Wreckage from a previous blog, recovered

Once upon a time, I had a Xanga blog. Why, I'm not sure. Today I went back and decided to delete it, but I wanted to keep a few of the posts, even though they are long out of date. So I'm posting some here. Likely, since the site was just about inaccessible, nobody has ever read them. Although the same is likely true here, of course. I will store the movie reviews somewhere, since they're from 2005 or so, and drop some of the more general observations here. Like this one:

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Pretty much everybody thinks life sucks, at least in that internal non-objective part of themselves that keeps looking at the best imagined possibility. Everyone. Hugh Hefner may be the lone exception, but he probably has his bitter moments, too.

Most people, looking through the prism of selective memory and (at least in the United States) a limited grasp of history—not to mention Hollywood—instinctively feel that things used to be better. In short, That Things Have Gone To Hell In A Handbasket. Even starving African subsistence farmers fondly remember better days and feel disgust at the way THGTHIAH, even though thirty years ago, their families were still starving.

And it has always been this way, apparently. The impression that Life Sucks and THGTHIAH are universal. On these two principles are all religions based. Nobody is going to beg some priest for guidance on how to make the Gods happy if he wasn’t under the impression that they were pissed off. And nobody would pass ancient texts down through the generations if they didn’t think those ancients had things worked out but that somehow, their wisdom had been lost.

Of course, the Gods never quite get happy and the ancients’ wisdom is right there with every generation. Every generation starts out knowing their elders are timid idiots and ending up whining about those disrespectful young whippersnappers. Whatever music you choose to rebel to, baby, you’ll find your grandchildrens’ music intolerable, and they will find yours quaint and boring even if you rattle the nursing home with gangsta rap and death metal. Keep in mind, friends, that those old folk tunes like “Daisy, Daisy” or “Camptown Ladies” were the lascivious pop tunes and decadent indie music of a hundred years ago and no decent person would be caught dead perusing their sheet music.

But I digress.

Christians today—and for the last couple of centuries since freedom of religion brought fanaticism out of the closet—have absolute rock-solid hardons for the idea that everything was perfect at some unspecified point in the past before evolution or the enlightenment or what have you. At the same time, they are (and have been for generations) dead certain that the End Times will come in their lifetimes. (After all, it says so in Revelations.) The Signs Are All There. The world has become an Evil Place and so the Messiah will come again to save them. Hey, he’s got to, right? (This also has the side effect of eliminating the necessity of their personal deaths in favor of Rapture, but that’s a subject for another time.)

Whenever religious folk think things just can’t get any worse, along comes another Messiah. Hey, they were so thick in the Middle East under the Romans they could have formed leagues. After all, how could things have gotten worse?

Jews, at least, seem to have gotten over their messiah issues, having had it made clear to them just how bad it could be on a repeated basis through the centuries. They may have one prophesied, but they aren’t setting another place for dinner and when he shows up, he can expect to have a lot of explaining to do.

Everyone thinks THGTHIAH and everyone always has. And they’ve usually been wrong.

Strictly speaking, for most of history, things tended to stay about the same, with periods of extreme suckiness—say, the bubonic plague which killed a third of the world—alternating with periods when things were rather better—such as after the bubonic plague, when two thirds of the world found themselves not only alive, but to have inherited money from the dead third. Ninety-plus percent of everyone was a farmer living on the edge of starvation and paying their lords to refrain from killing them and their priests to reassure them (and also to refrain from killing them).

Funny how every time somebody has a past life regression, they’re somebody important. What are the odds? I don't ever seem to hear about anyones' past lives having been a succession of peasant farmers dying of overwork and malnutrition.

Then, a funny thing happened a couple of centuries ago. Some guys started thinking about how things worked and how to actually figure this out. Eventually, it was called science and it was the first kind of magic humans had ever come up with that actually managed to work consistently. After that, things really did start to change.

It wasn’t all good. Literacy was nice and all, but money was the big draw. And so came the Industrial Revolution. With it, average people could, for the first time, own more clothes than they could wear. They could stop living their lives staring at the wrong end of an ox and have some sap actually pay them money—which mostly they had only heard of—just to sit in a mill for 72 hours a week and make cloth. Or glass. Or other things. This was one Hell of a lot better than farming from dusk to dawn, day after day, every day, forever.

The world’s food supply increased as medicine began to beat down the diseases that killed off people in job lots and farmers could feel secure enough to farm in new ways. With food, even more people managed to live to adulthood. The population of the world exploded. (For example, the population of Europe tripled in less than fifty years in the late 1800’s) The middle class emerged.

