Think About The Way XII

By Doctor Gonzo 

31 May 2000

Minneapolis — Too much time on my hands. Normally, school would still be in session now, and I would not be able to waste my time on this atavistic endeavor. I would be in the final stretch, finishing papers and reading what should have been read weeks ago. Yes, it is true that very little actual studying would be taking place, but at least I would give that illusion. I would certainly not have any time to fuck with this computer, trying to figure out how to work the damn thing without a mouse. I have spent half an hour on that futile mission, and all I have succeeded in doing is crashing programs. Microsoft apparently doesn't care to indulge those of us who, sometimes out of necessity, don't have a rodent handy.

It will be replaced tomorrow, for I have very little to do otherwise. There are two reasons that I am not fucking around with the College Experience right now. The first is that the change to semesters has resulted in a schedule that ends a month earlier, in the middle of May. But the more important reason is that I am done with that trip once and for all. No more puttering around with other undergrads, trying to get the good grades that may or may not lead to success in the future. I don't even have to pretend any more. And while post-graduate work may be in my future (and how am I to know?), it will not be for a while. I'm out of Sing Sing for the time being.

I have none of the extra bonuses added on to my piece of paper. No ass-kissing distinction for graduating with a 4.0, no cum laudes of any sort. Perhaps I graduated with honors or something like that, but I certainly don't keep track. I started my college career fully of dewy-eyed idealism, but during the last two years I resigned myself to the reality that it was all jumping through hoops anyway, so I may as well elect not to set those hoops on fire and make it harder on myself. Some people may say that they are in college for the educational aspects when all they want is an insurance policy against poverty; I am the other way around. I admit it.

So now, on this warm May night, I do nothing but listen to Led Zeppelin. I feel that I do not have to explain this, for I have done so quite adequately in the past. It works well for tonight, one of the first nights that actually smells of summer. The sodium vapour lights mix with the occasional headlights on the street below. An odour of day-old rain mixed with flowers past their prime fills the air. It is the perfect night for sitting on a rock on the shores of the Mississippi, or playing on a swing set until midnight. Talking, staring at the sky looking for Elvis, thinking, or just sailing higher and higher, trying to get a gut-level feeling of what it is like to be an eagle.

But for now I am stuck inside, listening to the Rain Song. It will do for now, until I can find a place where the above-mentioned activities can take place . . . but I do not wish to travel down that path at this time. Gradumatating from college leads to other kinds of introspection, the most important being why the hell was this so easy?

Sure, I may have graduated with a 3.75 GPA, but if you took out the two Fs I got due to insane professors (and my refusal to withdraw from those courses) I could have easily graduated with some high honor. This is everybody's goal, of course. Am I included? That is hard to say; I see grades as secondary to the whole process, or at least I think that way when I am in an idealistic mood. When I am not in such a mood, I just see grades as a means for incompetent instructors to give the illusion that they are teaching. The only time really cared about my grades was this past semester, and only so far as passing was concerned. I didn't want to stay here any more time than was necessary, and so I was relieved when I got my grades and saw that they were all above Cs.

The reason I see grades as secondary is because I learned long ago that they do not reflect effort. No reflection at all. I will come right out and say that I didn't try at all to get As in my class. I did not study, I did not worry, I never broke a sweat. And furthermore, I feel no guilt i this. I know that people have to work hard to get good grades, just as I "know" that there are 6,000 languages spoken in the world. Both facts have about the same impact on me. I do feel some disgust at this fact, but then again, what can I do?

Every consecutive year, in my eyes, I dropped the bar a little more. With every passing semester, I did less and less, but that was never reflected in any objective measure. In some classes I was tempted to aggressively go far below my standards just to see what would happen. I never did, because I can't really go that low; it's no more my personality than drinking eight Budweisers and drag-racing up and down the freeway would be. I have to do what I consider the minimum, but as far as the University is concerned my minimum is their maximum.

