by TC
As I stand here on this lovely spring day looking out over this sunny vista and your bright, smiling faces filled with hope, I can't help but feel depressed as hell.
While I'm often told that your generation is so much smarter and so much more worldly and wise, I think it's a crock. Mankind obviously learns a lot more with each passing day, but I don't know who came up with the notion that you guys absorbed much of this knowledge.
Nowadays, a general college education is a mighty thin layer of sandwich spread. Sure, they covered all of the bread — tried to expose you to every subject and topic — but the mayo's so sparse you can barely taste it. Of course, there's the old platitude about how the purpose of college is to just teach you how to think.
To this — honored students, faculty, and staff — I say horse piss.
Frankly, most of you remind me of the ducks, and for that matter, the beavers, the turtles, and the frogs.
There were 28,800 of them. They left Honk Kong harbor on a tanker in early January of 1992 en route to Tacoma. Along the way the ship met 40-foot waves and lost its cargo. More than seven thousand boxes, each one containing a yellow plastic duck, a red plastic beaver, a blue plastic turtle, and a green plastic frog peppered the surface of the turbulent sea.
The rough waves quickly melted away the cardboard containers and the armada of bathtub toys was set free to roam the ocean. Inexplicably, they all seemed to follow diverse courses. Rather than float in one direction, they became victim to some sort of oceanographic chaos theory that sent them to different parts of the world.
Since then, ducks, beavers, turtles, and frogs suffering from varying degrees of sun and wave erosion have continued to wash up on shores ranging from the Aleutian Islands to Kennebunk Harbor in Maine. Others continue to circle the earth, completing a lap around the Gulf of Alaska to the Bering Sea once every three years.
Like those plastic bathtub toys, I worry that most, if not all of you, will simply hand yourselves over to the capricious currents and trade winds of fate. Rather than take stock of your life and set out on a direct path with grim determination, you'll simply let life make its decisions for you.
It's easier that way.
The trouble is, you'll one day emerge from years of virtual passivity. I say "virtual" because it'll involve a little bit of interaction from you, but no more than a few mouse clicks or abbreviated keystrokes. You'll have spent who knows how long letting songs from I-Tunes and images from You Tube simply wash over your tree stump of a brain and your only communication with the world will be through abbreviated keystrokes.
You'll have created your own world, all right, but it's just a My Space world with some really fresh wallpaper. And while it's nice to have a theme song, the recording artist probably didn't have you in mind when he wrote it.
You're bored rats in a lab pressing a lever to get a treat, bored rats that inexplicably have delusions of grandeur.
Unfortunately, for most of you, when you wake up from this electronic torpor, you'll have missed your life. In text messaging language, you'll see that TARFU, 4EAE.
(By the way, I'm NIFOC right now.)
Of course, a lot of you have outs. A lot of you even know "The Secret," so you think you'll be okay. As long as you understand the laws of attraction, your imperially slim frame will be draped in Armani and propelled by BMW.
I now ask that those of you who know "The Secret" to put on your I-pod headphones or text message somebody while I address the others for a minute.
Are you "Secret" believers text messaging? Are you preoccupied? Good.
You see, I don't want to dis The Secret in front of the people who believe in it. Like any group that's swallowed any kind of swill-laden dogma, they get awfully defensive when you smite their gods.
"The Secret" started out as a movie, but it's festered and grown into a book, instructional DVDs, and a termite's nest of websites. The premise is that through the centuries, a select group of successful people shared a single belief that was responsible for their success.
The secret is essentially this: if you wish for stuff, you'll get it.
Really. I'm not lying. They invoke metaphysics and science and art and history to back up their assertions. They reason that laws of attraction rule the universe, and that if you simply think positive, you'll attract what you want.
Are you fat? It's all because you think of yourself as a fat person. Are you poor? Negative thinking.
Their team consists of a group of pop-psychologists and general hucksters who spout tidbits like this:
Why do you think that 1 percent of the population earns around 96 percent of the money that's being earned? Do you think that's an accident? It's designed that way. They understand something. They understand The Secret, and now you are being introduced to The Secret.
Apparently, things like drive and intelligence and a whole lot of perspiration having nothing to do with financial success. It was just a case of "the man" withholding information and trying to keep you down.
As evidence, they list a number of Western Civilization's greatest thinkers who supposedly knew The Secret, men like Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Hugo, Beethoven, Lincoln, Emerson, Edison, and Einstein. Never mind that we hardly know anything about Shakespeare, these mulyaks believe he was in on The Secret.
I've got a strong feeling that if Einstein were alive to find his name had been invoked by these hucksters, he'd spit so hard that his loogie would approach the speed of light, reach infinite mass, and wash the offending peckerheads away into a different space/time continuum.
It's The Da Vinci Code meets Tony Robbins. The book even includes faux parchment paper, quill and ink fonts, and wax seals. Sure! It's mystical! Written by hobbits or elves or magicians and sealed in a cave for centuries!
Horse piss.
If you flip open any random two pages in their book, they say virtually the same thing: Just think positive! You are a magnet! Think good thoughts and good things will be attracted to you!
Think all his is harmless? I know a college-educated girl who has printed aphorisms from The Secretand pasted them to the shaker bottle she carries in the gym. She explains that, "studies have shown the affirmations cause the molecular structure of the water to change and it becomes a kind of holy water."
