say we give those lives a value that is 10 percent of our own (a fairly low value, yes?). Then, let's consider what is likely to happen within the next 100 years, when those kids are alive. Let's say that there is just a 10% chance that the planet will warm up enough that the ice caps will melt enough to raise the sea level seven meters. If that did happen (again only one in ten shot that it will), scientists predict that most of LA, New York, Shanghai, and Bombay/Mumbai would be under water. Those are four of the biggest cities on earth. Again, taking another conservative estimate - and I'm taking lots of estimates here, but understand that they are all conservative, i.e. on the best end of the spectrum of possibilities - let's just say that the combined populations of those cities 100 years from now will be 50 million. So, those 50 million would either be out of a place to live or dead if this earth warming thing happened. But, you say, what if the caps didn't melt? And it's 100 years from now, so why should we care so much about these people anyway? Like we said before, because they are lives in the future, we can discount them - they're only worth 10% of our lives today. So that 50 million drops to 5 million in equivalent current lives. And then we said there's only a 10% chance the caps will melt anyway - anyway - so let's factor that in, which brings us to 500,000 equivalent current lives. So if we do nothing, we would estimate that the environment will kill the equivalent of 500,000 people of our current world population. If we do nothing about terrorism (say, if you think Clinton did nothing in the 90s), we could expect that the next terrorist attack would be very similar to that which occured in 2001, killing just over 3,000 people. And that day united the whole world. 3,000 lives. And we're talking 500,000 from the environment, using our conservative estimates. What if we valued future lives as only 1% of current lives? And what if there were only a 1% chance of the caps melting? That takes the number down to 5,000.
Now obviously all of that argument is not to say that we should abandon funding for anti-terrorism measures and begin jacking up engine emissions standards. But considering what we could get for spending just a little more effort on the environment - say, enacting standards that would take the cap-melting chance from 10% to 1% - isn't it worth it? How much would it really take to bring down the number of potential environmentally-caused deaths from 500,000 to 5,000? Or even 50 million to 50,000? Aren't those differences in numbers large enough that we might want to see what we could do about it? And the sad part is that so many people would be nodding their heads along to this whole argument if only they were hearing it. But they aren't, because nobody's talking about it on either side of the aisle. It's truly a frustrating sight.
As for The Departed, just go see it. Not only is it a good movie, it's a smart movie. It's a movie with enough twists and turns to keep you captivated while you watch it for the first time, and enough character development, snappy dialogue, and thorough storytelling to keep you coming back again and again even after you know what's going to happen (a true test of a good movie, I believe). Next on my list is Little Miss Sunshine.
2. Miscegenation - I've got no problems with it. Just wanted to throw that out there. It was the first M word that came to mind.
3. Military lifestyle - It's not so bad. The reason most people don't stick with it for a career, I think (the Marine Corps has something like a 20% turnover every year), is that we are so often doing things which we did not sign up for, and not in the good way, either. As my friends and I went through training, we had our fair share of 14-hour days, and 19-hour days, and a few 24-hour days, too. But every one of those days was filled with infantry things - shooting big guns, roping out of helicopters, walking through jungles, learning the history of the Spartans, and so much more. What kills an infantryman's soul is the 14-hour day spent behind a desk. That is generally the result of some ridiculous order coming down from on high - or as some like to say, "Shit rolls down-hill." This is probably true with people in general - noone likes to spend their days working towards no end and for no purpose. But the fact that we have been trained to not only survive but excel in chaotic and wild environments only makes the desk life that much more deadly. If the purpose of your training is to focus on situations when it is another man's life or your own - to deal with that for days, weeks, and months on end - how dreary does desk work become? The answer is too dreary.
This is not to say that we have been transformed in to stone cold killers. But the pure clean adrenaline rushing through one's veins in those situations does have an intoxicating effect. And we like adrenaline. We like the rush. We all volunteered to join the Marine Corps and to be infantryman. We are self-selecting risk-seekers. And now you're taking away that adrenaline and replacing it with complicated forms signed in triplicate and submitted to four different agencies. The infantrymen I've known don't quit because they've been to war too often; they quit because they've been at a desk too much.
4. Mix-tapes - How long ago was it that these were in style? I mean we're talking 9 years ago, max. Even for people in their twenties, this is not that long ago. And my how things have changed since then. The wonderful thing about mix-tapes was that a mix-tape really meant something; you had to find all of the original tapes with the songs on them, figure out where the songs were on the tape, line them up just right for the recording, sit there while the whole song played through and was recorded, hit the stop button immediately, and then go through the whole process again for the next song. It could have easily take you 3 hours to put together a single tape. And if that tape found itself melted on the dashboard or crushed by the leg of a chair, well, that was just three hours wasted of your life.
They were also quite a feat of communication. Especially if you were giving it to someone of the opposite sex. First there was the messages of the songs themselves - Sappy? Emotional? Tough-but-caring? Then there was the theme of the whole tape. Maybe the songs started out lovey-dovey but got more standoffish as you went along. Maybe they started out light and began to get a little more romantic as it wound down, which brings up another point - that the order of the songs mattered. You could only listen to them one way, from beginning to end. Juxtaposition of like or unlike songs mattered. And then there was what the mix-tape said about you - what were your tastes like? Were you a sophisticated listener? Were you into indie? Did you like Sublime in the early days? Were you on to Nirvana before or after they did MTV Unplugged? Or were you more focused on the top hits of the day; or maybe you threw in some old classics, Zeppelin or Floyd that you snuck off your dad's rack. And if you did know about these cool bands, would it be too much effrontery to assume that the other person did, too? Was the point of the mix-tape to bond yourselves with the sharing of new sensations, or was it reaching out to an unfamiliar someone with a musical essay of who you were?
