“Mr. Towns, you behave as if stupidity were a virtue. Why is that?” – Flight of the Phoenix
Well, at least someone gave this post two thumbs up.
My older brother, John Wilder (our parents were notoriously uncreative), got a job at a motel when he was in college. His duty was to sleep in the apartment above the front desk, and if anyone wanted a room late at night, to get up out of bed and check them in. Technically, he got paid to sleep on the job. When I try to explain that’s what I’m doing to my employer, they seem to think it’s a violation of company rules. They won’t even listen when I explain I won’t be sleepy on the job if I just sleep on the job.
Go figure.
One day the owner of the motel was looking for someone to do an extremely important job: sweep the parking lot every Sunday. As I had heard of a broom, my brother put in a good word for me, and I ended up with my first official job. As I don’t recall quitting, they might be irritated at me because I haven’t been in to work in decades.
This was a job that I was well suited for, since I was willing to work for the one-ish hour a week (on Sunday) sweeping up the parking lot. I even had a time card, and got paid minimum wage. So early each Sunday morning I’d get on my ten speed and bike down to the motel and sweep the parking lot.
My bike kept trying to kill me, though. It was a vicious cycle.
The best part wasn’t the few bucks after tax that I made, but rather sitting down with my older brother and having breakfast in the office. I timed it so that I’d be done sweeping so we could watch a television show on TBS® together: The Wild, Wild West. I’m pretty sure I saw my first episode ever in that motel office.
By the time my brother and I watched it on the 12” screen in the office, The Wild, Wild West was decades old. And yet it was better than anything on prime time television. The Wild, Wild West, if you haven’t seen it, was Robert Conrad starring as secret agent James West in the 1870’s Western United States, complete with science fiction gadgets.
The villains were ludicrous. One episode featured obviously rubber cobras. And in one fight scene, Robert Conrad’s pants split wide open and they just kept filming – they were on a schedule, you know. On top of that, the costumes resembled nothing ever worn by an actual human in any place and during any period in human history.
Silly? Certainly. But why was the show good enough that I planned getting up early to watch it?
It’s because the character James West (and his fellow secret agent, Artemus Gordon) were good. West was a hero. He was smart. He could fight. He had wit. He laughed in the face of death. And if he had a weakness, it was for a lovely lady.
We’ll pretend that Will Smith took 1999 off. There can be only one Jim West.
Why was James West’s contemporary, Captain Kirk so popular? He was a cut from the same mold as West.
A boy needs a hero to look up to, who models virtue and strength. And you could do much, much worse than either James West or Captain Kirk. For some reason, the values of the networks changed, and The Wild, Wild West was cancelled (like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies) in 1970 even though they did great in the ratings. Hmm.
It was like there was a social agenda . . . .
As time has gone on, many of the “heroes” in movies and television are given “depth” cheaply by making them either morally weak or having the system they work for be compromised in some way. When a hero sneaks by like Mal Reynolds on Firefly, well, the system takes care of him pretty quickly.
Captain Tightpants aims to misbehave.
Culture is, of course, upstream from politics. Culture is in part created by those heroes we are given to worship. Where do those heroes come from? Well, I mentioned James West, but I recall being pretty psyched about the Founding Fathers when I was a kid. Dad got pretty mad after the third cherry tree.
Our political reality is therefore created in part by media (now a tool of the Left) and academia (also a tool of the Left). And now the Founding Fathers are, instead of being revered for attempting to create a whole new type of country are regularly bashed in schools.
This attempt of the Left to steer culture obscures the real message. As a human, we have one (and only one) job.
That job is to be a good person.
It’s that easy. We waste a lot of time and effort wondering what it is we should be doing, when the answer is laughingly simple. You can’t control your height. You can’t control your intelligence. You can’t even control society. What can you control? Your actions and attitudes.
So, be a good person. That’s it.
The Left tries to obscure that simple truth because it has to. The Left doesn’t want you to be a good person. The Left wants you to be a Leftist. When I look at the memes from the Left, I’m astonished by two things:
- They’re horribly unfunny, and
- They’re based on a big wall of text.
No editing required.
The Lefty memes aren’t funny because funny requires truth. I wrote about that recently in The Leftist War on Culture: Comedy Edition. When truth is strangled, humor disappears which is why tyrants will kill comedians before they kill dissidents. Humor is one of the most potent weapons of truth.
The Lefty memes have to rely on a large blocks of text because half of the meme is required to try to refute reality and re-define it. If you’ve ever heard an actual Leftist talk, half of it is redefining terms: boy used to mean boy, but now it’s an entire spectrum which might indicate that boy means boy on Monday, but when it’s time for the state track meet, boy means girl. Sometimes.
If you want to watch real Olympic®-level verbal gymnastics, watch a Leftist try to define “racism” – it’s a hoot. For bonus points, see if you can get them to read the dictionary definition.
That’s the good news. Your job, being a good person, is so simple it’s hard for even the Left to mess up. But I bet they could come up with a 600 word meme to describe that “good” is only “good” if it results in more Leftist votes and the abolition of private property.
I wish that I could promise to you that if you were a good person, you’d be rewarded. That would be a lie. Being good doesn’t guarantee a tangible reward, or even that you will succeed, or even be liked and admired in your time.
I’m not sure I can promise a leprechaun will deliver them, though.
Likewise, being bad doesn’t guarantee punishment. Heck, some research indicates that 4% of Chief Executive Officers of companies are psychopaths. If you think long enough, you can come up with several names of people who are downright evil, but seem to be thriving.
The other bad news is that being good is hard work. First, you have to figure out what good is. Society isn’t necessarily a help here. As I write this, The Boy is watching livestreaming rioting and property destruction across multiple cities. When I try to calibrate the whole good/bad thing, I’m not sure that looting a Target® or burning a Hyundai© serves much of a purpose.
Being good isn’t about being good for today, either. I could easily ruin a child by making life too easy, or not holding them to high standards. Would it result in a happy child now? Sure. But every parent knows that short term success builds children into monsters who end up burning a Target™ or a Hyundai®.
Brought to you by the Minnesota Vistor and Tourism Bureau.
To be good, a moral code and the courage to follow it is required. Christianity is the one that built the West, and you could do worse – you rarely hear of Amish drive-by shootings, since everyone can hear the clip clop of the horses from pretty far away.
The Romans (Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python) had a well-developed system of virtue thousands of years ago and spent a lot of time working to figure out how to be good – that’s pretty close to the basis of the Stoics. Making it up your own individual code as you go can lead to rationalization and relativism. If it feels good, it may not be good – a lot of bad things feel very good at the time.
But generally, if it feels bad, it nearly always is.
Be a good person. Ask yourself: WW(JW)D? No, not John Wilder.
Jim West.
But make sure you get your sweeping done first.
