FawnDoo's Blog Party II: Old Coots and Change

It's interesting that FawnDoo, whom I'm certain is still somewhere in his mid-twenties, centered the theme of his second blog party around our “inner crazy old coots”. I've always felt like I was born about 40 or 50 years later than a time I would have fit in to better, and my friends have often likened me to an old man because of my ideas. While my notions may be mature, my emotions have been anything but. As a child, I got along best with either kids in my neighborhood younger than me, or people my father's age in the bands we played in, and rarely with people my own age.

Where was I? I seem to be rambling more than usual...perhaps the host spiked the punch with something. The topic of the evening is change, something else I've never gotten along with. Not all change has been bad, and I've eventually embraced some changes more than others. This is a party, so I'll try to avoid deep, meaningful, and depressing fare for lighter observations. I can't make any promises though; I'm in nigh complete stream-of-consciousness mode, and anything may come out of my typing....

What changes do you regret?
I regret the way branding has overtaken television shows. I remember when I could sit down, watch a sitcom, and then as the credits rolled in the background would be scenes from the episode I'd just seen, edited cleverly and filling the screen. Between the '80s and the '90s, this practice declined but instead we'd get an extra minute or two of original content at the end. Then something happened. Sometimes the original content would be cut out in order to advertise new shows. Sometimes it would be there, but the screen would split and a commercial would get the larger and louder portion of the screen. By the time some of these shows were syndicated, chunks were missing from the episode. The Simpsons is notoriously butchered in reruns. Characters will still be talking as the volume fades out and it cuts to commercial, sometimes truncating their line entirely! But the branding, the distracting station logo in the lower right hand corner of every show, is the most regrettable change to shows. Sure, they make the icon somewhat transparent with network shows, but it's still distracting. Saturday morning cartoons have brightly colored opaque logos obscuring the entire corner, often overlapping key portions of the animation.

On a more serious note, I also regret the decline of ethics in the work place. There was a time when a person could work hard, and move up on his or her own merits. A boss appreciated extra efforts and rewarded hard work, and workers felt a responsibility and duty to their jobs, which many of them held for their entire career. These days, you can't stay in one place for very long. Sometimes, it's not your choice, as Janet astutely pointed out in her comments to a recent post. It doesn't matter who you are, how good you are, or how hard you try; at any given time if a company needs to make budget cuts you can be deemed expendable. Even if you do survive layoff after layoff, you'll only inherit the work of others, with no increase in pay. In fact, with the hours you'll need to put in just to tread water, the hourly breakdown of your salary will suffer. The ones who survive and get ahead in business aren't the honest, hardworking people. They're the ones who lied in school, copied off tests, or got other people to do their work for them. They carried these practices into the real world and found nothing but success by doing so.

Watching Wall Street this afternoon, and an accompanying documentary, I found more analysis of the decline of ethical business practices. In the film, Charlie Sheen’s character is torn between the dishonest practices that made his idol Gordon Gekko(Michael Douglas) incredibly wealthy, and the honest ones that leave his father(Martin Sheen) potentially facing the destruction of his airline. The film was intended to show not that “greed is good”, as Gekko proclaims in a famous speech from the film, but that it's important to take the right and honest path, even though it may be the most costly and expensive. Is it better to have moral wealth or tangible wealth? Director Oliver Stone laments in the documentary how many viewers thought the honest people were suckers and idolized Gekko. When people matter less than numbers on a page, they'll lose every time. I regret the increase of such practices, but while Wall Street and the more recent In Good Company portray their rise within my lifetime, classics like It's a Wonderful Life show that it's nothing new. The only change is that the balance has shifted against people in favor of profit.

What changes are you pleased with?
I love the rise of DVDs. I've never been the first person to get any media format. When my friends were listening to CDs, I was still listening to audio cassettes. When DVDs came out, I was still renting video cassettes. Then I got a computer that played DVDs. I started buying them, started watching commentaries and special features and easter eggs and realizing how inadequate the cassette was. On more than one occasion I've had to get out a screwdriver and disassemble my VCR to save a cassette that had become tangled, and I still remember similar incidents with my audio tapes. Thank God for #2 pencils. With my luck, I'm surprised I haven't hit the eject button on my computer to see tape spill out. DVDs are great. With Netflix, I'm catching up on a lot of movies I've missed over the years, and I can't see such a program practically working with clunky cassettes. The fact that DVDs can be mailed in flat, lightweight envelopes attests to their advantage in that regard. Were it not for DVDs, and computers that play them, I wouldn't have been able to watch Wall Street at work this afternoon while working on a logo for a presentation my boss has to make.

