(Note: No actual research went into the writing of this article)
Over the course of close to 20 entries in this here journal I have delved into analysis of many different art forms and types of entertainment. Films, music, television (that is if you consider MTV to be actual television). I have explored and deconstructed celebrities, pop culture icons, and the American political landscape. But there is one area that I realize I have been neglecting. And that is the world of literature. Literature is one of humanity’s oldest and most respected forms of expression and artistry. From the early days of Chaucer and Dante to later figures like Dostoevsky, Jane Austin, and Franz Kafka to modern masters like Joyce, Hemmingway, and Steinbeck, literature has been a constant source of information and insight about the human condition and the greater world it inhabits. It is a subject and a form well worthy of study and examination. So to make amends for my previous neglect to the esteemed world of literature, I hereby present my first subject for literary analysis: “Where’s Waldo”.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It’s funny what thoughts your mind wanders to when you are almost a week late updating your stupid online journal. But, as is usually the case in such situations, my mind turned to children’s activity books. Specifically the “Where’s Waldo” books. Surely you remember the “Where’s Waldo” series. They were a huge phenomenon when I was in elementary school, 1st or 2nd grade I believe. In case that was before your time or you were raised by wolves in a cave and thereby disconnected from human society, I guess I should explain what these books were. They were quite simple really. There was a little man named Waldo and on each page of the book he would be hidden somewhere in a very complex and detailed picture. You would have to find him before you could move on to the next page (although there were many cheaters who didn’t follow the rules. I imagine most of these people are now incarcerated in a federal penitentiary after several years of lawlessness and vagrancy). You would continue this process until there were no more pages left. You would then either go out and buy the next book, or, if you were poor, would curl up in the corner and cry because your life was now devoid of meaning. As the books progressed more and more items would be added for you to find, including a book, a key, a cane, a scroll, and if I remember correctly, there was even a Mrs. Waldo at some point. It was a pretty simple concept to be sure, but it became a bigger phenomenon than that John Travolta movie. Kids and adults alike dressed up like Waldo for Halloween, the original book made the New York Times Bestseller List, and it even spawned a video game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System and a short lived TV show. I was a huge fan myself, and often took time out of my busy day of memorizing facts about dinosaurs and inventing my flying car to search for Waldo. Looking back though, the whole phenomenon seems rather curious. I mean it was a little kid’s activity book and its main character became a pop culture icon. And for doing what? He didn’t engage in exciting quests or heroic deeds. He didn’t have any magic powers or special skills. In fact he didn’t seem to have any personality at all. So why was Waldo so popular, why did he capture the public attention and imagination, why did people feel the need to dress up like him and watch shows about him? What exactly DID he do?
Well…
He liked to hide.
Now before getting to that, there’s of course the obvious message that’s contained in the popularity of Waldo: Human beings like to look for things. Whether it’s Monty Python and their quest for the Holy Grail (a quest similar to the one Indiana Jones would take many years later) or the sad lonely soul who actually uses My Space as some sort of postmodern dating service we, as a species, seem to really enjoy looking for things. And then once we find them, we don’t really enjoy them, rather we just move on to the next thing we can look for. After all I don’t think anyone really celebrated, in any extended way, actually finding Waldo (well except for the red haired kid with the bowl cut that sat in the back of the classroom in 2nd grade). They just moved on quickly to the next page. The only real joy anyone got in finding Waldo was not from the actual act of finding him, but rather, in then being able to show other people that you had found him, and even by being smug and obnoxious by showing others how to find Waldo themselves. Boy I really hated those kids. Acting all superior because they had found Waldo and I hadn’t. They were a real pain to be around. Always talking about "Waldo this" and "Waldo that" and thinking they were so superior because they had found Waldo and you hadn’t, when all the while you knew Waldo was just going to leave them again on the next page.
But I digress…
It seems like a simple way to explain the Waldo craze was that it gave people a constant source of things to look for. But I think there are deeper truths that Waldo can expose than just that. After all, hidden pictures have long been a staple of children’s entertainment. Even before Mad Libs, there were pictures in which you could search for hidden objects. No, I think why Waldo specifically took off was that he spoke to something in our collective unconscious. We responded to something about this Waldo figure.
About this guy that liked to hide.
