Dubbed the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009," it's 407 pages of the most brain-numbingly boring legal- and political-speak you've ever laid your eyes upon. No, let me amend that - it's the most boring thing I've ever laid my eyes upon. You are too smart to waste precious hours of your life studying the document.
That's right, I read the god-damned thing! Where did it get me? Well, now I know that none of those loudmouths know what in the hell they're talking about. Of course, I already knew that so I guess I'm back where I started. I suppose I can now argue with confidence against them. I have the facts. They don't. Then again, the facts never seem to make a bit of difference to them.
Why do I do things like this? Here's another example. When the steroid scandal hit baseball, I boned up on everything I could about performance enhancing drugs. I learned how prevalent their use is, what the health benefits and risks are, and how they might or might not actually improve a hitter's or pitcher's game. I then wrote a 5000-word treatise on the subject. All the while I was saying to myself, Just wait till I dazzle them all with my brilliance!
Naturally, when it came time to pit my research against the uninformed ramblings of the loudmouthed set, I may as well have been speaking Amharic.
We like to view ourselves as a rational, intelligent species. We call ourselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens - wise, wise man. It's as if we're insecure about our wisdom: Hey, we're smart! You hear me? We're smart!
We must be smart. We've created an Internet which provides us access to the most diverse, minutely-studied array of pornography imaginable. We've invented television and CDs and DVDs, which bring us the artistry of Howie Mandell, Madonna, and "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" directly into our homes. Perhaps our most spectacular and life-changing invention has been the automobile, whose evolution has resulted in that most sublime and aesthetically pleasing artifact known as The Hummer.
So yeah, we're smart. And I'm a smart ass but I like to think of myself as plain old smart as well. Sadly, though, we seem to have a need to be willfully not-smart too. I remember watching the first debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry during the 2004 election. No matter what you think about the respective candidates' positions, you have to agree that the incumbent Bush appeared embarrassingly uninformed and unable to articulate complex ideas. I felt a sense of shame and humiliation that the rest of the world saw the leader of the United States as, well, a dope. I wondered who could possibly vote for a man so lacking in intellectual assets. Oops - who's the real dope here? It turned out that a majority of Americans actually liked Bush's folksy befuddlement and were turned off by Kerry's intellectualism.
How about this? Years ago, I watched the mondo film "The Faces of Death" with my old pal Submarine Tony. Part of a series that was wildly popular in the 80s, it was purportedly a compilation of gruesome, real-life scenes of people being given one-way tickets out of this mortal coil. From the very start, I could tell that the producers' plan was to show a single, blurry, rough-cut clip of a real death and surround it with dozens of staged incidents.
So I launched into a scathing critique of the movie. I pointed out all the camera tricks and verbal suggestions, the breathless dramatic buildups and the shallow payoffs. I figured Submarine Tony would be thankful I'd opened his eyes. Instead, after listening to me for 20 minutes he said, "Would you shut the hell up? You're ruining the whole thing."
Another example. When Carl Sagan's book, "The Demon-Haunted World," came out in the mid-90s, I ran around excitedly telling everyone I knew what a great and valuable message it contained. Sagan wrote the book as a response to the exploding trends of pseudoscience. He deftly carved up fortune-tellers, UFO buffs, conspiracy theorists, New Agers, homeopaths, channelers, faith healers, and the like.
I was working at Barnes and Noble in Evanston at the time. One of my co-workers was Don the Egyptian, a tall fellow whom I'd figured to be fairly savvy. After I gushed about the book to him, he shrugged and said he wasn't interested in it. "I want my world to be demon-haunted," he said. "It's more interesting."
I wrote a note to myself: People want to be fooled.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only guy in the world who thinks the way I do. I also wonder where it gets me. Now and again I think, Wouldn't I be better off watching "Deal Or No Deal"? Instead, I read H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Then I think, Who would I rather hang out with? Howie Mandell or Carl Sagan? Sagan's been dead a dozen years now. I'd still prefer his company.