Speaking of computers, I'm not sure I'd even have a career in art otherwise. My first year in college gave me a taste of traditional graphic design, and I don't think I have the patience or motor skills to line up fonts by hand, one letter at a time. Graphic programs give me a remarkable degree of control and precision, and my computer skills more than compensate for some of my artistic weaknesses.

Where can you see it all going?
I think advertising on television is going to get so bad, that many people will wait and watch shows exclusively on DVD. As it is, I often tape shows so I can fast forward through the intermissions. And once “reality” TV has completely conquered the airwaves, I may be done with television entirely.

How do you feel about the changes?
I feel good about CDs and DVDs and air conditioning and automatic seatbelts and air bags. I feel REALLY good about the internet, without which I'd be a lot more bored and probably less intelligent. The ability to find ANYTHING out, to have the power of knowledge at my fingertips, may be the greatest change in my lifetime. I feel concerned about the moral and ethical changes in our society, and have no idea what the future holds. All I can do is take one day at a time and Keep Going. I'm sure my parents' generation had their hardships and they made it, as did their parents and generations before them. In the grand scheme of history, from natural disasters to diseases to wars, humanity is still here, as Fishburne's Morpheus proclaims in The Matrix Reloaded. The average lifespan is increasing. Maybe it's not so crazy after all that FawnDoo invokes the inner elderly; at 30, I would have been considered a senior citizen in the Old West.

What would you change if you had the chance?
I'm not sure I would ever have the chance to make great changes; there are things in my own life that I've been unwilling or unable to attempt to improve. The world has changed so much; how can one person possibly revert to the things that were once right about it? Wouldn't it be great if a person graduated school, married and then had sex for the first time, remained with his or her spouse for life, raised children, and held on to the same great job where he or she climbed the corporate ladder rung by rung? Isn't that the way life is supposed to work? A nice, uncomplicated Leave it to Beaver existence would be one I could handle, but I don't see things going back in that direction. People will continue to confuse license with freedom, and desperately seek to justify doing whatever they want at the expense of others. I don't think I could change society itself. A more realistic hypothetical scenario would be winning the lottery, buying a television station, and running it the way I wanted to, with employees having job security and shows being longer than the advertisements, which would be less intrusive. That too is a naive scenario, sadly enough, and I'd be out of business in a very short period of time.

What will you tell your grandchildren about 2005?
Another hypothetical, eh? I'd probably say something like: “When I was your age, we got up to change the channel on the television. My first television had rabbit ears, stood on four legs, and didn't have color. When we turned it off, a little white dot remained in the middle of the screen for a long time. By the time I was thirty, we had remote controls you had to hold in your hand and aim at the televisions, which were larger, sharper and in some cases flat. There were no holographic projectors, no chips implanted in our brain stem at birth that allowed us to tune in to any program we wanted at any time, or visualize our dreams and thoughts. And while we had the internet, its speed was measured in megabytes and even kilobytes per second, none of this gigabyte per second nonsense. That's why you kids are so damn impatient. You also don't understand loss, what with all the cloning and memory chips. Why when our pets and loved ones died, we FELT it. We visited places called cemeteries and paid our respects, and held on to memories, the only thing we had left. You kids have had the same dog and cat your entire lives, and I'm your third Grampa MCF! This moon colony is going down the tubes and if things don't change soon, we're going to end up so much space debris like the Earth. What? 'What's the Earth' you say?! Why you little--!

Will they believe you?
Hell, no.

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Thanks, FawnDoo. I feel a lot older now. And by the time anyone finishes reading this rant, we'll all be a little older. Still, I encourage my readers to pop in their contacts and be sure to check out what our host had to say.

(On an unrelated note, I can't believe it's been so long since I hosted one of these cyber shindigs...stay tuned....)