Some, if not all, have asked me why I am so cynical. Why do you always believe, given the chance to do well or to do harm, humans will do harm, they wonder aloud. In defense of my negativity, we have seen all through human history the inherent man’s-inhumanity-to-man. I reply with Emmett Till, Victor Jara, the children who were strapped to their car seats when their mother pushed the car into the lake. For some, Cain slew his brother Abel. For others, better caves were acquired by beating in the heads of the occupants with rocks.
I promise you, the rest of this post won’t be as much of a downer…maybe. I suppose it all depends on how much kum-bah-yah you require to exist upon. I do expect you will feel a slight bit of uplift knowing you couldn’t possibly be as dumb as the people who either vilified or supported the following examples.
Rebecca Black “Friday” – Just about a year ago, young Rebecca Black’s music video “Friday” landed on YouTube. To say it was a hit is an understatement. To say it was particularly good is an overstatement. It is, above all, a song performed by an unseasoned thirteen-year-old girl and, as such, could have been far, far worse than it is. There is a reason why my cassette recordings from my youth spontaneously combusted into flame, smoke, and curdled blobs of plastic.
Yup, I had no hand in that at all.
You are not stupid to have watched the video. You’re not even stupid if you admit to liking it a little bit. I don’t particularly like it myself, but I like that Black pursued her dreams as she did. Too bad I am a minority on this, as the song quickly became an internet meme, the butt of jokes, and believe it or not, the instigation of online death threats against Black. Adult television celebrities openly and cruelly mocked her song and her as if their youthful efforts didn’t bite it (heck, some of these “adults” professional efforts still bite it!) Black’s parents withdrew her from school and she is now being taught at home. This is to protect her from the taunting and abuse that came in tandem with her pursuit.
But kids are cruel by nature and are, therefore, exempt because they’re too young not to be so stupid, right? Follow me, Ebenezer. There are three shadows more.
Coca Cola Christmas Can – This past Christmas season Coca Cola introduced a holiday-themed can based on their perennially popular polar bear characters. The can was actually kind of an elegant design, but it was also a shiny, silver one. The marketing team at Coca Cola probably assumed, “Well, nobody’s going to simply ingest products without reading the contents of the label, right?”
Wrong! An outpouring of anger forced the company to withdraw the design and replace the cans with the standard red cans. It seems that the ‘erudite’ purchasing community did, in fact, run to the store and buy the regular Coke believing it was the Diet Coke, all the while probably thinking (if only to remind their little pea-brains), “Diet silver! Me buy silver! Me drink silver! Me good consumer!” The complaints ranged from slightly peeved of the “that was a poor choice in design” variety all the way up to claims of nefarious conspiracies of keeping America obese. After all, we have no control over what we ingest. Packaging designers lift the products to our mouths and make us eat it.
On the plus side, some stores still have some cans left. #FutureCollectorsItem
The Artist
– They also make us watch brand-new black and white silent films! Oh mercy! Several audiences were up in arms with the Weinstein Company and their distribution of the Oscar-nominated film The Artist. Nobody told them it was a silent film in black and white; not the black and white posters for it, nor the marketing campaigns that touted a “modern black and white silent film,” nor all the critics and write-ups that specified it was a silent, black & white movie. Through all of those warnings, nobody told them! Nobody!! Demands were, once again, made. Threats of lawsuits promised. Somewhere out there, Vin Diesel readies The Fast And The Furious Six, rubs his hands insidiously, and cackles, “Muahhh-haah-haaahhh!!”
The Artist should have been rated R-G: Goobers not permitted without a guardian with at least a high school education.
Those Who Continue To Make Excuses For The Republican Candidates For President of the United States – I’ll try not to get too political here. Pres. Obama was not the savior so many were hoping for. He got a lot wrong in his first term. He also got a lot right, but it really has nothing to do with him. If a competent, relevant, and relatively trustworthy conservative competitor was up against him, it wouldn’t really have anything to do with them either. Nor does it have much to do with the pack of presumed candidates of pseudo-intellectuals and money-shufflers.
It’s all about those who still claim today, as they claimed when Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain were in the race (and Donald Trump kept flirting with), that any one of them would be better than Obama.
I have several very conservative friends who say, unequivocally, that they cannot in good conscience vote for Obama but will not vote for any of their own candidates. Why, asked I. “Because they all suck,” they say. “They suck, and the RNC sucks for not banning them somehow and demanding at least one worthwhile contender. They have tried to deflect their hatred of the Democrats and bounce it off on us, making us the ones at fault for voting for such a bunch of losers, rather than taking the blame for mismanagement of their party.”
Another said, “I don’t intentionally seek out crap. I try to get the best. Why does the party I am affiliated with think so little of me that they would expect me to buy into these (jerks*)?”
(*Trust me – I severely cleaned it up for our more sensitive readership.)
And yet there is still a small army out there that say this F-Team, bench-riding, last-place, nose-picking, mouth-breathing, soldier-bashing, grandma-evicting, cancer-patient-ignoring lot of amoeboids is, one and all, better than Obama on his best day. They probably also enjoy drinking Drano accidentally, watch Charlie Chaplin films with the Insane Clown Posse dubbed over, and have on more than one occasion issued fatwa upon tween-age children.
2012 may be our last year, but not because of Mayan apocalypse. We’re too stupid, as a species, to justify our continuance.
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