A lot of words cut from my new book
I turned in a sprawling 18-page manifesto on life for the YouTube book I’m working on with Alan. Our editor (Sandy Doell - best editor I’ve ever worked with, she edited $30 Film School too, and I brought her on for this project because I dig her work so much) wisely suggested I cut a lot of the more negative stuff out of that chapter, and also cut it for length. I agreed, but didn’t want to “waste words”, so I’m posting here what I cut.
I look at working with the right editor as a collaboration, not as someone “messing with your work”, which is how it feels with the wrong editor. And I look at this one chapter as the same as painters who slather on a lot of paint, then scrape it off with a knife to make a masterpiece. It’s taking several rounds back and forth, but the end will be great.
Sandy wrote this very excellent book, Mom’s Field Guide: What You Need to Know to Make It Through Your Loved One’s Military Deployment. I read it and I really dug it.
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STUFF I CUT FROM THE LAST CHAPTER OF MY NEXT BOOK:
The world was already overpopulated when I was born,. and the population has doubled in my lifetime. If you’re 20, it may double again by the end of your lifetime. There are too many people, and we’re running out of resources. And that just increases everyone’s willingness to stab his neighbor in the back in a frenzy of “I gots to get mine.” It’s not a good world to bring children into, and I would encourage you not to. (I got a vasectomy in late 1999. That’s how I brought in the new millennium.)
The world is overcrowded, and things may get a lot worse. Don’t have kids. If you already have kids, make them your priority. While you’re at it, care about your fellow humans, even the ones you haven’t met. But don’t drown yourself trying to save people who can’t be saved. Remember what they say on the airlines, “Put the oxygen mask on yourself before your child, because if you pass out, you’re of no use to your child. Take care of yourself. Not in a selfish way, but in a way that keeps you around sucking air and making a difference, then you’ll be there for your own children, biological as well as spiritual.
Mine is probably the last generation that will have a somewhat comfortable old age, and even that will require a lot of money. If you’re 20, the way things are going, by the time you’re 70, the world will be really really hot, really angry, really polluted, and there will be very little drinkable water and no gasoline. I wish you luck. Let me know how that works out for you.
I’ll be dead, so I can’t help you then. But I think I can help you now, by pointing this stuff out and asking you to think about it. And by asking you to direct at least some of your art into processing it, commenting on it, and preventing it. (In between, of course, making cute kitten videos and bitchin’ skateboard trick videos.)
Gas costs a lot of money because investment corporations are exploiting loopholes in the stock laws to speculate on futures in the market in a manner similar to what the Enron corporation was found guilty of. It should be illegal, but as of this writing, it isn’t. As of this writing, gas is $4.50 a gallon in my state. Who knows what it will cost by the time you read this. If it gets much more expensive, the economy is going to collapse. People won’t be able to afford to drive to their jobs. Truckers won’t be able to deliver goods. Food (and other necessities) as well as luxuries we consider necessities like cell phones, flat-screen TVs, spinning hubcaps, and fancy clothes will be unaffordable. We’ll be out of luck, largely because we believed the lies of corporations who pumped TV full of slick ads with sexy people driving SUVs and trucks for the last ten years, and a lot of stupid people who do what their TV tells them to.
And the “I’ll bust a cap in your ass” mentality exists between nations. Many countries, my own included, often behave in a way that shows this. They (we) do not look at the military the way the founding father’s defined it in the Constitution (a defensive, not offensive, force). Many governments, including my own, look at military might as an offensive tactic, re-branded as a preemptive strike, sold to us by the same tricks they use to sell trucks, jeans, jewelry, the latest music, and the latest Hollywood Blockbuster. Often marketed by the same people who sell all that.
It has been said that democracies generally exist for around 200 years, 300 tops, before they collapse. That they are theoretically a great form of government, but with a major flaw. Democracies allow lazy people who don’t want to work to vote in people who will let them not work. We are at the beginning of the end of this. At best, it will morph us into some sort of half-broken version of socialism. If we’re unlucky, a malevolent dictatorship.
Never stop learning. Learn as many skills as you can from everything you do, from your natural curiosity, so when the world is really really hot, really angry, really polluted, and there won’t be much drinkable water, you can have some money to buy some water. Or use your skills to figure out how to pull water out of the air. And trade your skills for some pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, own a little land you can put a fence around so you can drink that water without being killed for it by less-skilled people. Seriously.
(And this is coming from a guy who used to get in trouble for skipping school to go to the library so he could actually learn things. I’m now very much in demand in a bunch of cool worlds, and most of the kids I went to school with now have jobs like working on the line in the box factory. The coolest thing any of them is doing is one guy who used to beat me up is now writing for the local paper. But the last thing I read by him was a story about how evil rock music is and why Nirvana should be banned and all their records burned.)
