...
Listening to all those old timers tonight, it crossed my mind for the gazillionth time about devising a way to flash fundamental truth at people. It is almost always when hearing smug people... somehow the oafs don't make me quite as mad.
I get a little rueful inner chuckle going over the little imaginarium snuff box I'd open as I sidled up to one of them, give them a moment's gander before snapping it shut. I'm wearing a clown costume in this fantasy. I'm dancing off into a tule fog. My victim is left gaping in a paralyzing rush of shame and bliss and gratitude and insecurity... more likely to feel humiliation and leap to conceal it than anything else, I suppose....
I don't like Ian Anderson. I never have. I still don't. I even sort of agree with a lot of the stuff he said. I could hear Jan Irvin yelling at him that he's a dupe of the genocidal maniacs who thought up the hippies to render us all impotent against their diabolical plans. "He hasn't done his grammar! He's a dumbed down dupe! Don't listen to him just because he's so famous!"
That isn't the problem. It's the glibness of spirit behind what he's saying, what he's playing, even when he's trying to sound humble or altruistic. If I could deliver that dharma peek, I fancy he'd break his flute over his head and try harder....
Silly me.
He'd feel the burn, the hot poker of recognition, be stupefied, and then insulted, all so quickly I'd hardly be off into the fog before he started blowing on that cursed flute for all he's worth... burying that insight under a mountain of gold records and anyone within earshot of his deuced pipe.
And when I'm bitching about people this way, don't mistake it! I used to be someone who could pontificate like that at the drop of a hat... on anything. If you are smart enough you learn things through your pores... without paying any attention. If you are gregarious enough you can say so much about anything, strictly on the basis of the words used to hark it into discussion, that whoever you are talking with will be convinced you know all about it. Very gratifying. That poor slob is so impressed.
I aced every test in school this way. I never studied. I never did a lick of homework. They put the test in front of me and I wrote paragraphs about whatever the question itself harked to mind. I got an A every time.
You could drop me in a convention full of physicists or brain surgeons or astronomers and I would not feel out of my depth, okay?
Neither would Ian Anderson.
Neither would a thousand of the big names of Blogistan whose posts full of righteous-sounding sophistry flash through the reaches of cyberspace almost as quickly as they can hit their "Publish" buttons. It's dead.
It's not real. It's an entire Western-Civilization-sized theatrics that even a pre-schooler could tell you is so far beside the point that the whole planet is dying of it. It. Doesn't. Work. That should be your first clue. And a little unbiased consideration should yield up the rest of them quickly enough.
But no. You need to dedicate untold amounts of time and effort into becoming clear enough of conditioning to do that kind of considering at all. It's usually the B students who are willing to agree with this much. The A students slap some sort of cleverism over it and call it good.
So we're back to my urges for that magic snuff box to contain the FLASH that could save the world... as much by scaring off the jackasses as hooking the bodhisattvas, I guess. It just seems to me to be the way to move into the future... the way to have a future....
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