Originally posted December 18th, 2011
By Michael Konik
Women, those creatures from Venus, assume that most men, particularly boyfriends and husbands, suffer from a malady known as “selective hearing.” Other forms of this pervasive syndrome include “selective memory” and “selective comprehension.” A rough description: When the Lakers score is coming over the radio, a man hears like a bat; when the wife is asking him to do the dishes – or massage her bunions, or watch cat videos – he hears like Marlee Matlin.
Selective memory usually kicks in when the subject of inquiry involves ex-girlfriends or number of beers consumed.
Selective comprehension usually kicks in when the subject of discussion involves the operation of the pay-per-view function on the remote when the new “Twilight” sequel shows up on cable.
Though it’s not yet entered in the Physicians’ Desk Reference, we’ve recently identified a new and possibly unrelated disease. This one affects both men . . . → Read More: Selective Smelling
Originally posted December 11th, 2011
By Michael Konik
Marx famously thought that religion was the opiate of the masses. If he were around today he could safely add sports and every other form of entertainment to the societal apothecary. We pay burly fellows like Albert Pujols more than $25 million a year to hit baseballs and petite ones like Tom Cruise about the same to look handsome while dangling from skyscrapers.
They deserve every penny, and maybe more. Our court jesters and fools don’t merely distract us from the gloom and anxiety of a fully examined life. They fill our spiritual emptiness with comforting narratives, gracefully lending what feels like meaning to the unsolvable mystery of existence – sort of like what religion does for the naïve and credulous among us. And for that we’re grateful.
The ancients had Talmudic scholars. We moderns have sports talk radio and TMZ. Since there’s always something . . . → Read More: Tom Sawyer Syndrome
Originally posted December 4th, 2011
By Michael Konik
Last week I experienced my first ride inside the back of an ambulance rushing to a hospital emergency room. The sirens wailed while paramedics monitored my vital signs and called out important-sounding numbers. I looked up from the gurney I was attached to, noting the oxygen valve on the ceiling, the lights, the latched compartments containing the tools of triage, and since I get motion sickness when traveling backwards I concentrated on breathing steadily and not vomiting. I heard the beeping of an EKG monitor and the crackling of a two-way radio and felt the pressure of a plastic mask over my mouth and on the bridge of my nose.
This is what many people see before they die, I realized: the inside of a speeding ambulance filled with mustachioed firemen-paramedics.
Although I felt terrible, I was almost certain I wasn’t dying. I had passed . . . → Read More: Near Death on Two Wheels
Originally posted November 27th, 2011
By Michael Konik
Friends are fickle. Family is unreliable. But shopping – now that’s something we can all count on to raise our collective Holiday Spirit. This was the primary message of hope we heard during Thanksgiving, which has gradually morphed into a two-day bacchanal. (Day One, Thanksgiving Thursday, features food and football. Day Two, Black Friday, features standing in lines and buying things.) In recent years, a period in which overconsumption has become a symbolic form of American art, the second part of the two-day holiday has threatened to overtake the first part in cultural importance. Indeed, in many places Friday is now beginning at 10PM on Thursday.
Here’s how someone the Los Angeles Times identified as a “retail expert” explained early reports that shoppers were “in a frenzy” of spending: “People have had so many years of recession that they want to spend money and feel good . . . → Read More: Shopping Our Way to Happiness
Originally posted November 20th, 2011
By Michael Konik
Mr. Darwin has some ‘splaining to do.
Our species, which has managed to rise to the top of the food chain, conquer and colonize every region of the planet we care to inhabit, and control the fate of almost every other species unlucky enough to exist contemporaneously with humankind, seems to be partially exempt from the Theory of Evolution.
Sure, our spectacular advances in technology appear to be compelling evidence that we’re making progress, “improving” our existence by applying our superior intelligence to complicated problems that other creatures can’t solve. Want an iPad, Senor Gerbil? You might want to grow some thumbs! Life expectancy is longer – and by many measures healthier and altogether “better” (less violent, less frightening) than, say, 10,000 years ago.
But what kind of species is powerful enough to unilaterally destroy its environment, smart enough to understand the ramifications of its decisions, . . . → Read More: Evolutionary Doubts
Originally posted November 13th, 2011
By Michael Konik
The tragic hero, Sophocles taught us, is an otherwise great man (a warrior, a king) with a flaw that makes him perilously human, which is to say imperfect and prone to terrible mistakes that may or may not involve the family matriarch. Thanks to the magic of theatrical drama, we who witness the tragic hero’s downfall understand that he is us and we are him. The dread and disgust we experience at his failures provide a kind of cleansing (catharsis), and, the Greek playwrights hoped, a kind of wisdom.
“Learn from the mistakes of others” is the lesson. But it’s one that’s easier to talk about than master. Instead, we constantly repeat the mistakes of other — and then find new tragic heroes to feel bad about, whether or not they’re tragic or a hero.