When I was a little kid, there was no cable TV. TV only worked as an analog broadcast, over the air. (Analog broadcast is being completely phased out in 2009.) When I was growing up, there were only three TV channels: CBS, NBC, and ABC. Programming was kind of quaint, occasionally funny, all scripted, and moved kind of slow. Then MTV started, in 1981 (when I was 17). And it changed the media…all of it. The quick-cut style of editing immediately influenced advertising (because what are music videos, other than ads?), movies, cartoons, even print advertising, all that took on a “quick and dirty” sheen. I loved it. Older people were baffled. They were suffering from “future shock,” the feeling that the world was becoming too fast, and even that change was happening too fast.
You have to keep in mind that there were people alive at that time who had been alive before automobiles existed and who had also seen people walk on the moon. And there were a lot of people alive who had grown up in a prosperous, gentle world where ladies were ladies, men were men, folks kept their clothes on, didn’t cuss, went to church, paid their taxes, and worked hard to retire and get a gold watch and live on a pension comfortably in their old age. MTV was the culmination of a lot of things: the sexual revolution of the 60s and the rock explosion of the 70s. The 80s fostered the Me Generation because many people felt that the activism of the 60s had failed, but hedonism was nice, and suddenly the focus was on “getting mine” and “looking out for number one.” The focus was especially on money.
I dug the 70s. While I liked the fact that the hippies cared about the world, and so did I, I felt that the hippies didn’t get it 100% right. I felt they were on the right track, but most of the less political ones struck me as a little old fashioned, self-righteous, spoiled, and more about identifying problems than solving them. I liked my music, and my media, a little more fast-paced and “in your face.”
My parents were shocked by this type of new media. The previous generation was shocked by Elvis Presley’s wiggling hips on TV (which I found quaint), and when I got into punk rock in 1983, MTV also seemed old fashioned to me. Yet I quickly wondered what would come along that would shock me. I predicted “The only thing that would take it further would be musicians who murder or maim their audience.” Well, with gangster rap, that has sometimes come to pass, sometimes in deed, and often in spirit. (GG Allin, of the rock band, The Murder Junkies, certainly tried to physically harm his audience, and often succeeded.)
Don’t get me wrong. I like rap, but I hate the mentality of some of it. Much of it seems like “I gots to get mine, I gots to get paid, and I’ll bust a cap in your ass if you get in my way.” More on this in the following “What’s Wrong with The World” section.
Basically what’s wrong with the media is two-fold. One, it’s turned into crap. Two, it promotes a “screw everyone else, step over anyone to get ahead” mentality.
There’s always the question of does the media (TV, music, video, magazines, radio, newspapers, blogs, all the old and new methods of getting the word out) influence reality, or merely reflect it? The answer is both. I am not in favor of the regulation of media. But I would love to see media producers and programmers have a little more self-policing, in the form of creating useful content that educates, promotes love of your fellow human and contains far less “kill everyone, blow stuff up, get thin, get laid, get rich” B.S. (If anything they’ve got it backwards, if it HAS to be regulated, I’d rather see more sex and less violence. You can show people dying graphically brutal deaths, get a PG rating, and get on TV. But if you show a sweet couple romantically making love, you get an R or NC-17 rating, and can’t get on TV.)
I’m far more offended by a diamond commercial than a nice art film with a little nudity, because the art film is honest and diamond commercials lie. Diamond commercials basically say “If you don’t give us four months salary now, you’ll die sad and lonely.”
So, back to when I was a kid and there were only three channels…. They were a little boring, but they didn’t offend me much. Now I’m middle-aged and I have 120 channels of mostly crap to choose from, and most of it offends me. Not for the same reasons conservative people are offended by TV. Britney Spears’ tight clothes and rehab visits don’t offend me, they don’t even enter into my “need to know” (or care) level. Yet somehow I’m aware of them, even though I don’t want to be. I channel flip past that stuff, as it has no bearing on my life at all. The only time I’ve noticed her lately is when people said “she’s getting fat” and I thought “Wow, she looks a little better, not so much like that media-influenced unnatural starvation look that’s considered “normal” and “glamorous.”
I’m offended because the media is feeding us flavorless gelatin, sprinkled with car explosions, and, and we’re idly sitting by and saying “Nifty! Neat! This tastes pretty good!”
“We’ve got a bigger problem now”
(Title of this section borrowed from the Dead Kennedys song of the same name.)
The bigger problem of big media is not just that they own everything, and shove it in your face 24/7, and they “wiggle in front of you like a shrunken head.”
The quote about products being “wiggled in front of you like a shrunken head” is from a great rant about corporations and media by Steve Albini. It’s only a few minutes long, and you should watch it. It’s from the DVD extras of DIY or DIE, and was not included in the movie proper because, due to scheduling conflicts, it was shot (by my friend Kime) after the movie was done. If you plan to make a living at media, you should watch it. It probably condenses four years of art school, four years of business school, and 40 years of life into under four minutes:
And watching COPS also demonstrates that most of what cops do with their workday amounts to babysitting idiots who have neither the life skills nor the moral compass to take care of themselves without infringing on the constitutional rights of others. And when this cat-food-on-the-hoof is being hauled off for whatever they did to violate someone else’s constitutional rights, they’re usually screaming “You’re violating my constitutional rights!” when this has not happened. They’re also often screaming “Don’t you know who I am?” (More on this soon….)
