CSotD: On Beyond Tide Pods
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I don’t know that stupidity always wins, but I do know it has the inside track. The fad of biting into detergent pods passed by quickly, but it did happen and was quite a tribute to peer pressure and general idiocy.
OTOH, looking back on my own misspent youth, I don’t picture 10 kids standing around each biting into a Tide pod. I picture nine kids standing around trying to get a 10th fool to bite into a Tide pod. Maybe telling him we’d all done it and now he had to do it, and then laughing like hell when the damn fool did.
And it was probably the same damn fool each time, because there was always a Designated Damn Fool who could be persuaded to do something stupid for the amusement of his friends, or of the people he hoped were his friends.
This can go into some pretty dark places. One regrettable lesson from summers spent at Camp Lord O’ The Flies was that every cabin of half a dozen kids had a full-time victim of bullying and practical jokes, and you didn’t want to be that kid.
You could hide and hope some other fool would stick his head up and get nailed, but the smart move was to expose him before somebody else exposed you.
But Camp Lord O’ The Flies was just real life with all the filters removed. If you don’t see it in your workplace, bless you for a saint but it’s there nonetheless.
And if you went to Camp Lord O’ The Flies, you may have some insights into kids who were sent to military school where it was Lord O’ The Flies all year and not just for eight weeks in the summer and you may have some insights about the sort of bully who prospers in that setting.
No names, please.
Rat is wrong that stupidity always wins, because times change and tastes change with them. Eldest son lived at the mall, and I knew his friends mostly from sitting around the food court talking to them. Four years later, younger son rarely went there, and I knew his friends because they’d turn up in my kitchen hoping for a dinner invite, if he wasn’t in their kitchens instead.
On a longer horizon, my contemporaries grew up with Shelly Berman and Bob Newhart and Stan Freberg, and shook our heads over the French worship of Jerry Lewis, whom we considered a jackass. But our kids embraced not just Jerry Lewis but anyone who would make faces and wear buckteeth and act the fool.
And bite a Tide pod if it made people laugh.
It’s not that it mattered whether you hung out at the food court or at each other’s houses, but, then again, I don’t think Shelly Berman would have torn down half the White House on a whim or voted for anybody who would.
And I do remember a fading glimmer of hope. The first Beavis and Butthead T-shirt I ever saw was on a kid who, with his buddy, hung back and whispered through a tour of the newspaper until we got back into the pressroom and I began explaining the giant machine in front of them. T-shirt made a quiet wisecrack and his buddy gave him an elbow and said, “Shut up. I want to hear this.”
I couldn’t change them, but I learned to balance my tours to sweep in more kids with different interests.
There’s a lot of chitchat about college football revenues which starts with the foolish notion that universities with Division 1 football programs have a big pool of money equally generated by football, physics and philosophy.
It’s not the biters of Tide pods who have to be told that ESPN will not pay millions of dollars to broadcast Professor Dildeaux’s lectures on temperature and movement measurements at a bergschrund, and they’re not the ones who believe Sunrise Semester would get the same ratings as the Rose Bowl if it weren’t on so early in the morning.
Meanwhile, the advice to the little fellow in Branch’s cartoon is that before you can be paid millions to stop coaching a team, you have to prove that you can bring in millions and win a couple of national championships.
Yes, you have to earn the right to fail.
By which time you won’t want to fail anymore, since success will have become a hard-earned habit.
Despite the happy horsepucky you’ll see in those inspiring sports movies:
Meanwhile, back on the Ark:
Wiley depicts Noah as an eater of Tide pods, and the number of misfires makes the whole thing work. Had he stuck any closer to the actual story, the joke would fail, but he mashes up Noah and Shackleton, which spans time, distance and common sense, while maintaining the traditional giraffes among the cargo.
And it’s not as if Noah were looking for directions. He doesn’t appear to have gone very far at all and the world would sure be different if he had, but the purpose of sending out the dove was to see if the waters were receding, since all he wanted was to get off the boat and back onto solid ground.
In the Anishinaabe version of the legend, the trickster/creator OldMan gathers the animals on a raft and, as supplies dwindle, sends his best divers, starting with Loon and Otter, down to see how deep the waters remain.
They fail, but little Muskrat manages on his third try to come up having drowned but clutching a handful of mud. OldMan revives him and uses the mud to recreate the Earth.
Meanwhile, in the Greco-Roman version, Deucalion and Pyrrha are spared from the flood but tasked with repopulating the world by throwing the bones of their mother across their shoulders. They’re appalled by the demand until they realize Earth is their mother and stones are her bones. It’s a lovely story, but the fact that there are three versions — four if you count Wiley’s — doesn’t mean it really happened.
It means people have great imaginations.
And a talent that goes well beyond nibbling at Tide pods, if you encourage it.
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