The point is, I'm pissed these things went the way of the beeper. Burned CDs can take as little as ten minutes to produce, and they are infinitely variable. As soon as you get it, you can slip it into your computer and voila - the songs have entered your general library of music. Who'd ever guess that that mix-CD gifter wanted to put the Ramones next to Bach's Concerto in G? And even if you did listen to it all the way through, how much effort did the gifter put into this? Was it a slapdash hodge-podge of the first ten tracks the gifter saw? Or did they peer at the screen late into the night to make sure that the songs were just right and in just the right order? The communication that was the mix-tape has been garbled by so many considerations, so many new possibilities. Woe to all today's teenage nerds looking for a way to tell the cute girl in math class that All I Want Is You.
5. Mambo (and salsa, and meringue) - I went to a bar on Friday night with some dudes, and it was unlike any bar I've ever been to in my life. There was an actual bar - a place to buy drinks - and a dance floor, and loud fast music and blinking lights and big men out front. But the people dancing, the thing was - most of them weren't even touching. In fact, the ones were having the best time of all were making it a point not to touch one another except when they were holding hands. These people were actually dancing to the music. And not dancing like most young people dance, which is usually what appears to be a ferocious desire to have sex with one's dance partner while the two of you are still standing up and fully clothed. This is not to say that I have any problem with this kind of dancing, but it was fun to see some relatively young and good-looking people enjoying one another's company without making the implicit promise of at least a handjob later in the evening (Am I wrong here that grinding with someone doesn't have to carry future obligations?). It's the kind of dancing where you can politely go out and enjoy a song or two with someone even if they don't seem to interest you, but without completely denying them and crushing any of the self-confidence they might have had to walk up to a complete stranger in a bar and ask them to dance. I wouldn't mind at least starting with this kind of dancing, and then moving on to some grinding later.
It was a Latino/Hispanic bar, so I assume the dances were called mambo or meringue (or is that a pie?) or salsa (or is that a condiment?), but I honestly have no idea.
6. Mincemeat - Where does it come from? And who makes it anymore? It sounds like the 18th-century British version of hot dogs - it sure is tasty, but there's no need to ask where it came from. Hm. Mincemeat.
7. Mosquitoes - Apparently they do not exist in California. This news pleases me. Which leads to the next topic...
8. Maine - What a state. Sadly, I have not been back for two summers now. Perhaps the only thing one could find wrong with it might be the pervasiveness of the biting insects - horseflies, chiggers, and the aforementioned mosquito. But when you balance this off against summer days that are still crisp in their warmth, gigantic delicious sea creatures, beaches clear of the big-city masses, and an evergreen forest worthy of a lifetime of exploration - ah, well the bugs are just there to make sure that more people don't move in permanently. Along with the Mountain West, it is one of the only areas in America I've seen where man is still completely subservient to nature. You can stand in awe at the steel canyons of New York or the manicured jungles that are Los Angeles lawns, but when you are standing in Maine, you remember that nobody beats Mother Nature at her own game (right, New Orleans?). And it's a beautiful feeling indeed.
9. Metropolitan Transportation - Truly one of the great inventions of the city. If you are predisposed to read, by all means read - everything from the canonical classics to flagrant pornography (if you happen to live in some parts of Japan). If you want to people-watch, well what better place? And if you want to soak in the smells of a hundred bodies at 5 p.m. on a summer Thursday, you should be ashamed of yourself, you sick-o you. But you could do that on public transport if you wanted to, too.
In a world where people value their time and their privacy, it's actually paradoxically interesting to be forced into some kind of social environment for a significant period of time. And if you are really feeling that awkward, just put your headphones on. But if you're not, you're just as likely to meet that smoking hot lawyer or doctor you've always dreamed of meeting as you are an elderly crackwhore with no teeth bringing home a batch of stolen cucumbers to her nest of city opossums. It can be a little adventure if you want it to, or it can be just a small part of your daily routine. If you want to make a ruckus or try out your new stand-up routine, go right ahead - what are they going to do, jump out the windows? The point is, you get to make of it what you want, and everyone else has to play your game, at least for a little bit. That's the fun of it.
10. Milk - Let's end it strong here. Probably the staple of my diet. Even if I don't have cereal around in the morning, I can go for a glass of milk (or three). If I have cereal but no milk, well, I ain't eatin'. Same goes for cookies. There must be some kind of chemical process that goes on in your body (or at least mine) that sends you scrambling for an udder as soon as you eat more than a single Oreo cookie. It's got protein to enrich your muscles, water to hydrate your organs, vitamins to improve whatever is it that vitamins improve, and a pasteurization and homogenization process that leaves worrying about E. coli, dengue fever, and severe acne to those tofu-loving assholes. Even if you're a vegetarian or a vegan or whatever, you have to drink milk - I mean, it's painful for cows not to get milked. So go ahead, suck down a tall glass of that smooth white gold and smile, secure in the knowledge that you're drinking healthy and saving some poor Holstein the cow equivalent of a severe purple nurple, too.