Much has been said in days and years past to the detriment of boredom. Some scandalous wags (not wangs) seem to find in its antithesis, 'excitement' or 'excrement' if you will, something devoutly to be desired. (HogBlog is thinking now of a Shakespeare line HogBlog cannot quite recall at the moment, to speak in the third person without use of pronouns.) Boredom is something to be fought to these poor, sick bastards, a disease to be cured, a pox, if you will. To such people as these, This Modern World must seem heaven-sent, for truly we live in Interesting Times. If you will.
Why does boredom have such a bad reputation?
Given that Interesting Times typically involve political turmoil, crusades to fight, dragons to slay, calls to arms, heroic rescues, divers alarums, war, chaos, destruction, death, burnt toast, left luggage, blood, sweat, tears, urine, semen...What's the attraction? Really?
Who wants to live in a time of upheaval and turmoil?
The proper state for any society really worth living in, if you ask HogBlog--and HogBlog knows that you didn't--is a sort of muddling, good-intentioned stability in which uninspiring and possibly unimaginative yet competent political figures with no definite agenda guide the nation through a long, dull national nightmare of peace and prosperity, while the great masses of the populace go about their diurnal lives in a deeply noncombative yet quietly progressive tide of advancing liberal sentiment, paying heed to politics only when it suits them, secure in the knowledge that their elected representatives, without their own personal constant supervision, will get things, if not quite right, then not wholly wrong; or sufficiently right for most tastes, will stumble perhaps but at least when they fall they will fall forward, gaining inch by awkward inch.
In short, in times of boredom We The People can exercise our fundamental God-given right to political apathy, which, really, is what makes life worth living.
Politics should not be a major concern to anyone not directly involved in governance, most of the time. And sometimes not even to them. The State, after all, is nothing but a convenient fiction. There is no entity out there called America, a living thinking creature with passions, desires, goals, fears, hobbies, parent-teacher meetings. (Unless you're living in a John Crowley novel.) This fiction exists solely for the comfort and convenience of We The People. In Interesting Times such as these, less boring and less benevolent regimes often gloss over this fact, bludgeoning an unprepared populace over their collective head into obedience with the Idea of the State, when the reason the State exists at all is to serve Us. Remember? To handle things like the post, sanitation, roadways, schools, law enforcement, environmental preservation, public libraries, Fermilab, the National Endowment for the Arts? Not in fact to shit the Patriot Act into our mouths?
Why should the concerns of this fictitious State trump those of actual, breathing people, We The People who exist, breathe, love, excrete, consume, read, build, who watch hockey, who pay outrageous box office prices to see X2, who make the society the State claims to represent? We who do the things that make history happen? Who live the lives that will become the future's stories, and make stories out of the lives of the past? History is not a triumphal parade of generals, battles, dates, and revolutions; history is the story told by women and men, written by women and men, for women and men. We are not its slaves, but its parents.
The important things are the details of small, ordinary human lives.
A boring State is a safe State. Look to the north. Look to Canada. What do you see? You see what America could have been under President Gore: with a federal leadership that might be a bit of a joke, but a harmless one, quiet and prosperous, its currency at unprecendented highs, with a firm international standing, and liberal ideals slowly seeping over the land despite everyone's best efforts.
Compare that to what the US currently has. The shouting, the rhetoric, the Republican Attack Machine, the paranoia, the patriotism, the propaganda...
One wants to grab America by the shoulder and say 'Dude, just chill out already. Dude.'
America would be a much happier and less hostile place if our elected leadership and unelected presidential frauds were required by law to smoke pot on a weekly basis. Say, on Friday nights. They were tailor-made for pot-smoking, as Dan Savage describes it in his book Skipping Towards Gomorrah, in which Mr Savage theorises that marijuana acts like a vacation compressed into the space of a single weekend for vast legions of overworked, under-relaxed American toilers and wayfarers. They'd be so much mellower, and less likely to oppress us ruthlessly beneath the iron heels in their velvet jackboots.
In conclusion, then, three cheers for boredom, a sure sign of a well-managed state!
Posted by aloysius at May 10, 2003 09:21 PM |