What’s Wrong With America: Part I

The problem that I have with human beings is twofold, keeping in mind that I take as a given the fact that the only difference between humans and dolphins is that humans have invented language (both animals are mammals with blowholes). First, there’s the physical annoyance of noise pollution, which seems to be most pronounced in the females of the species between the ages of 13 and 40. Second, there’s content component of speech which is like a kind of demented Google where people blurt out all sorts of incoherent and useless information as though it were fact…so I guess, actually it’s like actual Google. Though, unfortunately, I don’t have the capability to make this an audio-visual experience, I think an example might serve as a good jumping off point for our conversation (and yes, this exchange did actually happen, though I desperately wish that it hadn’t):

(Scene: It’s 7 pm on the Washington DC metro, which means you have a lot of irritated bureaucrats who just want to sit in silence and be pissed that their incompetent bosses made them work past the 5pm quittin’ bell.)

Man on Metro: Hi, how long have you been here?

Apparently British woman: Just a few days.

Man on Metro: I find it very confusing to get around this city, don’t you?

Apparently British woman: No, not really.

Man on Metro: I’ve been here three days, I just moved to Virginia from California. Where do you live?

Apparently British woman’s husband: We’re just visiting.

Man on Metro: I noticed you had an accent, where are you from?

Apparently British woman’s husband: We’re from London.

Man on Metro: I visited London once about 30 years ago. I really liked it a lot. Although, isn’t it true that the women there do not have a lot of educational opportunities?

Apparently British woman: Not really. Our daughter goes to university.

Man on Metro: Well, I guess things are changing. Who is going to win the election?

Apparently British woman’s husband: I wouldn’t know, we don’t really follow that stuff very closely.

Man on Metro: I’ll tell you [long pause, then says knowingly:] Barack Obama.

Apparently British woman: [Getting off at next available stop.] Nice meeting you.



Everyone please stop talking. It was one thing when you were just pissing me off…I’m fairly docile and I can’t find the key to my gun cabinet. But this is getting out of hand; you’re becoming a national embarrassment. The problem is that the world thinks Americans are stupid, and this is based solely on the fact that only the stupid ones don’t know when to shut their yap. So please, if you value world order, pipe down before I cause an international incident with your face.

I Have Lots of Questions…Number One…How Dare You?

When I speak to the organ grinder, I don’t expect the monkey to answer. So why is it that whenever someone has the opportunity to interview a living legend in front of an audience the baboon with the cue cards ends up doing most of the talking? I got to witness just such a display the other night at a talk by Elie Wiesel (and if you don’t think he’s a living legend, I’m blackballing you from the island). Here you have a guy who has probably taught humans more about humanity than anyone on the planet, and the jerk asking the questions is all like “Oy, if you think that’s bad, let me tell you about some farshtinkener delicatessen in Brooklyn.” Now listen you cradle-robbing blowhard, no one cares what you have to say so kindly shut your gob.

This episode brings to mind an episode of Katie Couric’s daytime dramedy a few years back: http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&brand=&vid=ce93bf2c-9fde-4c96-945c-1cdaa941c1eb. Katie, what are you doing?!? You are sitting across from a national treasure and you cut off her sentences? I have a news flash for you (pun INtended), when the flaming ball of failure that your primetime show has become finally runs out of gas (pun INtended) and is replaced by a gameshow where people compete to see who can belch the loudest, folks will still love Maya Angelou and they will still not give a rat’s patootie about whether you like corn.

Sad to say, though, the outrages committed by the appointed moderators are only the tip of the iceberg. I know we’ve all been held hostage in a Q&A where there’s too much Q because some A has decided his BS doesn’t stink. Every weirdo with a fanny pack and an ax to grind bellies up to the front of the line to give his or her view of philosophy and world events as if the honored speaker is going to say, “You there in the hemp pants, that’s the most brilliant question slash alternative short lecture I’ve ever heard! Will you co-author my next book?” If that ever actually happened, I’d probably wet myself. Fortunately, you’re more likely to hear the guy go “I don’t really understand you’re question and we’re out of time anyway.” Thus, my drawers are dry, your face is red, and we all live to pester each other another day.

But it boggles the mind that people could be so self-absorbed and slash or so oblivious as to steamroll over the words of thinkers so much smarter and more eloquent than they. I’m even more surprised that these folks abide this kind of indignity. Although, I suppose it is because they have charitable and generous souls. I do not suffer from this affliction so I’m going to give it to you straight: if I ever catch you horning in on the few short moments that an audience has with our most beloved public figures, I will clobber you over the head with your own microphone. Then at least you’ll look as foolish as you sound.

