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My wife and I are getting used to hearing that we’re doing it wrong. It's not coming from one side of the aisle or another. It's a barrage that boxes the compass. We're becoming immune to it.
Most everyone is willing to point out how strange they think we've become, in detail, without compunction -- or manners. We're wrong, wrong, wrong. If you drift with the current, no one makes you explain anything. Your behavior might seem deranged to me, but I'm not allowed to point it out to you. Our own relatives call us "The Amish" because we don't have cable TV. If you drug your child into catatonia because he acts vaguely male in public school, you're a good parent. Teach your children at home like we do? Weirdo.
So who decides who's fly, and who's wack? Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex doesn't have anything on today's Media-Government-Public School Complex. The US is looking more and more monolithic to my eye every day, but it's a very squishy, diffuse-looking monolith. A blob, not a stele.
Hmm. Not a blob. The Blob. It’s getting harder to get around or ignore all the time. My family is now most decidedly outside The Blob, but we know all about what goes on inside, because The Blob never leaves you alone.
Even people have writing on them now.
When was the last time you were forced to spend any time in a waiting room? They don't hand out hardcover compilations of Edna St. Vincent Millay poems at the dentist and tell you to take a chair, do they? There's a TV bolted to the wall everywhere, even upscale restaurants, and it's going full tilt, and that's that. Gas Pumps play bad music and ads. I can't remember the last piece of mail I received that arrived in a clean, white envelope, instead of covered with ads and slogans like a stock car driver’s jumpsuit. It's very difficult to find any article of clothing that doesn't have writing on it. Even people have writing on them now. Believe me, if you live inside The Blob, I know all about you. You’re inescapable.
It's pretty comfortable inside the American Blob, and the decision to live outside it can exact a toll of effort not many are willing to pay. There are much nastier blobs all over the world, and living outside them doesn't get you a funny look, it gets you stoned to death, so you won't hear me agitating for the American blob to be more like the _______ blob.
An American that looks longingly overseas is a fool. People swim those seas to get here with sharks nipping at their heels the whole way. But that's an outside The Blob observation. This is the worst place in the world if you listen to Katie Couric or your average Humanities professor. Both of their milieus heavily feature a trip up their colons; some literal, some figurative. Thanks, I'll pass.
Counterintuitively, The Blob is not a good old American, Steve McQueen kind of blob, taking over everything, moving inexorably all the time. The British TV show The Prisoner had a more accurate depiction of our current blob, coming to get you and bring you back if you strayed from the cosseted but stifling life they have planned for you.
Hey, FLOTUS! Leave my kids alone.
There's always a hint of incredulity, of exasperation, when they bounce over to round you up. Where are you going? How could you like it out there? Our President's wife will never understand what she sounds like to anyone that barely has enough money to keep their children fed. A diet would help them? You could stand to lose a few pounds, honey. Leave my kids alone.
For the last four or five years, The Blob has been in overdrive. It’s not getting stronger exactly; it’s just spread out more thinly over more acreage. It’s been both amusing and mortifying to watch the President change careers more often than an alcoholic brother-in-law, trying to find something he’s good at besides blowing the rent at the track after a liquid lunch.
First he was a shady car salesman, but instead of the old trick of hiding your keys while the finance guy works you over, they took your trade-in out back and poured sand in its engine. He took a flyer on light bulb sales. His short stint as a Real Estate agent was a hoot. He was a shady vinyl siding and plastic window and door salesman for a while, his pockets stuffed with coupons that defrayed a tenth of the cost they’d added the day before to fool the suckers. That didn’t last, so he started selling elaborate water heaters door to door. He fell back on his old job of chasing ambulances for a spell, and selling worthless insurance policies to elderly shut-ins. He tried his hand at payday loans, fronting people a fiver a week and getting it back on April 15th, with interest. I think he wants to try his hand at being a doorman in China now.
POTUS’s really not interesting enough
to pay attention to constantly.
I don’t mean to single our POTUS out for calumny. He’s really not interesting enough to pay attention to constantly. I’ve lived through another President telling me there’s never going to be any heating oil again, put on a sweater. I’ve lived through Japan taking over the world, I’ll survive China making McDonald’s Happy Meal toys.
People chafe vigorously inside The Blob when the opposition is in power, because they see life outside becoming a possibility; but neither side is any friend to the independent. I woke up one morning in the eighties, and Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan had magically transformed my FICA payments from 9.35 percent to 14 percent. George Bush senior negotiated NAFTA and Bill Clinton signed it, allowing unrestricted importation of factory-made goods while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the unrestricted entry of illegal aliens into the country.
I worked in factories way back when, and then in construction. No one speaks English in either of those places any more. It was Mitt Romney that finally convinced me to abandon Massachusetts, my home of almost five decades. Mike Dukakis couldn’t manage that. And I’ve never met a Libertarian that didn’t draw a paycheck from someone else. I can never ask for a raise, because all I get is what’s left over.
It’s still legal to pay a doctor with money.
The United States, or at least big portions of it, will still allow you a great deal of independence if you’re sturdy enough to accept life outside The Blob. It’s still legal to pay a doctor with money. The most independent of my fellow citizens inside The Blob can’t imagine that, they just talk about co-pays all day long.
You can still heat your house with firewood if you’re willing to put your back into something besides going to the gym because you’re vain about your appearance. I’m still allowed to stay married to my wife forever if I want to. You can teach your kids anything you want if you teach them yourself. If you are devout, no one but yourself is stopping you from saying Grace over your meal in a restaurant.
You can watch any movie ever made for a few dollars instead of watching The Deadliest Survivor Of America's Got Dancing With The Mythbusting Shore Bachelor Home Videos Dirty Eye For The Pimp My Ride Guy. Plus 8 for the hundred dollars or more a month you pay for cable. If you’re self-employed, you can go to the beach with your kids in the summer if it’s a pleasant day, even if it’s Tuesday. Parental leave? You can take an eighteen-year parental leave after your child is born if you want to; it’s just harder to have granite countertops and a new Lexus and two hundred pairs of shoes if you do.
The Blob's potholes are filled with the souls of your children.
People inside The Blob like reading about people outside it, because we are so strange and mysterious, and so I have this forum. I’m really happy out here, despite the hardships, but I freely acknowledge it might not be for everyone.
The behavior of The Blob often seems plainly irrational once you're outside it. Sometimes it appears to me that the only attraction of its road to squishy perdition is that it’s well paved. The caution signs are eclipsed by all the happy shiny neon. The potholes are filled with the souls of your children. The more bizarre or self-destructive or parasitic your lifestyle is, the more fleshpots are in place along the way to coax it along.
So even if you’re happy in there, beware; the cool kids running The Blob have a tendency to shove you out into the cold where I am without much notice, and knowing how the copier works and how to put a new cover sheet on a TPS report is of dubious utility out here. It’s hard to paddle upstream, it’s true. There’s often a waterfall downstream. Choose wisely.
