King For A Day

It has been an extraordinary time to be alive. For the last 100 years or so something has occurred that has never happened before: a person can be king for a day. What I'm talking about I experienced a couple of weekends ago. I attended a wedding and was treated to being waited on by a staff of attentive and responsive servers bartenders and other employees of the venue. Of course I did not think much about this until I had my fourth beer (an excellent summer-brew: Bell's Oberon). As I walked about the place I appreciated the dark suits and the veritable rainbow of dresses, the elegance that a gas station attendant could achieve given the proper setting and atmosphere. Men who turn wrenches for a living still look the noble emperor when attired in garments of severe angles and dignity. That under the soft glowing lights of the dance floor, all were miraculously transformed. Thoughts of chores that must be finished, time-clocks that must be punched, children who must be cared for, and bills that cry to be paid; all are washed gently from the brain by that dripping light and elegant music.

Granted, the excesses of a great hall in the palace at Versailles can not be compared to a wedding hall within the price range of a nervous and happy blue collar working father. Yet with enough beer and imagination we could all easily be in some remote court, playing the wealthy and noble Lord. Yet these people could never take themselves that seriously, because come Monday they will go back to being Wal-Mart drones, or paper pushers. For them, they know the dangers of flying to high from their inescapable landing place, usually somewhere that they spend most of their lives without wanting to be there.

I then began to wonder what the mindset of a person who feels they belong at the top is? Those who feel that they should not only be king for a day, but a king forever. I could not help but feel that if their powers of imagination and ambition were so monstrously huge, that they must in some way be insane. The flights of imagination, and the twisted webs of rationalizations that must be performed to come to such a conclusion are well beyond my meager means. Perhaps I lack the ability to pierce the boundaries of my imagination that I have learned over many years, you know, the ones that keep you sane, the places in your mind that you just know its a bad place to visit, and to visit too often risks being trapped there for the rest of your life. These kings are in a place many of us would be unwilling to follow.

I have been a participant and also a parent in the grand experiment of getting a group of kids to take their turn with a much coveted toy. It usually works extremely well, the first few kids will take their turn and pass on the toy, confident that justice will prevail, everyone will take their turn and that he will have another in time. Unfortunately there is always a problem, there is always one little asshole who doesn't want to take his turn. For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, he feels that he has a right to trump the good of the others for his own. I have seen kids who would break the toy in a rage rather than take his turn and pass it on.

So who are these men whom we allow to continue in their temper tantrums, these men who live on the tops of New York skyscrapers, these men who own their own jets, who are worth more than some small countries. Why do we allow them to get away with not taking their turns? We had better do something about it soon, else the working classes will not be able to afford to be a king for even a day anymore. I think its about damn time we started making them take their turn at the wheel, and let us have a few more days of being a king.

The God Manafacturing Process

It could be said that the reason everyone knows Britney Spears is because of technology. Mass media made it possible for something to occur that would not have been possible fifty years previous: the national and international recognition of someone with absolutely no redeeming qualities as a cultural and ideological leader, in that person's lifetime. Now this being the case imagine the virtues that those who attained fame prior to mass media must have possessed. Granted lying is as old as.. well... lying, and it is usually the surest way to any spotlight. The tall tales that gave us King Arthur and Joseph Smith have been helped greatly by the oldest form of mass media, histories. I would say that the passage of a ludicrous amount of time is second only to mass media in distorting and forcing a grotesque personality upon humanity.

Surely there could be nothing more reassuring then the comforting notion that humanity has never bothered with slapping these kind of people down, but were instead quite content to let them have their airy castles while they calmly lived out their lives. It does speak to a seldom heralded, yet invaluable human quality: apathy. Grand, glorious, wonderful apathy! Imagine if people really cared, imagine if the term "tongue and cheek" had never been coined. Imagine if those who fancy themselves our leaders could fathom the depth of our indifference. If they could, we would then be treated to the spectacle of an enormously bloated ego crashing like the Hindenburg. It would be better than the Fourth of July. Perhaps we should have "shun and ridicule someone important day" once a year, nah once a month.

Now I'm not making the argument that everyone of renown is worthless. There is ample evidence that Mozart was a genius with the piano and the pen. That Da Vinci was brilliant with the brush and the square. Now if only we could find a vintage Jesus Water Wine. Or maybe Joseph Smith's groovy golden tablets. But nah.....who cares? Where the hell'd I put my Cheetos?

Christianity, Humility, Atheism, and Obvious Toupees

Humility has been preached as a virtue for centuries by many teachers and groups. I have found through my own experiences that attempting to become more humble an odd experience, especially if you are a Christian. Let’s face it, according to Christian metaphysics we are all demi-gods in the making; we all have our very own guardian angel, and hordes of demons deem our souls to have such worth that they work tirelessly to obtain them. When this is your view of the world and more importantly your view of yourself, it is no wonder that humility has to be so stressed in Christian circles.

In contrast, take the atheist’s view of himself. He has strong evidence that he may have evolved from lesser primates, that he is not the center of a giant inter-dimensional soap opera/power struggle, that a lot of his impulses and desires are leftovers from a sloppy evolution over which he has little control, and that when his body dies, he dies. Which of these two groups would be more naturally inclined to humility?

A clear difference can also be observed in how these two groups settle an argument. Whenever I see two Christians debating a point of theological contention, my mind often paints a picture of two cavemen settling a dispute. In the case of a theological argument, evidence is never needed or even brought up, precisely because the two arguers have accepted the premise that what they are debating is “above” proof, or beyond human understanding (why they argue at all is an irony invisible to this sort). Now two cavemen in contention are completely unaware of the concept of evidence, so it is not a part of their discourse, and every contest is settled by force. The biggest caveman wins every argument. In comparison the biggest Christian Church won every argument ever raised in the Middle Ages with the use of its favorite club: the Spanish Inquisition. In our more modern, civil time, force of personality, or the force of conditioning has taken over the role of the inquisition. It does not matter to a Christian what a person says, but who said it, and how they said it. So the biggest and most eloquent Christian wins every argument. A good example would be when the High Priest of America declared that certain countries were not just a threat to the U.S., but that they were in fact evil. All his loyal Christian followers accepted this without any proof, simply because the biggest Christian had spoken (I’ll grant you, not eloquently) and we went to war.

The saying “he has strong convictions” is often thrown around in religious discourse. Merriam-Webster defines conviction as: a strong persuasion or belief. Every five year old I ever met had very strong convictions about the existence of Santa Claus. So just possessing a rabid conviction is no great achievement. I often wondered how one quantizes the strength of ones convictions, because it seems to me that in order to have strong convictions you must have successful convictions, meaning a lot of people adhere to your personal convictions. The methods needed to convince a mass of unthinking people are usually somewhat suspect. Of course Nuremberg springs immediately to mind, but I think that is taking it a bit too far. Used car salesman is more the line of modern Christian leaders. An absurd amount of self confidence, mixed with greasy charisma and fast talking seems to be the ultimate soil in which the seed of conviction grows best. And from that fertile soil springs the giant ego of the only gods we know, Christians.