Oh I hardly think the Conquistadors are an improvement on the Aztecs. Their swords were hardly unbloody. And across the ocean where they came from those civilized Europeans, those Christians who had daintily eschewed sacrifice were killing each other with wild abandon in a little incident with the hopeful name of The Reformation.
And I have a problem with the immature nation idea, like a nation is like a human being who what, toddles and suckles, learns to walk and goes to school, goes off to college, gets a job, gets married, has kids, gets old and goofy? A nation is a bunch of people and the citizens of a new nation are about the same age as the citizens of an old nation. What, a new nation sows its wild oats and gets in some stupid war, that as a mature, responsible nation it wouldn't? Do mature nations behave better than adolescent nations? No. This whole idea of nations being like people and having to seek their destinies is pure hokum. People, as individuals don't behave all that well, but when they gather into nations and wave their flags and sing patriotic songs they behave worse than any tribe of trailer trash.
And I am not buying that these things happen in streaks, like on the playground for awhile we are all playing marbles, then yoyos, then kites, We are killing each other all the time for all sorts of reasons, the only new thing is the technology.
The new thing about mass murder, and I am talking specifically about that and not all sorts of political and religious and nutjob assasinations, is that it is a thing. It has a culture. These guys are aware of previous mass murders, the count, the methods, like following a baseball team. I thought that was the point of the article, that what is new is this culture where who knows how many are following it and we're just waiting for the tick that sets them off.
I guess I am being disagreeable this morning, which is hardly a new thing, because I was up three hours past my bedtime watching a Cub game. Well not just a Cub game, the rubber game in the NLCS series to decide which team would go to California for a chance to beat the Dodgers and go on to the World Serious. I know Beagles has no truck with sports, and I myself have said it a thousand times: sports is stupid. One team or the other will win, one guy can always run faster or snap up a grounder better than the other guy, if your team wins you are no smarter, better-looking, or richer, except for some small bet you may have made.
But, Beagles calls it mass hysteria, and I believe I have succumbed. The nine inning game, full of lead changes and bizarre happenings, went on for five hours. An hour into it, I broke out a red imperial IPA that was to be last year's celebratory beer, but I didn't get around to drinking it in my mass hysteria at the time. After I drank that I went to the downstairs bar and had a tall IPA. The crowd was small and too drunk to feed my hysteria so I went back upstairs and had another beer. By then it was way past my bedtime and I rested my eyes in the LaZy boy for a half inning that lasted about half an hour. Refreshed, I opened another beer and stared at the tv transfixed while the Cubs held onto a razor thin lead, and then we won. It was mass hysteria, only for one person, I don't know what to say.
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