It seems clear that Waldo liked to hide, but it also seems pretty clear that he wanted to be found. I mean he was always staring out at you as if waiting for just that. And most importantly he dressed in a red and white striped shirt and wore glasses, not exactly the most camouflaged get up one could attire themselves in. Waldo had a unique and distinct style, but he hid it behind the masses of similar looking people. He was screaming out to be noticed, but then would hide behind another person, afraid to come out into the light alone. Maybe he had body issues. Maybe he just had general insecurities. Maybe he was afraid that when we found him we wouldn’t like him. Maybe he knew that as soon as we did find him we would just move on and starting looking for the shiny gold key or the hidden magic scroll. Maybe he was hiding from Mrs. Waldo. Maybe he was just lost.
Maybe he sounds like someone I know.
Maybe he’s us.
In my favorite book “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” Chuck Klosterman says, “I remember taking a course in college and my professor was obsessed by the belief that fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood” were part of some latent social code that hoped to suppress women and minorities. At the time I was mildly outraged that my tuition money was supporting this kind of crap; years later I have come to recall those lectures as what I loved about college.”
And it’s precisely this type of “Where’s Waldo”-deconstruction type thinking that I too love about being in college. Whether it’s that we like to search, or that we just want to be found; whether it means that we’re searching for love in all the wrong places, or that we like to hide from those trying to find us, it all CAN mean something if you want it to. If you let it. So whether we’re Waldo, or we’re just people who like to look for him, we’re one of the two. And knowing that makes you now look at something that was plain and familiar in a totally new light. It makes you think. And explore new things. And question the world.
Just like Curious George.
Top 3&1/2 of the Week:
1.) Brian Wilson - SMiLE (Album)
2.) Thanksgiving
3.) Marymount Manhattan's production of The Crucible
3&1/2.) Tea
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Thoughts on the Election
-So I guess its official: we really misunderestimated him.
-One interesting thing I learned in this election is that apparently changing your mind is a bad thing. Better to keep the exact same goals and opinions even when the support for those ideas proves inaccurate, false, or nonexistent. That is apparently good leadership in the 21st century. Which is funny to me because it sounds like the exact OPPOSITE of good leadership in years past. In fact we used to have a few names for that kind of “leadership”: stubbornness, arrogance, foolishness, and oh, yeah, ignorance.
-So looking back, this election was really Bush vs. Bush wasn’t it?
-I find it quite ironic that one of the groups among whom Bush gained the most support since 2000 is unmarried women with no college education. Ironic of course, because this is the group who would have the most need for an abortion. Well, I hear there’s a sale on coat hangers on Wal Mart next week so maybe that explains it …
-The fact Kerry lost isn’t, and shouldn’t be, that shocking, but what does really boggle my mind is the fact that this time Bush won the popular vote. This means of course that more people like Bush to a greater degree NOW than they did in 2000. So these people apparently didn’t like him before, but after he got us into an unjust war under false pretenses with no plan for how to get us out, failed to capture Osama Bin Laden who is not holed up in some secret lair but rather in a FREAKING CAVE, threatened to ban gay marriage, attempted to stop stem cell research, lost more jobs under his watch than any other president, ran up the deficit to record levels, passed education reform which focuses on testing rather than actual education, came out against raising the minimum wage, took unprecedented levels of international compassion for the US and turned it to record levels of anti-US sentiment in under two years, and passed countless anti-environmental protection bills, these people decided they liked him much better now. Seriously, who are these people? And how is this possible? Maybe he could have put a bunch of people in a chair and electrocuted them to death and won by even more. Oh wait, what? He already tried that? Oh…
-The fact that the Democrats couldn’t beat a president who has done so much wrong over the past four years that’s its almost like he was trying to give away this election on a silver platter, shows once and for all that there are MAJOR problems in the leadership of the Democratic party, specifically in this case, the people who were advising Kerry. The most major problem with the campaign was the fact that they let him be defined by the opposition. In polling, voters were asked to use an adjective to describe Kerry in one word and no single word or phrase received more than 5% of the vote. In a world where we need easy labels and descriptions for people, this is, and was, fatal. Even the staunchest Kerry supporter would have trouble defining his personality clearly in a word or two. I mean at least Gore was stiff and boring. Kerry was just nothing. Of course he wasn’t really nothing, but it took so long for him to try and define himself it was ultimately too late. The major identity of Kerry in the media - flip-flopper, liberal voting record, rich New Englander, weak on terrorism - was created by the Bush camp and then Kerry had to spend all his time defending it. How is possible that KERRY is the one who had to spend most of the campaign on the defensive? I mean Bush got us into Iraq and KERRY is the one who was having to constantly defend himself against attacks. When you let your opponent define you that a recipe for disaster and the Democrats better never let it happen again.