This post has been brought to you by the letters Q and A and by Dennis Prager and Kelly Kapoor.

Into the Drink

My drunk friends always tell me, “alcohol is a social lubricant.” I always tell them that I want to see what dictionary they are using because the last time I checked, spilling a 40 down the front of your shirt doesn’t facilitate anything. I suppose it removes a barrier between me silently judging you and me sharing a full-throated critique of the hot mess you’ve become after barely sniffing your preferred lube, but I doubt this is what you were going for. So I feel that this is an opportune moment to dispel some of the myths surrounding the greasing qualities of booze.

Alcohol transfers people to a parallel universe, divorced from reality. Like the good people of Lake Woebegone, all the men are strong, all the women are beautiful, and all the STDs are in remission. But once you put the cork back on your Garrison Keillor fantasy land you come crashing back to reality where all the men are unemployed, all the women are fugly, and that itchy burning won’t go away. And the kicker is that no one will ever know just how shameful your walk home the next morning really was because any pictures of your fugly, unemployed one night stand will have been magically deleted from your camera…or if you’re lucky, you’ll have spilled some social lubricant on it and it will be fried.

This raises the broader issue of waste. There are children starving in third world countries and you have gone through three digital cameras in two years because you get all butter fingersy around any drink with vodka and something fruity. And that doesn’t even begin to address the outrages your cell phone has suffered. It’s a wonder no one has picked up one of your lost cell phones and used it to stalk you or send you cancer or something. They totally could because you leave your cell phones everywhere. Heaven help me I cannot understand who you need to be calling at 1 am with a lime ricky in one hand and a ciggy falling out of the other. I guess you could say that alcohol speeds up the process by which you part with your money, but again, I don’t think this was what you had in mind.

Then we have a flotilla of awkward social encounters that will cause you even more angst than the drawer full of Plan Bs in the bathroom. Do you remember going up to that attractive person and waxing philosophical about how super-awesome it is to live rent-free in your parents’ basement and play video games all day? How about the drunken text message to your ex that came out like garbled Morse Code except for the one coherent sentence that you managed to mash into the keypad with your fingers which was “I m drnk…”? It seems that social lubricant only works well at sending you into a shame spiral that you won’t even discover until you wake up the next day with a raging headache and vomit in your hair. You’ll listen to a series of voicemail messages that start out extolling your wicked awesome drunkenness but will steadily deteriorate as friends ask you to call them back when you get up to make sure you lived through the night, and finally, the rehab clinic calls to tell you there’s a van waiting outside.

I raise this issue here not because I care about emotional toll that drinking takes on you; I could not care less about you. Rather, drunkenness is a problem because you are no fun to be around when you’re drunk and I have no interest in babysitting some sloppy disaster at the bar. You are smelly and incoherent and take up a lot more space when you’re sloshed and I am in no mood. If we add up the costs of the externalities you impose when you drink, the total would be enough for Sally Struthers to save an entire village. The bottom line, here, is that it is not polite to get so lubed up that you turn into a puddle of deadweight loss for humanity.

Peep Show

I paid zero dollars for this newspaper and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some mooch read it over my shoulder for free. It’s not even so much the mooching that bothers me; I was probably going to just throw the thing nonchalantly on the ground after I was finished anyway. What really steams my milk is the invasion of personal space. At one level, I do not need all of your carbon dioxide and methane gas creating a thick smog right over my head. At a deeper level, how do I know you’re not going to shiv (see: shank) me? Lurking up behind a person to catch a glimpse of the latest Doonesbury cartoon is not worth the awkward standoff between us and our carefully sharpened sporks, I promise.

Also, let’s not forget the space invaders that come with instructions:
“Wait, I’m not finished with that page.”
“Hang on, scroll down to the bottom real quick.”
“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you’re reading this filth.”

If I’m looking at something and I know you’re there, it means I have made a conscious decision not to talk to you. When you interject your two cents, you have not only broken the fourth wall that was so tenuously supporting my sanity in the first place, but also severed whatever loose thread of an idea was holding my reading material together, allowing me to learn something in the process of ignoring you. At least make it worth my while to have you ruin my day if you’re going to do this and share something enlightening. Usually though, people like to use a topical snippet from my reading material to drag me kicking and screaming into the social quicksand I was trying to avoid in the first place. “Speaking of the Pope, my mother had a bunion the size of my fist removed the other day.” And eureka, we’ve found something more noxious than your personal gas cloud.

