The Citizen, 2012-02-02, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2012. PAGE 5.
The year’s still young, but I’m putting
my money on James Livingston for
Bonehead Title of the Year.
Mister Livingston has penned an article for
Wired magazine called “Against Thrift: Why
Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy,
the Environment, and Your Soul”.
Pow! As titles go, that’s right up there
with “The Leadership Genius of George W.
Bush”.
Livingston enjoins his readers to “ignore
what the economists, journalists and
politicians would have you believe…Go to the
mall and knock yourself out.”
Or you could just wait until the Visa or
MasterCard bill comes in at the end of the
month. That’ll knock you out.
We live in the age of Homo Consumerensis.
Our highest civic calling is to buy crap we
don’t need with money we don’t have.
Our day of worship is – well, every day, really
– but our High Holy Day is Black Friday,
that 24-hour feeding frenzy just before
Christmas when shopping malls and big box
stores slash their prices and, in anticipa-
tion, salivating shoppers mass at the doors
like hordes of Visigoths at the gates of
Rome.
This past Black Friday a shopper in Los
Angeles pepper-sprayed fellow shoppers in
order to get at discounted X-Box consoles. A
riot broke out and blood was spilled over $2
waffle irons in Little Rock, Arkansas. And a
woman was shot near a Wal-Mart in Myrtle
Beach, South Carolina as she carried her
goodies to her car.
The insanity continued right up until
Christmas Eve, when Nike put its latest
line of retro basketball shoes on sale. Police
had to be called in more than a dozen cities,
including Charlotte, North Carolina, where
shoppers smashed glass doors to get at the
product.
We’re talking about running shoes, folks.
Somebody once said “The American
consumer is not notable for his imagination
and does not know what he ‘wants’”. Maybe
not – but he wants it now, and money is no
object.
Those Nike shoes? Two hundred dollars a
pair.
We’re still talking about running shoes,
folks.
There are one or two beacons of hope in the
blitzkrieg of berserker bargain hunters. For
one thing, the thrift stores are thriving. People
from all walks of life, unmoved by advertising
campaigns to buy $50 T-shirts, $100 purses
and, yes, $200 sneakers are heading down to
the thrift shops to get barely-used goods at a
fraction of the mall price. The proceeds from
the thrift stores I frequent go to the local
hospital and a women’s’ shelter. Where’s the
down side?
Another ray of hope comes from Elvis
Costello. The famed musician (and husband
of jazz diva Diana Krall) made the news
recently when he publically urged his
fans NOT to buy his latest CD/DVD
compilation.
Why? Too expensive, that’s why.
Costello says the price tag of $200 “is either
a misprint or satire”.
“All our attempts to have this price revised
have been fruitless,” says Costello on his
website “Steal This Record”.
But if you really want to get a very special
CD for your sweetie, Elvis has some helpful
advice. “We can whole-heartedly recommend
“Ambassador of Jazz”, says Elvis. “It contains
10 re-mastered albums by one of the most
beautiful and loving revolutionaries who ever
lived – Louis Armstrong.”
“Frankly”, adds Costello, “the music is
vastly superior.”
When’s the last time an advertiser advised
you to buy his competitor’s product – because
it was better?
Finally – truth in advertising. Good on ya,
Elvis – see you down at Value Village.
Arthur
Black
Other Views My name is Art. I am a shopaholic
It’s tough to explain to a class full of Grade
3 students, typically between eight and nine
years old, that they shouldn’t be afraid of
someone with too much time on their hands,
but that’s exactly what’s going on in the Village
of Brussels.
On page six of this week’s issue of The
Citizen you’ll find a plea for peace from the
Grade 3 students at Brussels Public School,
claiming that they’re scared due to the
vandalism and random violence that has taken
place at their school in the last week or so.
The students don’t understand how a random
person could state, in spray paint on the side of
the school, that God hates them. It’s tough to
explain this kind of situation to an eight-year-
old child.
However, that’s what the teachers at Brussels
Public School have had to do for the last week.
And it doesn’t stop at the school. Anyone
walking their children down the street in the
village has to explain the words and symbols
spray painted on the library and Cinnamon
Jim’s and other locations.
There doesn’t seem to be a clear motivation
behind the acts, just people who think
differently than you and me with too much
time on their hands. We see a school, they see
something that needs to be defaced.
Unfortunately for them, there are
consequences other than getting caught, not
that whoever is doing this cares.
A class full of Grade 3 students is frightened
to come to school. They’re confused, they’re
upset and they’re scared. It certainly takes a
special kind of tough guy to scare a school full
of children by scurrying around at night like a
rat and spray painting hateful words on a wall.
Most of us, however, are just left shaking our
heads, wondering why someone would do
something like this – hurt and disappoint this
many people. And really, for what? I have to
say, I’ve never understood the trade-off for
something like this. If you steal a car, at least
you have a new car. Where is the pay-off in
vandalism? I’m sure I’m not the only one who
doesn’t understand the motivation behind it.
When I was young, I walked to the store to
buy a bottle of soda and I got swarmed by a
handful of older kids. They pushed me around
and stole my money and the hat off of my head.
So while I’m sure those kids enjoyed what
must have been three dollars and the
Georgetown Hoyas hat they took from me, I
ended up speeding up my walk around that
store for the next five years, or avoiding that
area altogether.
While working at Rogers in Pickering, I
worked with fellow employees who, after
being robbed, refused to ever set foot in the
store again. It was just too traumatic for them.
