smorg

I’ve just started reading the new book by Al Gore, called “The Assault on Reason”. It’s premise is basically that the way we, as humans, communicate and exchange ideas has ben so badly warped by ‘one sided’ media such as television, that as a culture we are failing ourselves.

Yes, there are some politics in the book, and it reads at times like a text book, but it’s really a fascinating book with some very good points.

Last night, I read through a part that was fascinating to me…let me recap it briefly.

Essentially (says the book), our brains, on a physical level ‘tag’ memories. Everything that happens to us is tagged by a timestamp of sorts, so that we can hear a song and remember that it came out in 1995 or see a movie and remember seeing it the summer of 1988 and that it was Fall and night time.

This leads to the premise that people who have a problem such as ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ do things differently. For them, the event (rape, abuse, shock, war, combat or some other life altering horror) is tagged, but not in the normal way. For them, these events are kept alive…instead of being tagged as the past, the memory is kept alive. They have no reference to the event being in the past, and thus they physically exhibit the same symptoms that they had when they event occurred and that feeling is triggered by a visual or some other cue.

So if, for instance, a soldier was involved in a firefight on an Iraqi street corner, and one day he is walking along and hears a back fire, his mind jumps back to find a memory and finds the battle. Since it isn’t tagged in the past, the soldier instantly feels scared and alarmed and defensive.

I found that theory to be remarkable. And as I thought about it, I realized that we, as a nation, are all suffering from PTSD. Think about it. On September 11th, 2001, we all saw one of the most horrifying things ever filmed happen live in our living rooms. We watched people die in real time.

Now, some 6 years later, everytime we see a plane flying too close to a city or hear the words ‘terrorist’ or ‘airplane’ in the same sentence, we lose our shit. We get sweaty hands, we panic a little inside. We hope nothings going to happen, but dread that it will.

The worst part is that the current administration knows this and they play on it. By being demagogues, they know they can manipulate us by using fear. If they tell us we don’t buy gas from overseas anymore because it might be tainted with explosives that detonate when it reaches a certain temperature and that this is a terrorist act, we are NOT going to buy that gas. We’ll line up and pay $15 a gallon for ‘American gas’ that is safe.

Think that’s far fetched? When was the last time you ate fresh spinach? Flying soon? I’ll bet that if someone goes into a coughing fit on the plane that you’ll be letting the stewards know that someone might have TB.

The point is that by using fear, and by constantly broadcasting this fear over the airwaves, we are being herded like sheep. Unless you are an avid news junkie or have the wherewithal to do some research on your own, all you know is what the talking heads tell you.

Again, the book is a little obtuse, but if you’re looking for some clarity, it’s certainly worth the read.

I just finished (yeah, it’s 2am) a book by Joe Hill (who, by the way, is Stephen Kings son) called ‘Heart Shaped Box’. It’s about an aging rockstar who has led a life of leisure, decadence and lust. Pretty much all the good stuff in life.

But, his past is catching up to him as the ghost of the stepather of one of his many conquests makes its way into his life, turning it into a bloody, tragic and ultimately fatal shambles.

The writing is good. Hill writes likes his Dad…lots of name dropping and cultural references, as well as the same staccato -what am i doing here, this is crazy - mid-sentence interruptions SK is known for. But that’s always been a charm for me, as that’s how people think. They are in the middle of an action and second guessing it in their head while their body goes on with the plan.

The entire story has a Southern appeal to it also, which is odd since the King family was born and raised in Maine, but it’s obvious Joe has spent some time in the South, as he has a very finely attuned sense of what it is to be Southern.

In one particular scene, a character tells another that, ‘you can’t fly into the South…you have to drive. You have to see the dirt turn from brown to red and the rivers from black to a muddy haze’, and I like that, it’s true. The landscape changes and so do the people that occupy it.

Not a bad read, although toward the end I could sense he was setting it up to make it easier for some yet-to-be-named screenwriter to turn it into a mildly interesting movie that suffers only because books of this nature never translate to the screen properly. Too much of the good stuff is in the back stories and in the minds of the characters themselves.
(Although I can see Billy Bob Thornton as Jude and and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Georgia, quite easily.)

If you get a chance, take a look. if you want, you can borrow my copy.
:)

A few months ago, one of the Directors at work and I were having a discussion about this book, Blink. The premise is that we (as humans) make decisions within seconds, and sometimes microseconds, that are scarily accurate. We then tend to do one of two things:
*Ignore that ‘thin-slice’ (as the author calls it) of information and go on to talk and second guess and make mistakes
*Go with the snap decision because we have either learned to trust our instincts or because our psyche forces us to do so

To me it is a very personal book. I do this every day in a million ways. I’ve never been a fan of meeting about having meetings or debating something endlessly. I’d rather go with my gut and take a chance than to sit and ponder and over think things. In fact, looking back at my life, I would say that some of the stupidest and most tragic things I’ve ever done have been because I didn’t trust my initial thoughts and ended up going over scenarios endlessly in my own crazy brain.
But, at the same time, some of the best things to ever happen to me have happened because there was a real and visceral reaction to a situation that I followed.
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