CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist Part XVIII. Ambition and Gregariousness

Ambition

By Roy K. Moulton.  Topeka State Journal, July 29, 1913.

Let others work and lose their health
In piling up the sordid wealth,
    But that is not my wish.
Let others burn the midnight oils,
Devising ways of grabbing spoils;
    I’d rather sit and fish.

Let others solve the problems great,
Affecting the affairs of state;
    None of that on my dish.
Let others hew the nation’s path
And bear the thankless public’s wrath,
    I’d rather sit and fish.

Let others lead the strenuous life
That’s full of worry, toil and strife,
    But that’s not my ambish.
Let others wear their lives away
By living five years every day;
    I’d rather sit and fish.

Simone Biles dropped out of Olympic competition.

The reason was a simple, and yet complex, one.  It was the pressure of it.

Biles is a 24-year-old American gymnast, as most presumably know, who was in her second Olympics. She's truly great.

She was also under the public eye like nobody else in the Olympics, at least from an American prospective.  I don't know if this was anticipated going in, as I don't follow sports much, but it very clearly came to be the case very soon.

The pressure was getting to her, and it impacted her performance.  So, basically for the team, and for mental health reasons, she's dropped out.

The reaction has been interesting.

Indeed, the entire phenomenon has been interesting.

The day after it was clear that she was dropping out of team competitions Michael Phelps was interviewed on a network that he's been on during the Olympics.  Asked about if he understood it, Phelps basically gave a negative reply and went on to state how he thrived on the pressure and put more pressure on himself than would otherwise be there.

I hate people like that/

That may sound odd, but this story has really been a revelation on a series of things, one of them being the asshole nature of western society which revels in a moronic level of competition.

This was on my mind recently anyhow for an odd reason, that being that I'm not a competitive person whatsoever.

Now, I participate in some competitions, including one that is regarded as a sport, but frankly in those categories I've always just focused on my own performance.  Generally, as baffling as it is to a lot of people, I don't care much if I win or lose an individual sporting competition.

Indeed, I absolutely detest the way that some competitive people insist on interjecting competition into daily life.  A hyper-competitive friend of mine, for example, can't bring up the topic of hunting dogs without the stupid "my dog's better than your dog" sort of conversation.

I don't give a f***ing rat's ass how your dog generally fares in competition with somebody else's.

Now, people don't generally do that to me, as I'm not competitive, but I do have a sarcastic wit.  And as noted here in a recent thread, I don't argue for sport.  If I'm drawn into an argument and engage in it, it's for the kill.  I'm not interested in the fun some people seem to derive for pursuing perpetual arguments.  I don't do that.  So people don't try to draw me into the "oh golly, let's have the same stupid argument again here today!" type of conversation.  Last time somebody drew me into an argument on dogs, I had a single observation that ended the argument with the arguers left, literally, speechless.

Anyhow, our society really values competition.  We have a free market economy that's all about competition.  Our legal system, of which I’m part, uses the adversarial system, which is a competition, to sort out disputes between people, as opposed to the discovery method used in the Latin/Nopoleonic systems.  Indeed, as I'm in litigation, I’m ironically in a constant state of competition.

As noted, I view that differently than most people.  Some lawyer I know well engaged me in a conversation just recently I've heard a million times before recently about the glory of being in trial and how invigorating that is.

That's the kind of perpetual bullshit, I'd note, handed out by people who are rarely in trial.  I’m not rarely in trial, I'm in trial a lot.

The reason for that is that I'm not a competitive person.  I don't measure litigation by the "oh golly, it's so fun to be wearing a suit acting like an adult making arguments".  That's childish crap.  

I view it as a task I must weigh and calculate for the result. Totally different.  I'm not going to be experiencing any "highs" as a result. Indeed, when the fellow was waxing remantically about the joys of being in trial in heavy-duty competition, even if you were taking a pounding, and losing, I replied "I don't know what you are talking about".  This floored him, and he replied "but you are a competitive person!". ^[1]

No, I'm not. 

