Search This Blog

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

intellectual giants

When I go into Truman College or the Cultural Center, or most everywhere I go, there is a sign with a gun in a circle and a red slash through it which means they don’t want anybody to conceal carry in the building which is good. I don’t know if legally they can keep them out, but I don’t think very many people carry guns around, because, well it seems like a pain in the ass, and likely you will sit down and shoot yourself in the ass. I don’t fear your gun because I’m pretty sure you don’t take it to town.

But I do read about the five or ten gun killings we have a week, but I never read about anybody averting a killing by shooting the killer before he could shoot.

And I’m going to wager that now that half the gay people in the country are getting gay married, your vows are as stable as they always were, and even when they start doing it in Michigan there won’t be a change. I guess there will be a change when our triumphant army rolls into Cheboygan and makes you marry a gay dog, but we haven’t even decided on what color uniforms to wear yet.

I don’t really know how much importance putting out a good product is in making a profit. And more important than actually putting out a good product, is having people think that you put out a good product, and that’s why companies spend so much money in advertising and focus groups and what all. You look at all those over the counter pills in the drugstore and most of them are the same damn things, and they spend all their production on figuring out what color wrapping appeals to the most people. How about all those banks that have some wizened tv actor from some cop show talking about how the bank is full of great dedicated guys who work hard for your account and have integrity dripping all over them?

I suppose there are some companies who do make a superior product and profit because of that, but I am not sure if they outnumber the flim flammers. Mainly I was taking a dig at laissez faire capitalism, an integral part of it being that the guy who makes the best product will profit most, and maybe this works in some idealized logical vacuum, but in the real world, run by real people, probably not.

I don’t look that fondly on high school. I enjoyed being a teen ager and all, but I didn’t like the way teachers had all that power over us and we weren’t allowed to question it, and then just all that rah rah stuff they pumped into our heads. I thought college would be all this high intellectual discussion, but instead it was just like high school only with more homework, but at least nobody told you what to do. Pass, flunk, it was all the same to the profs.

Well that’s a little suspect comment about how you evaded the social crap and got right down to the business at hand. I think when you talk about getting away from those people, you are really speaking of all people, because you are as always a party of one.

I guess when I was speaking about social crap I meant more than that name-calling that went on in high school and at the mill. I meant the whole shebang, because you know, outside of ants and bees we are the most social animals on Earth, our real environment is not earth, sea, and, sky, it is other people. All these smart people wonder why they are not rich, and it’s because other people don’t like them, you could have been the best in the world at whatever you did at the mill, but if people couldn’t get along with you, you never would have gotten the job, I was pretty good at the computer work for the state, but when I, out of boredom I guess, tried to rise among the bureaucrats I was hopelessly shut out.

I guess we both have preserved a lot of our individuality, but neither of us has ever had much power to influence other people.


Well that’s what you get for reading the comments section. Those commentators do indeed make the two of us look like intellectual giants.

No comments:

Post a Comment