Remember the Laffer curve? People sure liked to talk about it when Regeanomics was all the rage. It says that at some point, if you increase tax rates, you will get less money because people will consciously depress their salaries in order to pay less taxes. It was the reasoning behind those tax cuts, and of course it was pure bullshit. It may well exist, but not for tax rates around 30%. Those idiot Republicans . . . but that's not the point, as fun as it is to bash right-wing morons. This curve does exist; film is a good example. Normally, as light increases on photographic film silver density also increases, in a nice linear fashion. However, if you seriously overexpose film, you eventually reach a point on the response curve where the reverse is true. It's called solarization (the true kind, not the Man Ray version that is really called the Sabattier effect). It's the Laffer curve for film development

What the hell does this have to do with anything? Well, it appears that this effect occurs with effort. More effort on my part is not leading to any increase in anything. There is no response. Complacency is the result, a complacency that is not welcome. It's a bit like being a deranged President who is running for re-election, say in the year 1972. When you can blow thirty points off your lead and still win, you tend to ignore more wholesome activities and spend your time showing contempt for the system. When you put a lot of effort into something and it makes no noticeable impact, are you going to put your effort into it? Or are you going to launder money through Mexico? History has shown which one is more apt to happen.

It seems that the system is no longer rewarding effort, and not just at a University. The NASDAQ didn't rocket up 87% in a year because all tech companies were doing that well. Instead of rewarding sound business plans and punishing companies that were nothing more than fluff with a web site, investors threw money everywhere. It could only last so long before the bubble burst, and burst it did. It's not even the first time that it has happened; the Asian financial crisis was basically the same thing. People threw money in that direction willy nilly, and when some bankers took a look around and decided that there was something wrong with office space costing more in Kuala Lumpur than in London, all that speculative money vanished. People didn't reward quality investments over there, they invested money without looking. Companies would get money rammed up their asses regardless of their health. In that situation, is it any wonder that people choose non-effort?

Effort seems to be a scarce quality. It was probably the only thing holding this society together, given the fact that most people are not terribly bright. In a society that rewarded effort, people had a great incentive to not stray from the path. Now, everybody's balloons are rising faster than some people can handle, and the result is a general lack of effort. Stock crashes may sober people up a bit, but they will not have much of an impact on things like workplace discipline. Many people, seeing the record low unemployment, believe that they no longer have to show any effort in their jobs. After all, with everybody so short-staffed, how can they be fired? Effort is not being rewarded; anybody can walk into a place a get hired on the spot. The incentive is gone, quality suffers, and people erroneously equate job security and goofing off.

These problems have always existed. There have always been snake-oil salesmen; there have always been that group of people who thinks that it is okay to go to work so twisted on Quaaludes that they can hardly speak. A lot of people do a lot of stupid things, things I and other sane people would never consider doing. These groups of people have existed for thousands of years, and many a lifetime has been spent trying to come up with some sort of solution. So far, it has not been done, and I doubt it can. I certainly can't do it; if I had the ability to keep people from acting like idiots I could solve all of the world's problems. If I could keep people from screwing around at work, if I could stop people from dating guys they met on the Internet, I could swiftly end all wars, keep disease from spreading, and get people out of poverty. But I can't.

Then what do we do? Some people look at the idiotic adventures and decide they want to have some fun too. Some people advocate drowning the fools in the ocean, or at least herding them up and sending them to Bavaria. Others just want to be left alone, as far from the idiots as possible. A few think that these people got the short end of the brain-stick because of social structures, multi-national corporations, or ridiculous conceptions of nationalism, and if you would only take them out of the repressive structure they would magically start doing The Right Thing. The elites throughout history have usually had one of these approaches (and I call myself an elite, if for no other reason than I feel like it). Wars have been started because of these ideas, but nothing ever gets done. There are frats that are full of people who think it is awesome to screw every girl in their partner sorority in a single weekend, just as there were marauding gangs of Vikings that raped and pillaged. At least in defense of the Vikings, they spread language, conquered the oceans and discovered new territories. The brothers in Pi Kappa Alpha just do terminal experiments on construction equipment.

What do we do with these people? I got used to taking the pragmatic approach, but is that right? Now more and more I feel like insulating myself, and no longer do I put any faith in the argument that people shoot others, steal things, and do smack because of the inherent nature of a capitalist society. No matter where or when you live you are going to have these people. The thing that makes it worse is when you give you incentive to play by the rules; when you no longer reward effort, it's over. When you give a kid an A because he tries really hard but still fails, the kid who gets an A because her work is spectacular will no longer feel like differentiating herself from the mediocre. When you pay a person eight dollars an hour to make personal phone calls and hit on passers-by, the other person who does his job perfectly but only receives the same eight bucks is no longer going to care. When one can be so ignorant as to not know what language is spoken in Great Britain but still pull down a six figure salary, those who pride themselves in taking an active interest in the world think not of using their knowledge to help people less fortunate, but instead think of wiping certain cities full of shallow people off the map.