But that's not the way a lot of people think, and that's not the way our entire society is engineered. And it makes me wonder.

I'm glad for Simone Biles that she was in a position to drop out, which is what she did.  

Most people aren't, and most men definitely aren't.

I could now more go into work today and declare that I need a mental health holiday or that I can suspend my participation in something big, not that I'm suggesting in any fashion that I would like to do so, than I could declare myself Emperor of Russia.  Not going to happen.

Now, let me be frank here.  I think that competition is inevitable, and its often the best system for something, although something that often has to be restrained as well.  I.e., I don't want to try to tell Chevrolet what the best way to make an electric vehicle is and I don't want to tell Ford that either.  I don't want to protect Tesla for being the first on the scene.  Competition will figure that out.

And I also feel, oddly enough for a post of this type, that, like Chesterton, the problem with our economy isn't too much competition, but not enough.  We've moved towards giant industrial concerns at the expense of smaller ones and that's wrecked competition in a lot of areas that would greatly benefit from it.

Apply the Sherman Anti Trust Act, darn it.

And I don't want the marketplace of ideas dominated by things that I have to think because somebody had determined I have to think them.  Not hardly.  

Indeed, if you want to look for a society that's geared towards no competition, look at a Marxist one.  Everything was planned including what you could think.  

And that was, quite frankly, horrific.

Well, I probably don't really have much of one.

But if I do, this is it.

Not everything in the world has to be a competition to the death.

And also, some people aren't competitive and that's not some sort of defect in them.  I feel like they aren't listened to whatsoever however.

Indeed, I ran across a lawyer sometime ago who probably pegging out on the competitive meter.  If I had a second cup of coffee, he'd probably have a third, just to "win".  So I was surprised that he bills himself as being involved in lawyer "mental well-being".

Having that sort of personality and thinking that you can help any lawyer with "well-being" is, well, mental.  Indeed, the entire lawyer "help the members of the bar" movement is, as its basically geared, like a field hospital, to patch you up and send you back into battle so that you can get killed.  Nobody is going to ask "is fostering war a good idea", even on a metaphorical level.

And all the more so if you are male.  Times change, and people and professions with them, but then they don't.  Society is basically perfectly comfortable with men competing themselves to death, and it probably always will be.  We'd rather express surprise that ol' Bob died at his desk or ol' Phil drank himself under the table and expired than ponder if there's a systemic problem here somewhere.

Not grasping the gregarious

I had an errand I had to run while at work the other day and in the course of it I grabbed my extremely gregarious co worker to lend a hand.  It was a short errand, but it involved going to a public place, buying something, and coming back.

I'd forgotten how gregarious the gregarious can be.

This actually starts off a day prior, actually.  I had to go to a meeting and was in a rush when I met the same fellow in the hall.  His question to me was "Have you met Father Terry?".

I haven't met Father Terry and indeed I didn't know who Father Terry actualy was.  I quickly told my colleague that I had to run to a meeting as, truthfully, I didn't wish to be drawn into a conversation and then bolt.  I was running behind as it was.

But tha'ts only part of it.

Something about stuff like this really puts me very ill at ease.

Father Terry, it was pretty clear when I saw him, was a Francican monk.  He looked every inch the part. Tall, heavily bearded, wearing a full length heavy gray robe.  He was also obvsiously a gregarious man like my co worker.

I've been friends, over time, with a couple of Catholic Priests.  In the oversall scheme of things, there's probably three that I could genuinely claim as friends, keeping in mind that I draw that line pretty close to me.  Acquitances, even ones I'm friendly with, I don't count as friends.  In addition to those three, I can state that there was a fourth who was on the edge of being a friend, but not quite, and maybe a fifth just a little more distant than that.  Interestingly, of the Priests  in this category, the one that I was not quite friends, with, whom I'm still somewaht in touch with, was simply hard to get to know.  He was highly reserved.  I'm also highly reserved.

