FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
SLAVERY REFINED.
Dr. Boli has mentioned before how these agreements, which run to thousands of words, are not agreements at all. They are conditions imposed at will upon people who have no real option of refusing them, which is to say they are articles of enslavement.
But you don’t have to agree, right? Some online services are necessary, but Snapchat filters for your phone camera are not. You can simply back out.
But the back button is disabled. It does nothing.
All right, you can force-stop the app.
But when you start it again, it’s on the same screen, with the “Continue” button waiting to be pressed.
Well, then, you can uninstall the app.
No, you can’t, because it’s the phone’s default camera app, and it can’t be uninstalled.
You have two choices: you destroy the phone now, or you have agreed to the Terms and Conditions. To put it another way, since destroying the phone is not a realistic choice for most people, by the time you read the notice telling you that you agree, you have already “agreed.”
It may be possible to refine these “agreements” to be even more unambiguously slavery. But an “agreement” where the possibility of refusing agreement has been deliberately removed for every user who does not have access to a time machine will be hard to improve on.
A CANDID ANSWER TO A DELICATE QUESTION.
After much hemming and hawing, you give the only answer that comes naturally to a parent’s lips in such a situation: “Ask your mother.”
But now, thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and the generosity of our friend Father Pitt, you can answer that awkward question in sixteen seconds. That is all it takes to watch this candid yet tasteful video of the miracle of pita birth, as it takes place every day at Pitaland in the Brookline neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Little Algernon’s laudable curiosity can be satisfied without embarrassment to his parents and without trauma to his young sensibilities. And it is important to note that sixteen seconds keeps within modern educators’ guidelines for the attention span of an average American child, with four seconds to spare. Here is the film Father Pitt, with his usual flair for colorful description, calls “Pitas leaving the oven at Pitaland, Pittsburgh.” Visit the hosting page at Wikimedia Commons to see it in full HD resolution.
A SERIOUS TALK ABOUT FRIVOLOUS ENTERTAINMENT.
Look at the movie listings and count the comedies. Dr. Boli just did that; for mainstream movies playing in Pittsburgh and suburbs aimed at adults, the number of comedies he came up with was zero. He may have misinterpreted some of the advertising, so the number could be as high as one. You can find a few movies with jokes in them, most of them featuring comic-book characters in ridiculous costumes. But the jokes are mostly sarcasm, which is about the only form of humor we can stomach. We take our comic-book characters too seriously to laugh at them very much.
Look at the “humor” section in the bookstore. If you are old enough, you remember when it was filled with all kinds of good literature—P. G. Wodehouse, Max Shulman, James Thurber. If you are lucky enough to have a very good bookstore nearby, you may still find Wodehouse in the humor section; but Wodehouse died half a century ago, and we have not raised up any replacements for him.
Dr. Boli has watched the rise and fall and rise of all kinds of literature and entertainment for a long time, so he is not such a fool as to believe that anything in literature today is the way it will be henceforth for all time. The wheel will turn. What he does believe, though, is that the barrenness of the humor section and the absence of movie comedies is a small symptom of a large phenomenon, a trend that has been obvious for decades, a long fad that is perhaps reaching its peak now and therefore soon to start down the long slope toward the valley of oblivion. He will not presume to dictate what we should call this fad, but its main characteristic is that we take everything seriously. There is no light entertainment: whatever entertainment we consume, we insist that it must be worthy of serious attention. It is usually not worthy of serious attention, of course, but we must pretend that it is, and it must bear none of the trappings of light entertainment. Being worthy of serious attention is the only reason we can think of for liking something. This is how we have come to live in a world where the comic-book adventures of heroes in ridiculous outfits are taken seriously as literature.
The writers who provide our entertainment know we expect it to be serious: “Transformers writer Ron Friedman says he took inspiration from Shakespeare in regards to writing villains, not only in Transformers, but G.I. Joe as well,” says some random thing on the Internet. Here’s a little game you can play, in fact: pick the most trivial form of drama you can find—say, an entertainment franchise designed to market a line of toys—and see how many pages you can read about it on the Internet before someone compares it to Shakespeare.
Now, if everything must be worthy of serious attention, then whatever has no purpose but to entertain us must be rejected. That is a stupid rule, but it does seem to be the rule. Shakespeare himself would find it meaningless, since his only purpose was to entertain his audiences. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to entertain readers and make us laugh; if we reject these goals, we must reject Cervantes. Yet over the course of centuries, the world has determined that Don Quixote is worthy of serious attention. How did that happen?
It probably happened because Cervantes was trying to entertain us. Many a work that set out with no other goal than entertainment has become part of the world’s permanent treasury of worthy literature, and we may assert with confidence that no work has entered that hallowed fane without being entertaining. This is why the world has held on to A Midsummer Night’s Dream so tenaciously, while the garbage dump of drama is piled high with plays that set out to save the world.