-Many of the rural southern states like Alabama and Mississippi are largely African American, and yet these were the states in which Bush enjoyed his largest margin of victory. Since the Republican party hasn’t gotten much more than 20% of the African American vote in any major election in the past 50 years it would seem to me that a lot of “black” people chose “Die” rather than “Vote”. Just another reason why (for the 5,233rd time…) we need Obama in ‘08.
-It’s ironic that the party supporting Christian ideals and family values is promoting war, intolerance, hubris, xenophobia, cutting welfare and is headed by a guy with a drunk driving arrest who has two underage daughters out drinking and who often makes sexually suggestive comments about his wife in public. Of course this is also a party whose two biggest spokespersons are Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly one of whom is being sued for sexual harassment and is been reported to be a massive asshole by nearly everyone who has ever worked with him and the other is a three times divorced racist drug addict. And yet they are the ones preaching that gay marriage violates the sanctity of marriage and that drug offenders deserve harsher sentences. Ah, hypocrisy, thou name art fundamentalist conservatism.
-I often wonder if people on the right ever look around and notice that like 90% of all actors, writers, non-country musicians, and artists as well as a wide majority of college professors and scholars of all types are liberal, and the most prominent conservatives are athletes, businessmen and religious extremists. I then wonder if they think, “hey all the intellectual humanistic types are over there and I’m over here with Pat Robertson and Charlton Heston and I’m proud of that!” I guess they do. After all as The Nation said, “in the Republican mind set, ignorance is strength.” This of course isn’t to say there aren’t smart Republicans and dumb liberals, but I just often wonder if it ever bothers conservatives that the majority of intellectual well-educated people in this country are on the other side.
-Speaking of education, Bush’s education plan makes much more sense when you realize who its coming from doesn’t it?
-Speaking of anti-intellectualism, the main argument I’ve been hearing since the election is that there are too many stupid people in this country, and while that is true, that’s far too reductive of a way to look at this election. That’s not at all the story of this election or even what decided it. What decided this election is the simple fact that the Republicans are far better campaigners than the Democrats. I’ve already mentioned Kerry’s failures were in defining himself and not attacking Bush hard enough, but it’s so much more than even that. I think the main thing is that, in the rural south, and really all across the country, the Republicans were able to get people to vote for a candidate who hurt their own best interests. And that is where I have to give them all the “props” in the world because it was sheer genius. I mean they really do deserve to win after the work they did on the so-called “cultural conservatives”. By “cultural conservatives” I mean people whose economic best interests would cause them to be Democrats, but who voted for the Republicans based on moral and cultural issues. These people actually, in a very real sense, hurt themselves to vote for Bush. These are largely poor people in the rural South and Midwest who need welfare, a higher minimum wage, and are being hurt by a high deficit and its economic repercussions. These people, as they are also largely very religious, are not going to be having an abortion or a gay marriage themselves anytime soon. But yet the Republicans got them to vote based on those issues, issues that don’t directly affect their personal well being, at the expense of issues that WOULD affect their personal well being. Now if that isn’t genius campaigning I don’t know what is. So to say Bush won because “people are stupid” shifts the blame from the Democrats for being piss poor campaigners to the generalized idea of “people”, when in reality this loss is really the fault of one Mr. John Kerry and not “stupid people”.