To a degree, I think certain people in certain occupations and vocations probably ahve to instinctively headge their bets.  Being a lawyer is a little bit that way.  I always dislike it when somebody casualy mentions to a stranger that I'm a lawyer, but it comes up in conversation all the time. A very routein question for men to ask another man is "so what do you do for a living?", or "where do you work?".  Oddly, I don't ask that causally at all.  But most men, and even a lot of women, will ask that. I'm also a cattleman and I often briefly think of saying "I raise cattle" but I never do.  "I'm a lawyer".

My gregarious friend, as we'll see in a moment, is super proud of that fact, i.e., he and we are lawyers, and has no problem bringing that right up.  I'm much more reserved about it for a variety of reasons.  Indeed, I don't start up conversations with strangers as a rule and beyond that I never start up a conversation with a complete stranger and then volutneer that "I"m a lawyer and that's my partner".  That's really just asking for trouble, in my view.  And I don't want to expend the mental energy to do that either.

Anyhow, back to Father Terry.

Because I'm so reticent about contacts of all types, and perhaps I figure other people are the same way, I'm super hesistant about introducing anyone I know to anyone else if that person is some sort of person of status.  My gregarious friend is not.  Only if a person has reached the point where they're really a personal friend would I do that.

Well, maybe I would, but I wouldn't tour the office doing that.

Some of that has to do with the concept of "friend".  My friends are definatley my friends.  I don't really have light friendships.  I do have friends that I know in context, such as through work, but if they reach that status, they're more than light associates.

A lot of gregarious people, it seems to me, count light associatiates as friends.  I guess they feel they make friends easily and therefore everyone is their friend.

I really don't understand, however, how some people like to take somebody around to all of the offices.  It completely escapes me.

I'm glad that religious (those who occupy a religious vocation) do get out and about.  Indeed, I think its something that needs to occur.  So its not that.  Rather, it's the odd habit of the gregarious taking somebody around where they work and introducting them to everyone.  Why do they do that?

I have no idea.

The TVA Demolishes a coal fired plant

It was in Tennessee and it was an old plant.

One of the local political ads claims that a politician saved our coal jobs.  This isn't related, but there's no evidence that any coal jobs have been saved, or can be.  The decline of coal has been going on for more than a century and that can't be reversed legislatively.

But it can be denied as a reality temporarily, and we're busy doing that.  Another legislator recently proposed to reduce the coal severance tax on the theory that if coal isn't taxed as much as it currently is, it'll be more competitive.  This is close to hte same logic which applied when the coal severance tax was first passed in Wyoming, which had opposition out of the fear that it would drive coal away.

In reality, in both Wyoming and Montana, the latter state having the coal severance tax first and at a higher rate, coal is passing.  

Must the show really go on?

Dusty Hill, ZZ Top's bassest, died this past week.

They are still touring, however, with a long time associate of the band taking Dusty Hill's place.

I don't know.  ZZ Top was the rock band with the longest continuous line up, which is part of what made it special.  The members are in their 70s. 

At least in my view, and I"m a ZZ Top fan, there is no ZZ Top without Hill.

ZZ Top achieved a certain sort of legendary status over the years of course, and their style of music actually evolved signficantly.  I first heard them in the car of a friend who moved up here from Oklahoma during one of our periodic oil booms. That would have been in the 1970s and at that point in time the band would really have been fully in its blues/rock stage, that is, more of a Southern blues band than a rock band.  There were a lot of acts that met that definition.  Over the years, most of them, but not all of them, fell back into the blues more than rock, which is where their original strength lay.  ZZ Top went the other direction.  Early on, they really emphasized their connection with Texas.

While I am a fan, that also means that I'm a qualified fan.  I liked the band that was defined by Tush more than the one that was defined by Sharp Dressed Man.   And great act though they were, they never compared to Johnny Winters or Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Because of a long break they took at one point they ended up growing long beards, something I myself might do if I had the luxary of taking a lot of time off.  When they reemerged it became sort of an affectation, and I have my problems with that.  Be that as it may, they were a great band, but they were a band.  In my view, it's time to hang it up and perserve their legacy as a unified band.

