Miami’s Not the Same

I failed to maintain my original plan of posting once a week, mainly because I skipped my Sociology class last Thursday, and that’s pretty much when I write these.  However, for the sake of attendance this endeavor of mine putters on.

Anybody not heard about the Jersey Shore?  I hated this show when I heard about it, I figured it was just another piece of MTV trash that taps into some superficial characteristic of pop culture and squeezes out as much money as it possibly can while yet again bastardizing and dumbing down the mainstream United States.  But I have to admit that when the first episode was over I started watching the next one without even realizing what I was doing.  Jersey Shore involves intensely one-dimensional characters, and I’m not saying that as an attack against the cast itself.  I understand the practice of reality TV shows of manufacturing identities and constantly reinforce such identities for its entire cast.  Therefore, although I definitely would agree that the cast doesn’t consist of the most brilliant individuals in the world, I don’t want to seem like I’m bashing them too much, it seems they’re getting enough of that already.  So why is it so addicting watching a group of tanned, juiced up, greased up people get drunk, fight and hookup other than for the obvious just mentioned reasons of course.

For me Jersey Shore is a breath of fresh air from life.  We live in a shady confusing world where every single human interaction brings layers upon layers of underlying tension, ulterior motives, communicative disconnect.  The person who smiles and laughs the most, probably cries the most at night.  Card often writes of how you can never truly know another person and why they do what they do.  You can conjecture, but it ultimately falls short, since most people don’t even know themselves enough to determine motive and intention.  My Buddhism professor once told us about acrasia, which is when someone behaves directly against their own judgment.  In an extreme case it is when someone looks at a line of cocaine and says this will ruin my life, and than lowering their head.  It represents a disconnect between the part of the brain that contains the intellect and the part that determines behavior.  It’s the difference between knowing and understanding.  I know that if I turned the computer off and just read all of my work I’ll probably get all A’s, but while I’m telling this to myself my fingers are typing in y-o-u-t-u-b-e without even realizing it.  It’s why even though I know there are no such things as ghosts, monsters or demons I can’t sleep without my back to the wall because I feel something rising up behind me.  Even though I know I’m the only one in my room I still run to the bed right after turning off the light.  We live in a world of masks and lies.  Whether it be person to person or to oneself.

Not so with the Jersey Shore.  While everyone else has hundreds of dimensions to them, the manufactured characters have only one.  Everyone knows what the Situation’s looking for when his head starts turning on a swivel.  I assume that at one point every person has wished that they could read another person’s mind.  When you watch the Jersey Shore you can do that.  They are so simple that every action or decision becomes reinforcement for the audience’s preconceived determination of their identity.  So when Sam gets mad at Ronnie for something idiotic, like a toe, it becomes reinforcement rather than annoyance.  It reaches a point where I no longer believe that they are lying to me, as so much of the rest of TV is, but rather they are simply lying to themselves.  People love having their opinions reinforces.  Instead of Snookie’s little whine annoying the crap out of me, it becomes endearing, when Mike makes an ass of himself it enthralls me, when Ronnie gets riled up, it riles me up too.  Jersey Shore exists as the antithesis to the Heroes, the Grey’s Anatomies, the Losts of our TV generation that capitalizes on the complexity of its characters in a very cerebral way.

On another level, the Jersey Shore is the manifestation of all of our desires that we understand are immature and superficial, but we still hold inside.  I’m not that different from them: I use the strongest gel I’m willing to pay for (level 10), freshmen year of college when I was working out and running every day I wore the smallest shirts I could find.  Actually let me rephrase that, I am very different from them, but not as much as I would like to believe.

Ultimately, you won’t learn any universal truths or profound philosophies of life by watching the Jersey Shore.  You can however, allow yourself to enjoy yourself a bit and let go for a little while of all the crap that comes with living as a part of society.

Animals are for Eating.

If tradition means anything, this will be the last post of the year.  But I am in a Sociology class that is so big and boring that I can see myself writing every week, like I’m doing now.

So about a year ago there was a minor upheaval about a biologist telling conservationists to give up on attempting to save the pandas.  Pretty much his argument was that the immense difficulty and expense within the conservation efforts are futile and would be better spend on other species.  The anger that arose revolved largely around pandas being so “cute” and “lovable,” that they have a cultural and humanistic impact on our world, more so than for example insects, rodents, etc.  He was being pragmatic, by criticizing public sentiments for placing value based upon abstract concepts rather than their importance to an ecosystem.

For me, I was wondering what the point of conservation was at all.  There are many cases where the abuse by human populations has clear effects on the ecosystem and could lead to massive problems.  Things like overhunting/fishing, deforestation, mining, drilling for oil, etc.  Those are clearly human problems that need to be stopped in order to preserve our resources, but that’s more for our benefit than for the sake of the animals in and of themselves.  I wonder whether we should be going any further.  Species have been faced with extinction for the entirety of their short-lived existence.  Even before humans were around species became extinct with regularity, and people forget that unless something changes we will as well.  There comes a point where natural selection has to come into play to ensure the strength of the Earthlings of the future.  If pandas aren’t able to compete and are bound for extinction than we would be remiss to devote critical resources to prevent it.  The priority of the human race should be the welfare of the human race; every dollar spent by organizations such as PETA could be better spent in Haiti.

Why am I saying this, when it seems ultraconservative when I’m clearly not?  Watch Home the depressing brother to Planet Earth.  The world is changing in ways that we don’t even realize.  Natural landmarks won’t exist with mountains getting shorter every year and seas drying up.  The world’s history has been marked by the rise and fall of its mountains.  When Everest becomes a hill there’ll be another Everest somewhere else, the world is constantly changing.  I guess we don’t need to learn how to embrace change since realistically we won’t see much of them for a few decades in some extreme cases, and this is a language of centuries rather than years, but maybe we need to learn to let go of the inherency of the Earth.  I’m not saying we can pollute all we want and completely disregard our impact on the ecosystem, but whether we like it or not the world is in constant motion, and maybe its time we let the pandas rest in our memories rather than in a pen forced to mate.  Brad Pitt said that the God’s envy our mortality, that our flashes of existence are ultimately more beautiful in its brevity.  Unless the Buggers attack and we acquire their advanced technology and harness the speed of light we’re not going to last forever.  We don’t have an ansible, we have reality, and I’ll admit that saddens me more than pandas do.  Space travel would be sweet.