-Speaking of stupid people, (man my segues are rockin today…) I’ve already started to hear the “Hillary in ’08” rumblings and seriously people, this has to stop. I know the thought of Hillary Clinton, a woman, in the Oval Office is a pretty thought, but so are rainbows and puppy dogs and I don’t think either of them will be winning a presidential election any time soon. Let me spell it all out for you people who seem to think her candidacy is a good idea. First of all, we have already all decided that Obama will be somewhere on the ticket and a black guy and a woman on the same ticket is political suicide. Secondly, the Clinton administration was not known for its moral values and we are dealing with an electorate that listed moral values as its main reason for making its voting decision. Most importantly though - is there a more polarizing figure in Congress today than Hillary Clinton? I can’t think of one. People have an instant response to Hillary - either like or hatred - and it’s an opinion that has already been formed in most people. I fail to see how Hillary could even come close to appealing to the “widest segment of the population as possible”. This election already exposed the Democrats as a limited, regional party so how would it make any sense to choose a candidate who is polarizing, strongly liberal, and appeals to a very limited section of the population? And “women would vote for her because she’s a woman” argument doesn’t hold much water because if you’re a conservative woman, Hilary Clinton is public enemy number one, and plus, conservatives aren’t so much into the whole women’s liberation thing so “she’s a woman” doesn’t hold as much weight as “we” might think it would. For those who DO support her candidacy, may I ask why? Is it the fact she is cold, distant, and the most lacking in a sense of humor of any political figure I have ever seen? Is it the fact that she cares about “the people” so much that she ran for Senator of a state she had never lived a single day of her life in because her own state was too small to gain her national attention? No. Most likely it’s because “she’s a woman”. And that’s well and good and all, if that’s not your only reason. But if you support her just cause she’s a woman without knowing her stances on any of the issues, how is that better than supporting Bush just because he’s a Texan or supporting Jesse Jackson just because he’s black? Look, if there was ever a guy who didn’t have a problem with a woman running for office it would be me, and that’s maybe why this Hillary talk angers me so much. Hillary not only makes the Democrats look bad, but makes female politicians look bad, and her inevitable failure will make it that much harder for a woman to run her next time. So if you would like to present to me a well reasoned argument as to why it would be a good idea for Hillary to be the Democratic nominee in ’08 Id be more than willing to hear it, but until you are able to do that, lets please, for the love of God, stop with this “Hillary in ’08” nonsense before someone gets hurt.
-So In closing, I have to say that despite that ways things turned out, I still have hope for the future. I mean Bush can’t do any worse in than he already has. And when you need comfort, you can always look to history. Vietnam may have turned out poorly, but leadership saw how as soon as they instituted a draft the tide turned against them with stunning quickness, and they wont make that mistake again. And it’s easy to make parallels between social issues as well. Gay marriage is simply the new desegregation and abortion is the new prohibition (go read a history book and you’ll see the stunningly clear parallels) and both of those issues, after periods of struggle, worked out for the best. The attempt to advance society or fight off regression is never an easy one, but it always turns out for the best. So just hold on to your hope and know that the best in the human condition always triumphs over the worst, and so too will it again in our current troubles. And if not, well, I can always become a Toronto Blue Jays fan…
Top 3 & 1/2 of the Week (People Currently Living I Would Most Want to Be/Meet/Worship Edition):
1.) John Stewart
2.) Cameron Crowe
3.) Jennifer Connelly
3 & 1/2.) Philip Seymour Hoffman / Jerry Seinfeld
-One interesting thing I learned in this election is that apparently changing your mind is a bad thing. Better to keep the exact same goals and opinions even when the support for those ideas proves inaccurate, false, or nonexistent. That is apparently good leadership in the 21st century. Which is funny to me because it sounds like the exact OPPOSITE of good leadership in years past. In fact we used to have a few names for that kind of “leadership”: stubbornness, arrogance, foolishness, and oh, yeah, ignorance.
-So looking back, this election was really Bush vs. Bush wasn’t it?