These are extreme circumstances, but in
many ways they carry the same weight.
These children have prematurely been
exposed to the dark side of humanity. It’s
unfortunate that it’s got to this point, but the
best most of us can hope for is that children
don’t have to go through something like this, at
least until they’re old enough to grasp it.
In a community like Brussels, or Blyth or
really all of Huron County, one of the things
people pride themselves on is the safety of the
area; the ability to walk the streets at any time
of day, or night.
Unfortunately for those young children, this
situation makes them question that ability.
But hey, I’m sure it was worth it. In a
basement somewhere there’s likely a pair of
hack anarchists snickering to themselves and
reveling all the good work they’ve done the
weekend they terrorized Brussels.
Paper tigers
When little boys (and I suppose little
girls, as we know how important
representing both sexes equally are,
unless they’re scrambling off a boat, then we
have to go women first) dream of being
soldiers they dream of being SEAL Team Six
members.
According to online sources, the team,
actually known as the United States Naval
Special Warfare Development Group, or
DEVGRU, is a counter-terrorist unit not
commented on by either the Department of
Defense or the White House and has most of
their operational information highly classified.
The team was previously, and is currently
colloquially, known as Sea, Air and Land
(SEAL) Team Six. They are the elite troopers
responsible for bringing down Osama Bin
Laden.
Now, they are the elite troopers also
responsible for parachuting into Somalia
under the cover of dark and rescuing two
hostages while killing nine of the hostage-
takers.
Play out that scenario in your imagination.
These men jumped out of a plane in a pitch-
black sky. They parachuted, silently enough
not to be caught, to a location and landed.
They breached whatever building the hostages
were in and effectively eliminated nine threats
with no reports of any bystanders hurt (no, I
will not say collateral damage, I have a real
issue with that term) and both hostages coming
out in the same condition they were the hour
before the breach.
To become a member of the team you have
to be in a regular SEAL team and display
extraordinary abilities (supposedly, as I said
most reports about the group are highly
classified).
We’re talking the best of the best here.
And yet I still have some trouble envisioning
some of the things they’re doing.
Busting into Osama’s compound and putting
him down had to be harrowing, and, no doubt,
came only after years and months of research
into his location and defenses.
But didn’t that news seem a little odd?
If Osama died, I expected to see it as some
long and drawn out firefight or as the result of
some strategic bombing run or some unlikely
sniper shot from miles away while he picked
up his morning newspaper in his bath robe.
I certainly didn’t expect a team of elite
soldiers to be responsible for infiltrating his
compound and putting a gun to his head.
Now we’re told that, with action-movie like
stealth and guile, they completely diffused one
of several hostage situations in Somalia.
It all seems not Hollywood enough to me.
I’m not saying I don’t believe it. The proof
is in the pudding... or in the pooled blood
where they eliminated the hostage-takers, I
suppose. I just wonder where the explosions
are.
Maybe I have a jaded outlook because
whenever I try to plan anything more intensive
than moving a couch, everything goes wrong.
Heck, on the weekend I had help moving a
piano (yes, I’m still sore from that adventure)
and it didn’t go without a hitch. It wasn’t until
I had bruised the soft tissue in my hand, one
person had slipped and cut their leg with a
falling piano and one other seriously
compromised his reproductive abilities by
slipping and doing some impromptu splits on
the side of a truck bed that the piano found
itself in my home.
Looking through the world with those eyes
(and a bruised and battered body around them)
I can’t see how you can have an elite team for
which things always unfold so well.
I don’t see how they have enough men to
take down nine captors without hurting
themselves, a bystander or one of the hostages
without having so many people that they get in
each other’s way.
I’ll admit that the closest I ever come to
military training is the occasional video game
or military-themed movie and I never once
guessed that those showed any glimpse of
reality.
That’s why I believe that, in a decade, or a
century, or however long it takes for classified
documents to become declassified, film
director Michael Bay, or his protege will
probably show the exploits of SEAL Team Six
(or DEVGRU, who knows).
For those of you who aren’t up on modern-
day stupid action movies (of which I’m a
closet-connoisseur, so don’t think less of
yourself for not knowing) Bay is responsible
for the recent resurgence of one of my
childhood-properties, Transformers.
He has such a basic way of looking at films
that people have immediately attributed any
film with an abundance of explosions and
fancy graphics to be “Bayified”.
And that’s the problem. I’m so used to
seeing movies about two-man, four-man, six-
man or 12-man teams taking on entire armies
that I have labelled them as only happening in
Hollywood.
There are far too many explosions for any
team to be truly precise and effective in my
Hollywood-twisted mind.
I completely expect any action movie to be
full of explosions and unlikely situations that
simply wouldn’t happen in the real world. I see
military tactics that result in huge explosions
instead of precise actions.
So I’m sure, when Bay, or his film-school
progenies get a hold of the story of SEAL
Team Six their boring, quick, silent and deadly
tactics will be replaced with explosions, most
of which the heroes will be walking slowly
away from.
As for today, as for right now, I find myself
a child again.
How did they do it? How would I do it
(despite the fact that I’m in no shape to join
any military body, let alone an elite team of
counter-terrorist specialists)? How is it
possible?
I’m afraid I’ll never know, and, even if I did
know the specifics they would still seem too
outlandish to be real.
So here I sit in disbelief. Thanks Hollywood.
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
Bay’s next hit flick? SEAL Team Six