Speaking of affectations. . . 

Lalapalooza Drops DaBaby Over Homophobic Comments Hours Before His Performance 

So read a headline.

I don't know who DaBaby is or what he said.  All I can say is that a grown man ought not to call himself "DaBaby".

A person has to be really careful about this so it doesn't sound completely wrong, but one of the things about fans of jazz and blues is that we don't like affectations.  When like music that's real.

That doesn't mean that music nad musicians in any one era or genra don't or can't take on certain affectations.  Since the decline of blues following the 1970s, some blues artists definately affected a certain physical image for their acts, for example.

But certain musical styles have become affectation dominant, including rock (post KISS), country and rap.  Rap is particularly interesting this way as it started off about as stripped of affectation as it could conceivably be.  When it crossed over into general popularity, the affectation that its artists took up often were very much associated with wealth, and demonstrated excess, but they were entitled to that.  Lots of rap acts still do that, so I'm not dissing the genra or the affectations of its artists.

Rather, what I'm going after is the juvenilization of American men, which is rampant at this point.  A moniker like the "DaBaby" is, well, speaking of a certain sort of infantilization that should be avoided.

The Fire This Time.

I drove from Casper to Denver last week. Dense smoke the entire time.

This is being noted in conversations by regular folks all the time, and its on the cover of the Tribune today.  But the remarkable thing is that its being ignored locally on a larger scale.

The national news notes it to be sure. We're in a record fire season.  But locally, in the region where the dense smoke is everywhere, nobody is stating anything about what's the cause of this.

This isn't the way things have always been.  Growing up here, smoke in the air was very unusual in the 1970s nd 1980s.  It was something that began to make a notable appearance in the 1990s and the last two summers its been the dominant feature of the summer sky.

With this being the case, you'd think that the legislature would be discussing what's becoming an annual tragedy.  Nope.  Nobody is brining these topics up.

It was Trotsky who stated "You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."  That's probably one of a handful of things Trotsky ever stated that are worth repeating.  The same thing is true of climate and weather.  You might not be interested in it, but it's interested in you.

It's time to start discussing these things.

Blind Assumptions

There was an interesting letter to the editor for Anthony Bouchard in today's Tribune.  The author was obviously extremely distressesd that Bouchard was not invited back to meet Donald Trump in anticipation for an anticipated endorsement of some Wyoming candidate to run against Liz Cheney.

What was interesting about it was the set of assumptions built into it. The author obviously loves Trump and stated the same, i.e., "loves".  She maintained that it was Bouchard who is most like Trump, even if her hero is set to dump him like a hot rock on a mid August day.

Fawning admiration of politicians is something I don't get, but then as noted above I'm a questioner of ambition and authority.  But that sort of desperate fawning is odd.

The Tribune also ran a column by one of its columnists, Tom Gagnon, all about his registering as a Republican in order to vote for Cheney. Gagnon makes it plain he's a Democrat, and if you read his piece, he's a really far left Democrat.

I don't care if he does re-register, that's his right.  One of the things about American political parites is that there are no restrictions on who resigsters as what, and for that reason, they can change.  Frankly, I don't think the Wyoming GOP is actually anywhere near as right wing as its really active members think, as most Wyomingites are in it, and most are centrists.  But Gagnon is doing the classic Wyoming Democratic thing of killing his own party.  If he was going to do that, he should have just shut up, rather than broadcast it and confirming the far rights suspicition that everyone in the GOP who isn't in the sleeper car of the Trump Train is a communist.

Footnotes:

1.  I also feel, quite frankly, that many such comments reflect either propaganda that we feel we're required to say, as in Republican members of Congress saying "oh, um, yes, I believe the election (in which I myself was elected) was stolen. . . "when they don't, or in the dulce bellum inexpertis manner that so many people have about so many things they really don't engage in, or rarely do.  Put another way, watching The Sands of Iwo Ima might be fund, but actually landing on Iwo Jima. . . not so much.