Sticking your big bazzoo right behind a person’s head is also a safety hazard. If I were to read something hysterically funny and rear my head back with uproarious laughter, I might accidentally break your nose sending small pieces of shattered bone back into your brain where they would cause you to stop living. I would feel just awful if that happened and goodness knows I have enough guilt issues without pulling a Marsha Brady on your schnoz.

I think the biggest problem, though, is that your surreptitious spying is a proxy for behavior in which even you would be too embarrassed to engage. You would never walk up to a stranger and ask, “Hey, can I borrow your laptop real quick so I can check the box scores from last night’s baseball match?” But this is exactly what you’re doing when you sneak a peek in public. And lest you think I’m the only one getting all hot and bothered about this problem, the good folks at 3M (who brought you Post-It Notes, and Scotch Tape, and the letter M, and the number 3), also saw a social malady that needed a cure: http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ComputerFilter/Home/. So I suggest you take a hint before I find a way to whittle a Command Hook into a throwing star.

Click it Good!

Damn that “reply all” button. It has a way of turning every clickster into an amateur comedian and floods my inbox with groan-worthy puns and a raft of highly personal RSVPs that constitute TMI to the max. I think it is that everyone is so starved for attention and validation that they can’t help their itchy trigger finger when they see a long recipient list and the opportunity to memorialize their wit in the bowels of the Google servers until the second coming. Maybe they think that if there’s a William Morris agent hidden somewhere on one of these lists, a well-timed “your mom” joke will mean sweet release from their cubicle and the guy who smells like bad gouda sitting in the next cell over.

You should know at this point that I can already hear you fuss-budgets clicking your tongues and saying exasperatedly, “Why don’t you just delete them you lazy so-and-so?” My reasons are multi-fold. For one, I like to keep an archive of all my correspondence. If there’s ever a mass-tort litigation over the scheduling of a lunch meeting to discuss the schedule of meetings for the next three months, I want to have all of my ducks in a row. Besides, if I’m ticking off a list of e-mails to delete, I might accidentally get rid of the one with Giada’s Passion Fruit Mousse recipe and there’s nowhere else that I would possibly be able to find that again. Thirdly, why should I take more time and energy sifting through someone else’s e-diarrhea when that person couldn’t be bothered to distinguish between the button with one little arrow and the button with two little arrows?

This e-mail phenomenon has taught us that people cannot be made to shed their animal instincts just because they’ve started to walk upright. This is the major flaw in Darwin’s theory. If a hundred monkeys locked in a room can produce Shakespeare, why can’t people at least bother to spell out “lol” (which I doubt they’re really doing anyway) when they decide to broaden the radius of people disturbed by their self-absorbed attention grabbing beyond those within earshot? We could all take a lesson from the monkeys to form a nice heuristic for when it’s appropriate to use this powerful feature. If your message is not ten syllables with beats at 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10, keep it to yourself.

Notwithstanding a penchant for hyperbole, the reply-all abusers are not the drum majors in the parade of horribles that we’ve been discussing. They’re more like the baton twirlers…mildly irritating, totally useless participants in a larger spectacle that is a black mark on our civilization. Put differently, it’s the social engineering version of the law of large numbers. How many pointless megabytes of social desperation will it take to clog our information technology infrastructure? Send out an unflattering picture of Hillary with a shotgun and a 40 to a bunch of people and wait ten minutes. If you can resist the urge to take out a hammer and smash your own computer just to stop the dinging, you’ve got an iron will or a defective eardrum. The rest of us are going to have to re-learn how to make fire.

Crossing the Line

“I’d like a double tall, half-caf….hold on a sec…no not you….what?....double tall, half-caf., low foam, high fiber…No way! I can’t believe he said that to you!....Wait, where’s my latte? Do you need me to repeat my order?” If your blood is not as boiling as the hot coffee I’m about to spill on all of those line-clogging cell phone junkies, I’m sorry that my little dramatization has gone over your head. Standing in line (or “on line” if you’re in New York where everyone else seems to be able to see some imaginary line on the ground leading up to every cashier, ticket window, and gyro cart) is frustrating enough without having your ears assaulted by the conversational table scraps of a would-be socialite who may as well be gabbing with the time-teller for as much substance as she’s transmitting through that cancer machine. I know this sounds harsh, but let’s be honest, if you’re waiting for someone to make change for a $20 because you just couldn’t live without a fresh role of Bubble-Tape, you’re probably not having philosophical debate about Jesus v. the Constitution with the person on the other end.