-I find it quite ironic that one of the groups among whom Bush gained the most support since 2000 is unmarried women with no college education. Ironic of course, because this is the group who would have the most need for an abortion. Well, I hear there’s a sale on coat hangers on Wal Mart next week so maybe that explains it …
-The fact Kerry lost isn’t, and shouldn’t be, that shocking, but what does really boggle my mind is the fact that this time Bush won the popular vote. This means of course that more people like Bush to a greater degree NOW than they did in 2000. So these people apparently didn’t like him before, but after he got us into an unjust war under false pretenses with no plan for how to get us out, failed to capture Osama Bin Laden who is not holed up in some secret lair but rather in a FREAKING CAVE, threatened to ban gay marriage, attempted to stop stem cell research, lost more jobs under his watch than any other president, ran up the deficit to record levels, passed education reform which focuses on testing rather than actual education, came out against raising the minimum wage, took unprecedented levels of international compassion for the US and turned it to record levels of anti-US sentiment in under two years, and passed countless anti-environmental protection bills, these people decided they liked him much better now. Seriously, who are these people? And how is this possible? Maybe he could have put a bunch of people in a chair and electrocuted them to death and won by even more. Oh wait, what? He already tried that? Oh…
-The fact that the Democrats couldn’t beat a president who has done so much wrong over the past four years that’s its almost like he was trying to give away this election on a silver platter, shows once and for all that there are MAJOR problems in the leadership of the Democratic party, specifically in this case, the people who were advising Kerry. The most major problem with the campaign was the fact that they let him be defined by the opposition. In polling, voters were asked to use an adjective to describe Kerry in one word and no single word or phrase received more than 5% of the vote. In a world where we need easy labels and descriptions for people, this is, and was, fatal. Even the staunchest Kerry supporter would have trouble defining his personality clearly in a word or two. I mean at least Gore was stiff and boring. Kerry was just nothing. Of course he wasn’t really nothing, but it took so long for him to try and define himself it was ultimately too late. The major identity of Kerry in the media - flip-flopper, liberal voting record, rich New Englander, weak on terrorism - was created by the Bush camp and then Kerry had to spend all his time defending it. How is possible that KERRY is the one who had to spend most of the campaign on the defensive? I mean Bush got us into Iraq and KERRY is the one who was having to constantly defend himself against attacks. When you let your opponent define you that a recipe for disaster and the Democrats better never let it happen again.
-Many of the rural southern states like Alabama and Mississippi are largely African American, and yet these were the states in which Bush enjoyed his largest margin of victory. Since the Republican party hasn’t gotten much more than 20% of the African American vote in any major election in the past 50 years it would seem to me that a lot of “black” people chose “Die” rather than “Vote”. Just another reason why (for the 5,233rd time…) we need Obama in ‘08.
-It’s ironic that the party supporting Christian ideals and family values is promoting war, intolerance, hubris, xenophobia, cutting welfare and is headed by a guy with a drunk driving arrest who has two underage daughters out drinking and who often makes sexually suggestive comments about his wife in public. Of course this is also a party whose two biggest spokespersons are Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly one of whom is being sued for sexual harassment and is been reported to be a massive asshole by nearly everyone who has ever worked with him and the other is a three times divorced racist drug addict. And yet they are the ones preaching that gay marriage violates the sanctity of marriage and that drug offenders deserve harsher sentences. Ah, hypocrisy, thou name art fundamentalist conservatism.
-I often wonder if people on the right ever look around and notice that like 90% of all actors, writers, non-country musicians, and artists as well as a wide majority of college professors and scholars of all types are liberal, and the most prominent conservatives are athletes, businessmen and religious extremists. I then wonder if they think, “hey all the intellectual humanistic types are over there and I’m over here with Pat Robertson and Charlton Heston and I’m proud of that!” I guess they do. After all as The Nation said, “in the Republican mind set, ignorance is strength.” This of course isn’t to say there aren’t smart Republicans and dumb liberals, but I just often wonder if it ever bothers conservatives that the majority of intellectual well-educated people in this country are on the other side.
-Speaking of education, Bush’s education plan makes much more sense when you realize who its coming from doesn’t it?
-Speaking of anti-intellectualism, the main argument I’ve been hearing since the election is that there are too many stupid people in this country, and while that is true, that’s far too reductive of a way to look at this election. That’s not at all the story of this election or even what decided it. What decided this election is the simple fact that the Republicans are far better campaigners than the Democrats. I’ve already mentioned Kerry’s failures were in defining himself and not attacking Bush hard enough, but it’s so much more than even that. I think the main thing is that, in the rural south, and really all across the country, the Republicans were able to get people to vote for a candidate who hurt their own best interests. And that is where I have to give them all the “props” in the world because it was sheer genius. I mean they really do deserve to win after the work they did on the so-called “cultural conservatives”. By “cultural conservatives” I mean people whose economic best interests would cause them to be Democrats, but who voted for the Republicans based on moral and cultural issues. These people actually, in a very real sense, hurt themselves to vote for Bush. These are largely poor people in the rural South and Midwest who need welfare, a higher minimum wage, and are being hurt by a high deficit and its economic repercussions. These people, as they are also largely very religious, are not going to be having an abortion or a gay marriage themselves anytime soon. But yet the Republicans got them to vote based on those issues, issues that don’t directly affect their personal well being, at the expense of issues that WOULD affect their personal well being. Now if that isn’t genius campaigning I don’t know what is. So to say Bush won because “people are stupid” shifts the blame from the Democrats for being piss poor campaigners to the generalized idea of “people”, when in reality this loss is really the fault of one Mr. John Kerry and not “stupid people”.
