Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Joys of Peter, Paul, and Mary and the value of self loathing

The mailbox that has vexed my quiet neighborhood for so long is now in its pre-assembled state, something it shares with the new mailbox, in the front of my driveway. There is merely a small, square piece of concrete sitting, or hiding, amongst the aggressive indigenous grass that has swallowed at least four toddlers. You can't blame the grass for its aggressive nature, this is a southern variety and understands the natural world's view of competition. A concept abstract to politicians, university professors, and people largely from the flanking coast of the continental U.S.
My battle with this green aggression has now taken on new dimensions. As I was helping out the domestic labor I came across a cassette tape (I'll spare you the joke here on the advancement of technology- except for the last comment) I made for a friend. Magnetized on its brown strips of tape were classics of varying decades, Guns-N-Roses, Queen, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. The sixties folk trio who my parents took me to see in my impressionable teen years, while they were in their twilight years happily soaking up the 2nd hand smoke from concerts, and the nuclear radiation fallout from protesting french nuclear tests in the south Pacific. As I listed to "Why are you crying my son? Are you frightened like everyone?....brain fades...Puff the magic dragon, lived by the sea, and frolic in a happy mist, in a land called hon-alee....wow, that brings me back at least two decades before I was born, and made me want to protest something...like ....happiness. Okay, its really hard to find something when life is pretty good, and like all arrogant Americans, I think I'm doing pretty well. I may not be the best looking individual, but I still get winks when I look in the mirror. I have wonderful children, who are cute enough that they get freebies when I take them out in public. With such a great life, I ask "why did Peter, Paul, and Mary (whose real names are Joseph S, Carl M, and Bernadene Dorn) and they 60s crowd, included the modern equivalent i.e., liberals and Europeans, hate the human population? And want to curtail modern growth?"
Well, I think I have the answer. Its self-loathing. If I did nothing but think about drugs, rock n' roll, and the third item in that list, or I was hanging around in San Fran these days, I think that I would hate myself, and if I hated myself then why would I want to reproduce a smaller version of my self-loathing ego. Think about what man kind is blamed for, we cause mass extinction (ignore the Permian or the K-T boundary), create wars, create pollution, consume anything and everything, and worst yet- man has reached out with his inventions and altered the very cycles of the earth's climate all so we can drive our cars three blocks to Wal-mart to scarf down a hot dog made with plastic imported from China. Why would you want to create more of you, when you are the cause of all these things? If you were wading in a drug induced state in a pit of mud, listening to mindless noise (lets call this Woodstock) and you looked up and saw that your fellow county men, who worked selflessly long hours, had through man's arrogance and a slide ruler put a man on the moon, why would you want the human race to go on? You wouldn't, and so you'd vote for Obama, so it won't.