Not that I have a Marxist regard for service employees, but I find this behavior to be rude, largely because it is demeaning. Who do these people think they are that the poor barrista (Fritalian for “slave-wage coffee jockey”) doesn’t deserve their undivided attention when trying to serve them efficiently so they will get back out onto the street where they will be everyone else’s problem? If we’re honest with ourselves, you guys and gals would be cleaning that barrista’s toilets if you did not have someone else’s money to spend on gourmet French roast and oversized sunglasses. So it seems the least we could do is show a little human courtesy to the folks by whose good graces you are saved from having to figure out how to work that damn contraption in your kitchen with the glass pourer-dealie and the pouch with the black powdery-thingies in it.

I raise this issue because we’ve stumbled onto a societal prisoner’s dilemma. I too would like to be pouring over every detail of what I had for breakfast with whoever accidentally hits the “talk” instead of the “ignore” button when they see me calling. But I refrain because I’m not self-absorbed enough to commit the offensive behavior discussed above and still sleep at night (although who could sleep when there are so many interesting things to say about the piece of chewing gum I saw on the sidewalk this afternoon?). Other than personal shame (which, to be honest, has not been much of a barrier in the past), what’s my incentive not to pick up the phone as well? At least then I’d have something to distract me while Liz Smith over there narrates the menu to her conversation partner to help her decide which Egg McMuffin will go best with a Bloody Mary. And thus the problem snowballs to the point where our poor cashier has capitalized on our absent-mindedness to embezzle more than the GDP of Mauritania out of the change drawer.

Not that I’m shilling for Visa, but to illustrate my point, see if you can spot the most offensive person in this ad: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6332303939470321646&q=visa+commerical+food+court&total=2&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0&hl=en . I’ll give you 2 guesses. Then I’m calling in the soup nazi.

You Are a Waste of Space

Do you remember those clever signs on the Washington Metro that were made up words with fake definitions as public service announcements? My favorite was “escalump: n. a person who becomes a human speed bump by suddenly stopping at the top or bottom of Metro escalators.” Apparently the mass transit officials in town felt that not stopping to check your watch at the bottom of a crowded escalator was such an underappreciated social norm that they had to alert people to the proper way to ride a moving staircase (it really boils down to walk, stand there, walk again). If it were any easier a child could do it…wait…children can do it, which leaves you on very thin ice.

I have to say that I think this sign is very unfair to speed bumps. At least they help to slow traffic on dangerous roads and do not waste precious resources like air and food as do the humanoid forms of social detritus that we’re discussing here. It seems like any place that serves as a choke point is also a magnet for gatherings of the self-absorbed and oblivious. We saw a version of this when discussing our clogged city sidewalks. The same is true of a crowded restaurant entryway. By all means, please finish picking the broccoli out of your teeth and dumping the bowl of mints into your purse before moving your recently expanded waistlines out from between me and my three hours worth of complementary dinner rolls.

But we see this problem in other places as well. We’ve all seen the i-bankers so absorbed in conversation that they have to stop just outside the main entrance of a 50 story office building to finish sharing their brilliant insights into the role of agricultural commodities in their getting hammered at the bar in 20 minutes. It’s almost as if the further they get from the building, the dumber they become so they have to drop all of their impressive knowledge within a 5 foot radius of the front door. This theory makes sense given how dumb they seem to be by the time they get to the bar.

We also see a strange phenomenon in revolving doors. Turns out, there is some mechanism placed just inside the center pole that causes cell phones to ring only once, maybe twice at most. This is evidenced by the fact that no matter where a person is in the process of walking forward while also possibly pushing the door, he or she feels a keen sense of urgency about fumbling through every pocket on every garment on his or her person to answer the phone. “Logjam be damned, this could be Ed McMahon and if I don’t catch this by the second ring, I’ll never forgive myself.” Of course, the odds of it being Ed McMahon, or even a worthwhile long distance offer, are about as good as you using the word logjam, making the discounted, risk-adjusted value of this phone call about half a cent. So let’s make a deal. I’ll pay everyone a penny to just let it ring until they get through the door. You get some positive NPV out of the deal and I get a decent shot at putting my groceries away before the plastic bag handles sever the finger I would need to effectively communicate with you.