it’s a normative thing, you wouldn’t understand

I wet my virtual finger this morning to determine which way the blogosphere zeitgeist was blowing today, and noticed a high level of Vonnegutitude in the atmosphere. There’s a lot that could be said about the man, his works, and his cultural legacy, but I’ll leave that to folks better versed in those areas than I am. I’ll remember Kurt Vonnegut for two things in particular.

- his remark, referenced in Mike Nelson’s Movie Megacheese, about the funniest thing he had ever seen in his life was a man falling backward out a bus door.

- his 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron,” featured in every short fiction anthology I had to read during my travails as an undergraduate English major.

It’s a simple story about a dystopian society where citizenry is forced to conform to the lowest common denominator, and those gifted with better than average looks, intelligence, or athletic ability are burdened with government-imposed handicaps to bring them into accordance with the baseline. It’s a depressing, yet farcical, piece of fiction, and likely one of the inspirations behind Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy, but it is clearly a product of its era. The story’s stifling conformist future is as much a reaction to the 1950’s cultural landscape as Blade Runner’s vision of a future Los Angeles reflects the urbanist nightmares of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Both those visions of potential futures have been overtaken by reality and rendered as quaint as the art-deco metropolises and finned skullcaps envisioned in 1930’s sci-fi.

It’s interesting, sifting through the popcult artifacts from the 1950’s (which like all decade tags for cultural trends has a great deal of “bleed” at the upper and lower boundaries) and noticing the emphasis placed on being “average,” a vague baseline best defined as “just like me.” -- the “me” in question taken to mean white, Christian (preferably Protestant), and respectably middle class (referring to standard of living, not vocation). Politically, it meant subscribing to the grand consensus, not too far removed from the political center (or at least, not too far on the left from the same).

In popcult works, it was an easy means of user identification (“This person could be YOU!”). In everyday life, it was a means of self-identification centered on each individual’s perspective, much like how “middle class” has come to mean “people who describe themselves as middle class, regardless of standard of living.” “Harrison Bergeron” arose from this cultural environment, but times have changed since then.

We have gone from a society where the accent was placed on conformity an artificial median to one where there is a widespread belief that each one of us is entitled to a special destiny, entitled being the key word. The particular destiny can take any number of forms – religious, political, nationalist, creative, or romantic. There are many teats on the belly of delusion, but the underlying sense of entitlement is the same whether one is talking about an aspiring American Idol contestant or a person convinced that God has placed his/her/its sole trust on his or her shoulders.

I put the emphasis on entitlement because I’m not trying to position myself as a nay-saying dream-wrecker. There is a world of difference between seeing greatness as a goal to work towards and seeing it as a birthright which is automatically bestowed -- to hell with the qualifications. If I’m hiring, say, an accountant, I do not want someone who whined their way out of meeting the math proficiency requirement of the CPA exam, but if they were to bust their ass and overcome their fear of numbers, then I’ll be cheering them at the finish line. If you want something, you should be willing to work for it. At the same time, one has to be prepared to face the cold truth that they just don’t have the vocal range/eyesight/whatever it takes. I know your mom and friends say you’re great. They have to say it. They are your mom and friends. (My TV production professor once gave a lecture about the temptation to cast “funny” or “talented” friends or relatives in one’s work. His message in brief was “Don’t.”)

This is the point where some of you may be saying “What about affirmative action, Mr. Liberal? Hmm?” Affirmative action is a direct response to certain endemic inequalities in the system. It has its flaws, being a stopgap patch passing for the broader, costlier reforms required to properly resolve the root causes. Until society comes around to acknowledging that responsibility, affirmative action serves an important purpose. Oh, and a big “fuck you” to all those rich white folks who could give a rat’s ass about Boston’s public schools until their privately educated hellspawn fail to get into one of the elite Boston high schools, at which point the “reverse discrimination” lawsuits begin.

I say all this as someone who admits to possessing a small degree of talent, kept well-hidden under a very large bushel, and who has zero aspirations about what to use said talent for, apart from my own personal amusement.

Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet – Having an Average Weekend (from Savvy Show Stoppers, 1988) – I miss the days when Comedy Central dedicated a third of their programming day to showing Kids in the Hall episodes, rather than All Unfunny Stand Up, All the Time Hosted by Dane Cook.