Tag: Monoculture

A Beautiful Tribute to the Writer of Calvin and Hobbes

On By BrettIn People, Personal, Pop culture, Quotes2 Comments

I found this link today to some inspiring words from Bill Watterson, the reclusive creator of the beloved Calvin and Hobbes series. The words critique the high-climbing, fast-paced American view of success and happiness: work hard, keep climbing, and one day you’ll be happy, or at the very least you’ll have fame, success, and a lot of money. Pointing out the statistics and the logical fallacies  to view entails is not new. Neither is Watterson’s encouragement to break away from social pressure and follow personal passions, ignoring the flak and shame that comes from following “the road less traveled.”

[image courtesy of NPR]
[image courtesy of NPR]
Some people may think such encouragement is trite or naive. It’s the sort of drivel that idealistic college kids tell themselves when struggling in classes and accruing debt or peppy elementary teachers post on walls, but ultimately, it’s a lie,as pervasive and false as the American dream. But when one considers the way Watterson lived out his own advice, the words gain a new depth. He did resist corporate pressure and created one of the most beloved, evocative comic strips around. Not everyone would want to fallow his path, and many may think his reclusive life unstable and unhealthy.

But still, hearing such words in such a monoculture of competition and corporate ambition is refreshing. Hearing such words from Watterson, transformed into a homage by cartoonist Gavin Aung Than–that is truly moving:

“This Incredible Tribute to Calvin and Hobbes will Make you Cry”

Bits ‘n’ pieces: the odds and ends of the world

On By BrettIn Cosmology, Personal, Thoughts6 Comments

For a while now I’ve been wanting to write an essay about end tables, coat Archaeologistpockets, bag bottoms, and storage cabinets. We often forget these clutter-gathering crevices of our individual lives, until we fish through an old coat and pull out receipts, candy bar wrappers, and a dollar or two tangled with some coins. These seemingly random articles, disused and long-forgotten, once played a role. We bought something, earning that receipt. We ate that candy bar and couldn’t find a trash can. We pocketed that loose change.

Such odds and ends reveal our former lives, providing a time stamp for our days and habits, whether they are the books and jewelry on our end tables, the unused casserole dishes in our cabinets, or the grit and at the bottom of our bags. Our past selves leave traces. And just as archaeologists dig through the rubbish of past cities, we can dig through our own lives.

But unlike archaeologists, we don’t normally care about these random bits of rubbish. We crave the big picture–the narrative that collects the pieces, not the pieces themselves. Perhaps a few things transcend this bias, like a stone from our childhood house, a ticket stub from a memorable movie, or that framed first dollar a business might display. We infuse these random pieces of existence with meaning and display them, like a museum of our lives.

But in themselves, they are mere physical objects. That dollar passed trough hundreds of indifferent hands before it fell behind that frame. Its “it-narrative” probably included stints buried in coat pockets or lost in the wrappers and rubbish on the bottom of a bag. Maybe it fell behind a bed. Maybe it went from a lemonade stand to a store clerk to a strip club. That dollar connects us to hundreds of other lives–including our past selves–but its average everydayness camouflages it.

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Labels

On By BrettIn Philosophy2 Comments

Labels are insidious. I imagine them slipping around like lampreys and aphids, Sticky_note_sleepingnotching their toothless jaws to us. They slip into conversation, into thought, and spatter the world like sticky notes, categorizing, separating, allocating, and organizing. We can pry them loose, but they always seem to slip back and latch on again. They’re often at the foundation of how we operate, whether we’re aware of them or not.

One of my favorite–albeit “sketchy”–pastimes is to sit in a crowded place, especially on a college campus, and look at how people naturally sort themselves, fitting into tidy categories

The “jocks,” with short, blond hair, fit physiques, and exercise clothes sit together. So does the alternative crowd, people like “hipsters,” with quirky sweaters, weathered jeans, and sunglasses, or the lingering pockets of “goth” and “emo”culture.

The pre-med students group together, and the theater folk unite. The church-going flock together, filling the same long tables at meals with persistent regularity.

People separate and and sort by age, majors, music tastes, geographic locations– anything to segment and define–and looking at them, I, too, block people together under labels.

I often wonder where the label ends and the person begins.

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Non-economic labels

On By BrettIn WritingLeave a comment
Image
from “Stealth of Nations,” a blog by Robert Neuwirth

I just finished Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything, a recent book by writer and researcher F.S. Michaels. She details how an economic view of the world shapes our lives at the expense of other views. The “economic story,” as she calls it, is a way of viewing the world that takes specific biases for reality: mainly that we’re rational individuals with selfish needs behaving in an indifferent market system.

Our world expects us to conform to this monoculture and we hardly notice its pervasive dominance.

It was a fascinating book, and I hope to have a review up this week, but I read it thinking of my own self-proscribed label as a “writer.”

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