Our latest protagonist is Joe Paterno, 84, the lifelong Penn State . . . → Read More: Sophocles in Happy Valley
Originally posted October 30th, 2011
By Michael Konik
Here’s how a noted correspondent for the London Observer recently described one of the world’s great democratic republics: “[The country] has become greedy, obsessed with commercialism at the expense of any other value or norm, xenophobic, belligerent, and hubristic.”
He was talking about modern Great Britain. But sentient Americans reading the unpleasant description surely identify with the harsh diagnosis. We’ve been this way for as long as I’ve been alive (more than 46 years). Manifest Destiny has always been our credo and American Exceptionalism our rationale. But now, as in Great Britain, our historical mother, the Empire – and the myth of universal prosperity — is crumbling. The belligerence turns toward home.
In London there were riots and looting and violence. In New York (and Los Angeles, Oakland, Atlanta, Denver, Las Vegas, and a growing number of cities in every region of the Unites States) there’s . . . → Read More: Occupy Everything
Originally posted October 23rd, 2011
By Michael Konik
Finally.
After more than eight-and-a-half years of deadly folly (more than 120,000 lives, most of them Iraqi civilians) at costs that may never be fully counted ($806 billion out of our treasury so far; $3 trillion according to Nobel-winning economists), President Obama announced on Friday that he’ll pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of the year. “As a candidate for president, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end,” Obama said. “So today I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year…After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” he said.
Not exactly. The “war” has been over for around 8 years and 5 months. The ongoing (and disastrously expensive) police action we’ve been conducting there will continue, albeit at reduced numbers. . . . → Read More: Stop the War(s)! Cut the Budget! Restore our Faith?
Originally posted October 16th, 2011
By Michael Konik
As a non-commuter, I’ve always assumed that commuting to and from work or school was a kind of five-times-a-week penury, a semi-voluntary temporary confinement that people endured as a necessary but hated element of getting by. Stuck in traffic, rolling past the same landmarks ten times a week was brightened only by the opportunity to listen to a book on tape, learn a new language or song, talk (on hands-free consoles) to relatives — to “multi-task.”
Recently I learned from an acquaintance that his 90-minute daily commute from bedroom community to downtown financial center was anything but wasted time during which his life slowly dripped away, one burnt clutch at a time. His commute, he explained, is the one time of day when he can escape the drudgery of corporate striving, a respite from needy children and a hectoring wife. He can listen to sports talk . . . → Read More: Commuting and Cocooning
“I welcome that debate.” — President Barack Obama, reacting to the disclosure of a secret domestic surveillance program operating under his watch.
“I welcome that debate,” I said to my wife. She had just discovered that I’d been having — actually, that I am currently having and intend to continue having — an affair with one of the hot flexible chicks in my yoga class.
Some bitter friend of my wife’s knows the girl I’ve…
We’re like every other patriotic American: when our beloved country is under attack, as it is at this very moment and every other moment of every day, we’re delighted to sacrifice our constitutional rights.
Whatever gets the job done, that’s our view. And if beating Islamic terrorists means being spied…
The time we’re living in is being called the Technology Revolution. It’s given us personal computers and cell phones and devices that, we all agree, make our lives altogether better. Everything is more efficient, more connected. Things can be ordered to appear at your door, getting lost in your car is…
Luckily for Barack Obama, news of improper shenanigans at the IRS stole attention from the week’s biggest story: that the President’s Justice Department had secretly seized call information from at least 20 phone lines belonging to Associated Press reporters, including personal cell phones and the main switchboard of the AP’s…
News comes from Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that a disastrous fire swept through a garment factory there, killing eight people. A factory fire in November killed more than 100.
The garment industry in Bangladesh is euphemistically called “loosely regulated,” so, regrettably, these things (fires and so forth) tend…
Finland’s Don Johnson Big Band is an ironically named collective of modern hip-hop artists. They’re not big and they’ve got nothing to do with the former star of “Miami Vice,” but they are a band. A funky one. With percussion and a flute-and-sax man. They’re extremely groovy and unabashedly weird — klezmer gangsta rap, anyone? The best [...]
Tom Sawyer Syndrome
By Michael Konik
Marx famously thought that religion was the opiate of the masses. If he were around today he could safely add sports and every other form of entertainment to the societal apothecary. We pay burly fellows like Albert Pujols more than $25 million a year to hit baseballs and petite ones like Tom Cruise about the same to look handsome while dangling from skyscrapers.
They deserve every penny, and maybe more. Our court jesters and fools don’t merely distract us from the gloom and anxiety of a fully examined life. They fill our spiritual emptiness with comforting narratives, gracefully lending what feels like meaning to the unsolvable mystery of existence – sort of like what religion does for the naïve and credulous among us. And for that we’re grateful.
The ancients had Talmudic scholars. We moderns have sports talk radio and TMZ. Since there’s always something . . . → Read More: Tom Sawyer Syndrome