Today’s Lesson: America is Screwed
I began today with a brief stop at Bartell’s. As I was checking out (chocolate, toothpaste, and batteries), a young male employee (overeager, glasses, hair with product) had the following exchange with a middle-aged woman employee (tired, glasses, no product):
“Good morning!” he shouted.
“Good morning,” she replied.
“I saw you coming out of the elevator!”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah, I came running and shouting at you!”
“Oh. I didn’t notice.”
“Yeah, I was running!”
[awkward silence.]
“I guess I didn’t notice. I guess you could’ve been a rapist.”
[awkward silence.]
“Yeah,” she repeated. “A rapist. And I wouldn’t have even noticed.”
He nodded awkwardly, probably feeling as nauseated as I wasit was a bit early in the morning for rape jokesand life went on. Was she trying to tell us something? Tell him something?
I ended today, ironically enough, at Cowgirls, Inc., where I rode the mechanical bull. I’ve never been to the Inc. before, never even considered going, but the staff was nice, the jukebox was rockin’ (in an AC/DC and Zep kind of way), and the mechanical bull was great fun. It jerked in unexpected directions and dared me to keep my balance. I eventually fell offeverybody doestried to look cool leaving the bullpen and ordered a beer from a woman dancing on the bar. And I thought: “I review plays all the time. I wish they were as unpredictable as that mechanical bull.” And then I thought: “If an art form is more predictable than a mechanical bull, it’s in bad trouble.”
By the way: Did you hear about the honors-student high school debater who got in serious, serious trouble for simply positing, in a discussion, that one example of violent revolutionary protest would be to plant a bomb in the school? And his principal, a very popular, and by all accounts effective, woman got fired for not reporting him to the police? He didn’t threaten anything, as far as we can tell from the news reports. He was just illustrating a point.
Remember: The ragtag American army won the Revolution because it was fast, adaptive, guerilla, and creative, while the Brits lost because they were orderly, mechanized, and disciplined. The famous anecdote from when I was a schoolboy in Lexington, MA, went like this: During the Revolutionary War, British troops would march in formation down a country road while American snipers sat in trees. The snipers would pick off soldiers one by one, killing some troops and terrorizing the rest, while the ever-stoic Brits couldn’t break ranks and fire back unless their commandersat the head of the phalanx, who never noticedordered them to. This was a very effective strategy for the Americans.
In conclusion, today’s events have indicated that America has lost the nimble, creative, no-holds-barred virtues that made it the most artistically, intellectually, and militarily powerful country in the world. Now we’re repressed (rape “joke”), mechanized (art vs. bull), bureaucratic (punishing kids and principals for a hypothetical), and stupid.
We’re totally fucked.
"What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure." -Thomas Jefferson (November 13, 1787)