The lesson for the writer of drama or screenplays is not obvious. Your audience of today wants you to be serious. You may indulge in sarcasm, a form of humor that is still approved for the consumption of respectable persons, but every higher form of humor will be rejected, and farce will make today’s audiences furious. On the other hand, the audiences of the future will be bored stiff by what pleases the audiences of today. If you write for those future audiences, they may prefer it if one of your characters has an ass’s head.
It has always been this way: the crowd-pleasers of today will be forgotten tomorrow. The entire nineteenth century in English drama has been wiped out of the collective memory, up to the point when Gilbert & Sullivan and Oscar Wilde rose up to show the world what could be accomplished by remembering that all art is quite useless. Yet the theaters of those forgotten years were filled with people watching plays that were good for them.
To write for the present or to write for all time: this is the choice writers of all sorts have been faced with since the first hack discovered he could make a living with his pen. Blessed are the writers whose tastes match the public’s, for they shall prosper. But twice blessed are the writers who see beyond the moment, who catch hold of what is worthy and permanent, for they shall feel smug.
COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
FINNEGANS WAKE.
The truth, however, is that the author’s requirements have not kept Dr. Boli from reading Finnegans Wake. The juvenile puns are the things that stand in the way. Dr. Boli is simply not mature enough to appreciate their subtle genius. In another two or three hundred years, he may have grown old and wise enough for Joyce. At the present, though, his memories of vaudeville comedians with wretched parodies of an Irish accent are still green enough that he cannot read Finnegans Wake without hearing a rim shot from the pit drummer in every line.
Every few years, Dr. Boli gets the notion stuck in his head that he must be mature enough now to read Finnegans Wake. He finds a copy at a library book sale—they are never hard to find—and opens it to the first page, which begins with the end of a sentence whose beginning—close your eyes for a bit if you don’t want the surprise twist spoiled—is at the end of the book. This is a structure that would strike a fourteen-year-old as awfully clever. Having thus opened the book, Dr. Boli slogs boldly onward, through the first dozen or two puns, until some particularly groan-inducing pun causes him to toss the book across the room, where the parlormaid finds it and deposits it in the recycling bin. A few years later, Dr. Boli finds another copy at another library book sale. This time he is all enthusiastic, determined that Joyce will not get the best of him—until he comes to the pun that made him toss the book the last time.
Hootch is for husbandman handling his hoe.
But no, this was the one that made us toss it two readings ago. We remember now: we marched boldly past it last time until the next sentence:
Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain!
This time, however, we are more mature. We can grit our teeth and make it past this one. We read on:
Comeday morn and, O, you’re vine! Sendday’s eve and ah, you’re vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you’re going to be fined again!
Toss.
TRY TO IMAGINE HIS ACT.
The advertisement above makes us wonder whether the shortage of lady leapers was directly related to the lack of an experienced catcher.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: I was walking past the St. Aloysius parish school this morning, and I noticed that they had a banner up: “Training Tomorrow’s Leaders.”
Well, I thought, that’s nice. Tomorrow’s leaders have to come from somewhere, and it might as well be St. Al’s as anywhere else.
But later this morning I passed the Ninth Ward Public School, and they also had a banner about “leadership.”
I started looking around. When I passed the Remnant Christian Academy, they had a big sign out front: “Educating Godly Leaders.”
The Hillel School was “Preparing Children for a Lifetime of Leadership.”
The Allegheny Catholic Girls’ School was “Building Up Leaders for a New Generation.”
Blandville Elementary School was “Teaching Today’s Scholars to Be Tomorrow’s Leaders.”
We are heading for the edge of a cliff here, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. We are raising a generation of leaders, and there will be no one to follow them.
When we have brought up an army of generals, where will they find their infantry? While they sit behind the lines drinking port and playing whist, who will be at the front? Who will fight the war? Who will carry the packs? Who will fill the generals’ boots with mashed potatoes? In a world with no regular soldiers, none of the essential tasks will get done!
It will soon be too late, so immediate action is called for. A new school year is beginning, and children entering school should be tested for their natural followership aptitude. Those who demonstrate a talent for following should be sent to specialized academies where they can learn to be tomorrow’s followers. We will separate out the children of below-average intelligence, the ones who have trouble finishing a simple task, the ones who are prone to behavioral problems, the ones who have no patience for accurate knowledge, the ones with sociopathic tendencies, and they, having already demonstrated their qualifications, can be trained to be the leaders. The rest of our children must be taught to follow, and they must learn to do it well.
Sincerely,
Admiral Hagsworth W. Foremost (retired)
Avalon Heights