I have been listening to a LOT of Patton Oswalt standup lately, and that’s how I came across this little gem :
And it struck me as darkly humorous because wow, that is always what it comes do when American liberals hit middle age, isn’t it?
They started off as bright-eyed idealists out to change the world in college, but by the time they hit 40, it’s all “I am personally embittered and disgusted by this world and therefore EVERYBODY EVERYWHERE SHOULD DIE. ”
Gee, sorry the world failed to live up to your high expectations, but um, aren’t you liberals against the death penalty?
So why are you levying it against LITERALLY EVERYONE?
And this got me thinking about the bitterness of the disillusioned idealist in general and how while I sympathize, I do not empathize.
Because I never had those lofty expectations of the world to begin with. Like I say, I lost my innocence so young I don’t remember it. As a result, I have been a ruthless pragmatist determined to see things as they really are for my whole life.
I have never, in my memory, thought of the world as a safe place. Or a good place. Or in any sense a fair place.
It’s just a place. It is what it is. Trying to generalize about it is futile because it contains all the good and all the bad and everything in between.
And you can’t possibly know enough about it to deduce its “true nature”.
When people talk about “life”, they are really talking about THEIR life. It’s not that Life sucks, it’s that YOUR life sucks…. right now.
Allow me to illustrate.
a : Man, life sucks!
b : What, in general?
a : Yeah! Life is a never ending shit sundae, man!
b : So it sucks for Bill Gates?
a : Yeah… I mean… well maybe not for him…
b : It sucks for little kids laughing and smiling at a birthday party?
a : OK well…. maybe not….
b : It sucks for newlyweds on honeymoon? Old people living it up on cruise ships? Parents gazing at their first newborn baby?
a : Well…. no, I mean….. some people are happy….
b : Just not you.
a : Yeah. I guess. Has anyone ever told you you’re a dick?
You get the idea.
What idealism I have – and I must stipulate that I consider myself to have very high ideals – has survived depression, trauma, loneliness, social isolation, and every other sort of ill that has befallen me, real or imagined.
It has continued to burn bright despite being yoked to the brutal realities of true pragmatism and it is therefore an idealism and optimism that is chosen.
I choose to have hope and keep fighting back the darkness and wage my war against pessimism, fatalism, jadedness, hopelessness, and all the other tricks the forces of evil use to convince us to just let them win already and get it over with.
NEVER. I will die before I stop shining my burning beacon into the dark corner of the world and the darker things get, the brighter it shines.
And I will gladly submit myself to the harshness of the pragmatic, realistic world view that accepts no unjustified simplifications because I know that it is through its self-discipline that true, effective, REAL solutions can be found.
You know. Shit that actually WORKS.
And that’s worth any amount of suffering to me. Including bruising your ideals.
Wow, this did not go where I wanted it to go.
Oh well, maybe in Part 2.
More after the break.
Now where was I going with this?
(scrolls back) Oh right… ruptured ideals.
Hmmmm. Actually, I don’t think there is much more to be said. I never had a sense that the world was a good place to lose.
Building myself up from “truth” only was a very hard path to tread and there are times when I wish I had been a lot dreamier and less “realistic”.
Maybe that would have cushioned me from some of the hard knocks life was going to give me. Maybe I should have listened to all the cartoons of my youth when they went on and on about “the power of imagination”.
Erf. Eh, maybe not.
No wonder we Gen X people grew up to be bitter and cynical when we had to listen to that crap for our entire childhoods.
I guess that sort of airy idealism was never going to be in the cards for me. I was a weirdly pragmatic and realistic child even before I got raped.
Like I keep saying, I never had an imaginary friend and I never played with toys in the imagination based way I have seen in the media.
Because I knew the friend wasn’t there and the toys were just objects. The idea of infusing them with my own imagination and (sort of) pretending they were real would literally never have occurred to me.
Thus began my lifelong career in being so damn smart that I completely fuck up my own natural development via logic.
I mean, kids have imaginary friends and play imagination games for a reason. Both things help us develop our social instincts and expand our consciousness. Like other animals, we humans have a whole battery of instincts that normally lead us along the path to being a fully functional adult if we obey them.
But not me, of course. Because I thought I knew better.
And I really wanted to link to a clip of Marge Simpson telling Lisa, “You see what we mean when we say you’re too smart for you own good?” from near the end of the “Hungry Are The Damned” segment in Treehouse of Horror 2 here.
But I can’t find it. My Google Fu is so weak.
I laughed SO hard at that line when I first saw that episode. It was that special kind of deep, cleansing laugh you can only get when some bit of comedy hits the nail right on the head for you.
I mean, just listen to how hard these people laugh :
Clearly Lehrer helped these people release tons of repressed Catholic emotions through the miracle of laughter.
And that’s what the Simpsons line did for me. I’ve been too smart for my own good for my whole damned life. Felt good to hear it said out loud like that.
Of course, I’m pushing 50 and still have no idea what to do with all these brains.
But hey, at least I can laugh about it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.