I find it all pretty amusing.
The potential for TV and movies is astonishing…. It’s sad that it’s so underutilized. Most TV has no meaning. Most TV glamorizes bling and gets a laugh by being genuinely cruel. This is interspersed by people barking at you trying to sell you crap that you don’t need. And most indie cinema has its heart in the right place, but just ends up being Hollywood without money. Most indie cinema, while it may deal with slightly more “edgy” themes, still cloaks them in boring three-act format where the hero learns a valuable (and predictable) life lesson. It’s just Hollywood with shaky camera work and mediocre audio.
Someone once told me, “People have two basic desires. To keep things the same, and to make things different.” It’s true. Basic human needs must be met before we can have civilization. You need a roof over your head, and you need to know that your house and possessions will be there when you get home from the hunt (the office). Otherwise, you’ll have no time, energy, or inclination to “progress” and invent (buy) more things to fill your cave (condo). This is what separates modern civilization from the hunter-gathers of old. We create shelter, utilities (heat, cooling, fresh water, energy, and sewage systems) to make our caves comfortable. We create police and military to make sure no one destroys our cave. All well and good.
But once things are “good” being “the same,” we want things different. This impulse can lead you to buy a new iPhone, or pillage a neighboring country. The world grows increasingly complex until people aren’t smart enough to govern themselves, so they elect people to do it for them. Unfortunately, all too often the people who seek such positions have motives other than ruling the land equitably. Politics attracts people who want power. The world is a balancing act of give and take, of agendas and demands, of every splinter group demanding rights for their special unique brand of humanity when it should just be based on human rights, rather than special rights for every one of the thousands of groups demanding their due. There are too damn many agendas in the world.
These same corporations who put people there will be happy to still make a buck off of you once you lose your home. I recently saw a cell phone commercial about a guy who is “couch surfing.” Not traveling America, not hitchhiking around Europe, but couch surfing with various friends in his own town. No home, but he’s got his cell phone. Gotta stay “plugged in”! It’s a commercial aimed at homeless people. Plan to see a lot more of these.
Sometimes the world is horrible, but life can also be amazingly beautiful. It’s mostly up to you.
June 27th, 2008 at 7:54 am
Greetings from a 50-year-old dude who counts you as one of his mentors.
I agree with what you’re saying, for the most part. But in the spirit of providing some food for thought:
You say: “I would love to see media producers and programmers have a little more self-policing, in the form of creating useful content that educates, promotes love of your fellow human and contains far less “kill everyone, blow stuff up, get thin, get laid, get rich” B.S.”
Me, too—and I’d suggest that such content already exists in the form of programs broadcast on PBS and NPR, and in the form of certain non-NPR-affiliated community radio stations, like the excellent KMUD in California. (Listen to their stream sometime on the Web to learn what radio CAN be.)
I go to Vienna twice a year and one of the things I do while there is watch European TV. While most of their TV is commercial, they still have a lot more public networks than we do, like ARTE which is a joint German-French network.
My Viennese girlfriend is old enough to remember when there was ONE television network in Austria. They were a public channel and broadcast in black and white long after we’d gone to color in the US. She tells me the content on that network was very “highbrow” by today’s standards, focusing on matters of art and literature and lengthy panel discussions among learned people. But TV was so new, so novel, that she’d eagerly await these shows, even as a little kid, and so grew up to enjoy having her intelligence fed, instead of being entertained all the motherfucking time. (They also had children’s programming. Needless to say, there were no giant purple dinosaurs prancing around.)
Such government subsidized/viewer or listener supported outlets are, in my opinion, real jewels floating in an ocean of shit. If and when they ever go, that’ll be the final nail in the coffin.
I don’t know how to get people as excited about LEARNING THINGS and GETTING SMARTER as they are about BEING ENTERTAINED/ANESTHETIZED, but if it doesn’t start happening soon, we are well and truly FUCKED.
Maybe your new book will get the ball rolling. I’ll be buying it, as I have the others.
Cheers—
Nunzio X
July 1st, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Speaking of the sex vs. violence, I talk about that in my pleasure manifesto :
Great essay. Always a fan.
July 4th, 2008 at 6:43 am
[...] Another screed by Michael Dean. Tidbits: It has been said that democracies generally exist for around 200 years, 300 tops, before they collapse. That they are theoretically a great form of government, but with a major flaw. Democracies allow lazy people who don’t want to work to vote in people who will let them not work. We are at the beginning of the end of this. At best, it will morph us into some sort of half-broken version of socialism. If we’re unlucky, a malevolent dictatorship. [...]