Good God woman, if I paste affirmations on the inside of my shorts, it doesn't mean I'm going to pee wine and shit loaves of wholesome multi-grain bread.
I actually know secretaries around town who have, because of The Secret, tacked up pictures of fancy cars on their cubicle walls. They fully believe that by staring at the picture and thinking good thoughts about it, they'll get the car.
As long as I can remember, I've hung pictures of naked girls on my office wall and thought nothing but really, really, good thoughts, and it's yet to work. Nary a naked woman has plopped her firm buttocks down on my lap. Chad Waterbury came in drunk once and relieved himself in my Mexican Hat Plant, but that's as close as anything's come to being naked in my office.
I'm going for broke! I want the car AND the girl!
And there are literally millions of these "Secret" people walking among us.
And sure, The Secret "helps" people, but I'm going to quote Karl Marx here and proclaim that The Secret is the opium of the people. People who believe in The Secret surrender responsibility. They don't need hard work or resolve or perspiration, The Secret will provide all. They're all plastic ducks that have cast themselves onto the mercies of the ocean.
If you're vulnerable to every false god that comes along, you're pretty much doomed to be a 7-11 clerk...4EAE. (That's "forever and ever" to you non-texting people.) And not even a dayshift 7-11 clerk. No, you won't be good enough for "the show." You'll work the night shift and when some punk slips a 12-count box of Bud underneath his parka, you'll look the other way lest he use your rectum as a bottle opener.
If you're prone to every false god that comes along, you're emotionally and intellectually weak. You're a plastic duck.
The real secret that successful people have known all along is integrity. And before you hrummphh mightily, let me define the words "successful" and "integrity."
I'm not jaded enough to equate success merely with money. I mean, damn, Paris Hilton gets paid 11 million dollars a year just to show up at parties. If that's your idea of success, by all means practice vapidity and public drunkenness and flash your naughty parts as often as possible. That whorish apple doesn't just fall off the tree; you've got to reach for it.
I define success in the simplest terms: to turn out well, as in your life turning out well — a nice little frappuccino blend of intellectual satisfaction, physical satisfaction, and emotional or spiritual satisfaction. An existence that is, at its end, ultimately free of obsessive wanting.
And by integrity I mean adherence to a code, an incorruptible purpose.
By and large, those who want something out of life and continue to strive for it against all obstacles, attain it. That's integrity of purpose.
And if by some remote chance college helped you find that integrity of purpose, that was money and time well spent. But I fear that it didn't happen. I worry that many of you are vulnerable to things like The Secret. Unfortunately, it and all other similar "strategies" that involve sitting around and wishing probably aren't going to get you the car, the girl, money, or whatever it is you think the big piece of chicken is on life's platter.
A couple of days ago, I had the macabre pleasure of seeing Bodies...The Exhibition. In case you haven't heard of it, it's a traveling exhibition that features more than 250 real human organs and specimens, many of them in athletic poses. There are bodies throwing baseballs and footballs, only the bodies have been stripped of their skin, plasticized, cured, and frozen in a "natural" pose.
I can't help but think of this obscure song I used to listen to. The lyrics went something like this:
My old friend Trigger up and died,
They've got him stuffed and dried,
He's staring glassy-eyed out through the parlor door....
Many of the bodies have been sawed in half so you can see the internal organs. One room even contains plasticized fetuses. In one display case is a complete human skin, a pelt, if you will, including a face. It looks like a rumpled suit someone left on the floor. You can even see the calluses on the bottom of the feet. Another display contains the entire nervous system — and nothing else — spread out on a slab in the shape of a human.
These specimens are prepared in China, and you can clearly see Asian features on the displays. Once the human factory receives the body, they begin processing it. If it's meant to be a display of human musculature, they painstakingly strip off the skin, eyeballs, and all fatty tissue. It's then posed, plasticized, and cured.
(I recently read that the Japanese have invented a robot wine steward that's capable of chemically analyzing and identifying foods. When presented with human flesh, the robot thought it was prosciutto. After seeing the bodies, I realize that human flesh is also visually similar to sliced ham.)
If, however, they want to display the vascular system, they inject brightly colored plastic into the blood vessels. Once it hardens, they place the entire body in a vat of acid, which leaving nothing but the veins and arteries.
There's one display that shows the vascular anatomy of a skull. It has the exact shape of a skull, only there's no bone or tissue whatsoever. It just looks like a remarkably dense mass of brightly colored blue and red thread floating in solution. You can even see the ghostly imprint of where the eyes should be.
There are also "exploded" versions of various skeletal structures, including more human skulls. As I understand it, the most efficient way to split the skull for display is to take the intact skull and place mung beans into the fissures. The beans in their skull pots are then watered. As the beans sprout and grow, they deftly crack the skull into pieces.
While I was intrigued by the anatomy, I had trouble looking at these pieces as just "specimens." I kept wondering who they were. What did they do? What did they contribute? Were they happy? Did they consent to this? Did they know they'd spend eternity shooting a basketball, their shrunken, plasticized pecker and balls getting dusted by housekeeping once a week?
By policy, all personal records are destroyed. Anonymity is preserved. They lack individuality or distinction. I suppose it's easier for us to deal with the specimens that way.
However, dear graduates, it's one thing to lack individuality or distinction when you're stuffed and dried, but it's quite another thing to lack it when you're still alive.
© 1998 — 2007 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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