Baseball? Football? Hell no, the American national pastime is snark, that kind of idiotic cynicism that makes the worthless hunk of big city, small minded protoplasm feel wise and worthwhile.
No, I didn't wake up this way this morning, but I did go looking for live streaming of the remnants of TS Irene on her way through New York. I do, after all have friends and relatives in the area and as of 10 AM today it looks like it won't be all that bad for those not foolish enough to go surfing or walking out on piers to see the waves as idiots are wont to do to the delight of the sharks.
No, what got to me were the endless comments from people using their good fortune to scream the usual brainless things about the inaccuracy of storm strength predictions. Ha, ha, ha -- the worst case scenario seems not to have occurred and as the first licks of wind began to affect the wormy apple, the giggling about the "experts," the government and their liberal inadequacy began.
So perhaps there were ten good heterosexual Christian people in the greater New York area and so God, who as you know is in control of all natural disasters affecting America, decided to spare the city. If so, that small group isn't evident in on line news commentaries. But God or no God, hurricane strengths are subject to too many variables to be accurately forecast so the smart person, the person who has been there, done that and had the T-shirt ripped off his back by the wind, ignores the giggling and prepares for the worst.
There aren't a hell of a lot of New Yawkahs who remember the storm of 1938. Even in Florida in 2004 the locals, many of them from New Yawk were smirking and snarking about the silliness of taking Francis seriously. It was fun to see them lined up at FEMA in their big Republican cars waiting sheepishly for food and water. Many of them no longer have houses in my part of Florida after a cat 2 and a cat 3 hitting the same town in the same month. Even so, in the following year some were still talking about Chicken Little when Wilma was predicted to be a weak Cat 1 yet by the time it came down my street, there were big oak trees rolling like tumbleweed in a Western movie and tall palms flapping like overcooked pasta or being torn to pieces and I still can't sleep through a storm for remembering the deafening noise of that storm.
So keep laughing you smug, know-it-all New York nitwits. Keep telling us we don't need FEMA or the National Weather Service or any silly thing that sounds like government -- just don't go looking for help when the looters come to your door, if you still have a door or are floating out to sea on the remnants of your house after a phone pole came through the wall at 160 MPH. Go have a Tea Party meeting in the soggy rubble stinking of drowned rats and dead crabs and tell yourselves about the every-man-for-himself paradise that comes from having no "government programs." I'm 800 miles away and it ain't my concern.
Hey, now. Don't make fun of snark and cynicism. Some of us live by those two virtues.
ReplyDeleteMoi? Someone famous once said that cynicism is the weapon of the cultured man. Such weapons shouldn't be allowed in the hands of others.
ReplyDeleteYesterday, New Joisy’s verbally abusive GOP despot said: “Mandatory evacuation means we will arrest you if you don’t leave your homes” only to backtrack a few hours later with: “Well, maybe we won’t arrest you, but we won’t rescue you either.”
ReplyDeleteNow lets focus on what Ron Paul said on Friday, August 26, 2011: “I live on the gulf coast, we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.” He thinks FEMA is nanny thang, that folks should fend themselves just like the good ole days when thousands died in a single storm.
In 2004, hurricanes Frances and Jeannie tore through my neighborhood too. A single mom who lived down the road had sent her teenage daughter to Miami to stay with relatives while she braved the storm alone. Days later, the mom was found dead.
No matter what any Republican says, whether they err on the side of caution or err on the side of recklessness, they are all so fucking callous and stupid, I’d like to smack them, smack them all! I can’t do snark and cynicism when I am this angry.
"the smart person, the person who has been there, done that and had the T-shirt ripped off his back by the wind, ignores the giggling and prepares for the worst." and "Such weapons shouldn't be allowed in the hands of others."
ReplyDeleteYes, the attitude you're describing differs significantly from genuine cynicism, which is founded on sad experience. It is a pre-fab device that stupid, mean-spirited people use to fend off having to deal with actual experience. Cynicism is worthwhile, but it has to be earned first: one has to have seen enough, been around long enough, to see certain patterns emerging in human conduct, nature, etc. Patterns aren't proof of grand coherence, but they're pretty much what we have to go on in this life. I think the kind of cynicism we find at times on our own site is of this latter, genuine sort.
For example, it's hard not to be cynical about politicians' claims to have the golden key to "getting this economy moving again" when you've heard that slogan in every campaign going back to Ulysses Grant, or whatever your personal cut-off point is. Same goes for "getting government off the backs of the American People" and other such drivel. The thing is, as smarty-french-pants Monsieur de Tocqueville wasn't too shy to remind us, les américains don't spend much time reflecting on their own past. So each generation of Amur'cans experiences all these stale memes and sound-bytes as if they were being uttered for the first time. The earnest take them for profundities or at least for reasonable approximations of the truth, while the snarkificators just make fun of politics and everything else without even bothering to consider why. It's all beneath them since they're going to live forever, of course, and they'll never need any help or even meet anyone who might need their help.
And I think such phenomena as the reassertion of "creationism" in the face of sound scientific theory shouldn't come as a surprise to us: what pattern in human history is more common than rejecting what our minds tell us is true in favor of what we dearly want to be true instead?
"what pattern in human history is more common than rejecting what our minds tell us is true in favor of what we dearly want to be true instead? "
ReplyDeleteThat would get me back onto the thin ice, so I won't go there. Besides, sanity is only a theory with gaps in it, which proves that Cthulu created the Earth, and he created it flat.
o have a Tea Party meeting in the soggy rubble stinking of drowned rats and dead crabs and tell yourselves about the every-man-for-himself paradise that comes from having no "government programs." I'm 800 miles away and it ain't my concern.
ReplyDeleteLOL! Classic.
Great blog. Just stumbled upon it. Keep doing what you do.