-Speaking of stupid people, (man my segues are rockin today…) I’ve already started to hear the “Hillary in ’08” rumblings and seriously people, this has to stop. I know the thought of Hillary Clinton, a woman, in the Oval Office is a pretty thought, but so are rainbows and puppy dogs and I don’t think either of them will be winning a presidential election any time soon. Let me spell it all out for you people who seem to think her candidacy is a good idea. First of all, we have already all decided that Obama will be somewhere on the ticket and a black guy and a woman on the same ticket is political suicide. Secondly, the Clinton administration was not known for its moral values and we are dealing with an electorate that listed moral values as its main reason for making its voting decision. Most importantly though - is there a more polarizing figure in Congress today than Hillary Clinton? I can’t think of one. People have an instant response to Hillary - either like or hatred - and it’s an opinion that has already been formed in most people. I fail to see how Hillary could even come close to appealing to the “widest segment of the population as possible”. This election already exposed the Democrats as a limited, regional party so how would it make any sense to choose a candidate who is polarizing, strongly liberal, and appeals to a very limited section of the population? And “women would vote for her because she’s a woman” argument doesn’t hold much water because if you’re a conservative woman, Hilary Clinton is public enemy number one, and plus, conservatives aren’t so much into the whole women’s liberation thing so “she’s a woman” doesn’t hold as much weight as “we” might think it would. For those who DO support her candidacy, may I ask why? Is it the fact she is cold, distant, and the most lacking in a sense of humor of any political figure I have ever seen? Is it the fact that she cares about “the people” so much that she ran for Senator of a state she had never lived a single day of her life in because her own state was too small to gain her national attention? No. Most likely it’s because “she’s a woman”. And that’s well and good and all, if that’s not your only reason. But if you support her just cause she’s a woman without knowing her stances on any of the issues, how is that better than supporting Bush just because he’s a Texan or supporting Jesse Jackson just because he’s black? Look, if there was ever a guy who didn’t have a problem with a woman running for office it would be me, and that’s maybe why this Hillary talk angers me so much. Hillary not only makes the Democrats look bad, but makes female politicians look bad, and her inevitable failure will make it that much harder for a woman to run her next time. So if you would like to present to me a well reasoned argument as to why it would be a good idea for Hillary to be the Democratic nominee in ’08 Id be more than willing to hear it, but until you are able to do that, lets please, for the love of God, stop with this “Hillary in ’08” nonsense before someone gets hurt.
-So In closing, I have to say that despite that ways things turned out, I still have hope for the future. I mean Bush can’t do any worse in than he already has. And when you need comfort, you can always look to history. Vietnam may have turned out poorly, but leadership saw how as soon as they instituted a draft the tide turned against them with stunning quickness, and they wont make that mistake again. And it’s easy to make parallels between social issues as well. Gay marriage is simply the new desegregation and abortion is the new prohibition (go read a history book and you’ll see the stunningly clear parallels) and both of those issues, after periods of struggle, worked out for the best. The attempt to advance society or fight off regression is never an easy one, but it always turns out for the best. So just hold on to your hope and know that the best in the human condition always triumphs over the worst, and so too will it again in our current troubles. And if not, well, I can always become a Toronto Blue Jays fan…
Top 3 & 1/2 of the Week (People Currently Living I Would Most Want to Be/Meet/Worship Edition):
1.) John Stewart
2.) Cameron Crowe
3.) Jennifer Connelly
3 & 1/2.) Philip Seymour Hoffman / Jerry Seinfeld
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)