The cities became real cities, with hundreds of thousands instead of a few thousand. They got rapidly overcrowded. And polluted.

They were always overcrowded and polluted, of course, but they were bigger now…and the point was that a lot of people now had the interest and will and money and education to do something about it. So conditions improved.

Absolute monarchy proved bad for business, and so republics emerged. Business needed workers who could read so education became compulsory and universal. Educated people did more science and science made more progress. That’s what they called it, too: Progress. It was a universal good—except to those it harmed…those who had it good the old way.

People being people, they embraced science as the going thing. Technology was as popular as the Rolling Stones. And, people being people, they determined that the highest possible pinnacle of science involved designing things to kill other people.

Which they did. Enthusiastically as ever, but with differences. Now, they had absolutely huge numbers of disposable young men and an efficient means to slaughter them. And from the orgies of destruction in the first half of the 20th century, science emerged victorious and scared the hell out of everyone.

But science had been doing peace also.

There is virtually nothing in your current home that would have existed in a home three hundred years ago. Even the brooms are more efficient.

Air conditioning, for instance, turned Florida from a sparsely populated hell hole into a vacation wonderland. Refrigeration and internal combustion also made it possible for you to eat something other than what you can grow within twenty miles. Your modern house or apartment is made of materials quite different from the old places—even the wood is treated. You have carpets, which used to be impossibly expensive, not to mention curtains, towels, and a closet full of clothing and shoes: leather, silks, gold jewelry, a personal coach…such riches that a medieval king would have gone to war over.

You bathe (possibly) every day inside your own house next to a mass of porcelain that would have brought its weight in gold in the 1500’s—and which you use as an indoor outhouse. You probably don’t stink most of the time and only wear scents to smell even better rather than to cover up the odor. If you wear makeup, you take it off every day rather than just adding a new coat.

You do not know anyone who has had smallpox, let alone died from it, and you wouldn’t know what the scars look like from surviving it if you saw them. You do not fear The Plague. The Plague meant, for centuries, any of a dozen infectious diseases which brought fever, death, and disfigurement to the world. You wouldn’t run away if someone came down with the flu next door. At least, you wouldn’t nail up the doors and burn the house down.

Speaking of which, if your house catches fire, someone will come and help you and they won’t have to be bribed to do it, nor will they offer to buy your house before going to work. If they did, other people you don’t have to bribe can be called to arrest them, or still other people—who do have to be bribed—may be hired to sue them.

You do not likely know anyone who could murder you with impunity because they are above the law. No lord with high justice and low comes by to take half of your goods and inspect your daughters or breaks them in before their marriage. Nor are you expected to be grateful for such things.

You’ve probably not seen any or many dead bodies. In the 18th century, bodies were the sort of thing you just stepped over or sold to physicians. Unless they died of cholera, of course, which you’ve probably barely heard of anyway and wouldn’t recognize if you saw it. It was a common, messy and humiliating way to die that can be prevented by chlorinating water.

You probably have most of your teeth and have a Count’s ransom imbedded in your mouth where they’ve been fixed with silver and gold. You had this done with minimal pain, shock and blood loss rather than have a barber remove infected teeth with pliers.

While there are places you might not care to go in the city, you can largely live without fear of bandits. You have at least a nominal voice in government which is provided by law rather than the circumstances of your birth.

You have access to people, places and things so far away as to have been unknown even two centuries ago. There really isn’t any place on the planet you couldn’t go with a passport and a credit card. The reason accents and languages developed in the first place was that people were isolated in small groups and couldn’t keep their language from changing subtly over time. Now the old languages are dying out save for only a few major ones and a few stubborn remnants whose speakers must also learn one of the majors. Because we can communicate now.

I’ve already gone on way too long, but in the end it is this: The world has been getting better for a long time despite little inconveniences. We live in what, for most of history, would be considered a paradise. Even people who still live the old way benefit from this. That Ethiopian farmer may not starve because grain from Kansas gets flown into his village. That would simply never have happened in the old times.

The world is not going to hell in a handbasket. The messiah is not on his way. He hasn’t even checked Travelocity for his bus tickets yet. The world is not falling apart in moral decay. The End is not at hand.

No matter how things are for you just now, Things Are Great. If you have the luxury of being bored, remember that you could just as easily have spent your life as a peasant farmer staring at the wrong end of an ox for all your days, watching most of your twelve children die in your log hut, worrying about the rain and considered an old man at forty or a hag at the same age. If you not only can read, but own books, man, you ARE practically Einstein to that farmer.

Steve “Living in the Present and glad for it” James

(With minor editing by the contemporary Me.)