Vexxing

I've noticed over the last couple of years how fucking polite our society is. That isn't really an insult, I suppose, but in a way it is. Everyone seems to have forgotten how to say "no." A recent study I read about subways said that 70% of people riding the trains will give up their seat to you if you just ask for it. Panhandlers can live in crappy apartments, eat, drink, and be merry for just a few hours a day asking for spare change on the street. I'm not saying we aren't a cynical nation, or that we are easily manipulated. We just have a culture that frowns upon being rude to anyone.

I think it is because we really do believe, for the most part, that each of us are no better than anyone else. We have created a society that idealizes equality and individual freedom. It all sounds so good. Yet it sort of sucks.

Larry David is sort of a spokesperson for anti-politness. On "Curb Your Enthusiasm" he is constantly getting dragged through the mud because he made one, small, impolite gesture to someone. Obviously the show is a comedy and it is designed to take that one small thing and snowball it into being a crazy laugh filled adventure, but its a satire, and satire exaggerates reality to make a point about how absurd it is.

I am one of those people that is bad with the banalities of human life that everyone else seems to ease easily into. And I say "seems" since I honestly don't know how easy it is to really be nice and polite all the time. I just am not great with strangers or new people generally. Even so, I've been helped by strangers many times, I've had doors opened for me, just today, but mothers, by elderly people, and by a guy carrying a large amount of groceries. And you might say "well, your an ass, making those people hold doors." But I don't try to be, I was just standing near the door waiting for my turn to go through and they were kind to me and held it. I, too, hold doors for strangers almost every day.

The problem is that there is just too much politeness. I once had a woman measuring me for a tux, and I was just one in probably dozens of people she had measured that day, and her breath was awful. Just so incredibly foul. And she breathed heavily at me for several minutes while measuring me. I was too polite then to say anything. Frankly, I'm sure I've had horrible smells emanate from me many, many times. But to this complete stranger, someone who probably would have liked to know she should take a breath mint or at least smoke a cigarette so she just smelled like nicotine, I said nothing. I ignored the problem and went on with my life. And, yeah, it was just bad breath, who cares? Well no one, but you take that level of politeness to an extreme and you may find yourself not wanting to say anything to someone that is clearly pouring poison into their dinner guests drinks.

The biggest problem, though, is that we are so afraid of saying no anymore that we are easily manipulated. We are told by a salesperson that we need something and that it is relatively cheap and we are so used to saying yes that we just instinctively agree. I had a salesman on the phone the other day that was trying to sell me something and I said I wasn't interested several times and it took me saying no about eight times before he finally gave up (note: I would have just hung up, but it was a company I was already a customer of and I was trying to get something else done, they just put the phone person on sales as well as customer service). I don't mind telling people I am absolutely not interested, but our society seems to make no room for that. It wants us to act like we are always going to say yes. That was the problem I saw with the "hit" movie "The Yes Man" staring Jim Carrey (that I didn't see, but I'll talk about it anyway because I am an out of the closet jerk and I don't care if I get caught talking about subjects I know nothing about). It's all about a bored, white, middle class male trying to figure out why his life sucks. So he says yes to everything. And you know what? He goes sky-gliding (based on the preview at least). And then presumable he learns a valuable lesson. Maybe the lesson was, "you should say no sometimes" but they sell the movie as just saying yes to everything. And that is going to end up with you with twenty credit cards and several hundred thousand dollars of debt. If you could just say yes to everything, then there would be total chaos. Evolution taught us to say no because sometimes people want you to do really, really stupid things.

Speaking of "The Yes Man" I am reminded of a movie called "The Yes Men" (note the plural). Which sort of brings me home here. In the movie (a documentary) a couple of dudes set up a fake website mocking the World Health Organization (I think, it may have been another group, but I am not going to look it up)and some people take it seriously and book them for appearances at conferences. So they, like the Merry Pranksters they are, took advantage and made presentations about a selling poor people their shit, after it'd been recycled, back to them as hamburgers. They made another appearance wearing a gold running suit with a giant inflatable phallus on it that was supposed to be able to allow them to work on their computer (that would be attached to the tip) while working out. It all sounds a little stupid and far fetched, but aside from the college classroom they visit during the film, everyone bought it. And why did they buy into the absurd? Because they were too polite to say anything about it. A rational person would see they were just playing a joke. And I assume that there were many rational people in the conferences, but they didn't say anything because they didn't want to be seen as being negative towards a new idea. Which is idiotic.

Listen, there are great new ideas that a lot of people wish they would have got on bored with when they first heard about it, but for each good new idea, there are approximately 800 billion horrible new ideas that never go anywhere. Yes, saying no to everything will sometimes come back to haunt you. But pretending that every idea is a good idea, that every thing that other people do, that the way that everyone handles themselves, the way they live their lives, that every stranger is worth your time, is, again, completely idiotic. Society, politics, science, religion, and even sandwich preparation (by which I mean everything else), thrives on controversy. It all thrives on one asshole telling another asshole that he is an idiot. After battle, one idiot will prove victorious, and we have a whole new world view. But if every idiot just pretends to agree with every other idiot then the whole system gets thrown out of whack.