MTheads

There Are No Idiots.

I've been chastised for calling Amy Winehouse an idiot.   I'm heartless.  I don't know her.  She had problems.  I'll admit she was pathetic in a forgivable way, mainly due to how much I've enjoyed her music.  And perhaps she wasn't properly succored by those around her.  Regardless, I wouldn't put her on any list of clever people in any category.

If she was not an idiot, what was she, I ask?  Depressed, addicted, and exploited.  I don't think the dead famous can be anything else.  Why do we excuse famous people for their actions?  Are they so different from the rest of us?  Apparently, yes.  According to a celebrity psychologist often on TV, studies suggest that people who seek fame are different from the rest of us and more likely to be the sorts of people who do dumb stuff.   A rather paradoxical statement.

So, in order to have a heart, I have to hold celebrities to lower standards than I hold cashiers, bus drivers, pilots, and pretty much everyone else.   Idiots are only people who annoy us and are not famous.  Your non-famous neighbor who drinks too much and leaves beer bottles all over the yard, he's an idiot.  No reason to cut him some slack because he has trouble saying no to yet another beer.  The plain jane who gets piercings and skips school to take drugs -- she's an idiot rather than a girl having trouble dealing with her banal middle-class existence.  The bitter woman at the counter who gives us a hassle at the end of a long line at the airport -- idiot.  We're certainly not going to consider she's been suffering from low grade depression since she was a teenager and forgive her her rudeness.  Nope, idiots all the way through.

I'd like to see the people who think I'm callous for calling Amy Winehouse an idiot apply their sanctimonious standards to all the annoying and idiotic non-famous people they come across.  Perhaps there are no idiots at all, only the misunderstood.  Instead of the finger, give that idiot who cuts you in line a hug next time.  He needs it.  He's just more fragile than the rest of us waiting our turns.

 

Burdock Root for the Soul

Long ago while stationed in Japan, I picked up a book in English on the macrobiotic diet by that Michio Kushi guy.  I was just starting to get an interest in using food to regulate my health and happiness - a warped path many of us take at some point - and the macrobiotic diet certainly had a point of view in those areas.  As a naive young woman looking to improve my diet, I read the book with a slight sense of awe that here was the perfect diet as proven by all these people who had managed to save themselves from death or obesity or failure by adopting the macrobiotic diet.  That's how I read books by experts when I was young.  I believed until proven otherwise or until time allowed me the chance to reflect on what an author had to tell me. 

After a sinking feeling that my years of eating tomatoes and potatoes (members of the nightshade family and thus considered by macrobiotic practitioners as toxic to humans) had doomed me to poor health, I started to notice a certain pattern throughout the book.  Foods and thinking which originated outside Japan, bad.  Foods and thinking which originated in Japan, good.  The same went for physical characteristics; freckles are a cultural and dietal aberration along with not being Japanese.  While one can't help not being Japanese, we can work on being more like the author by following his minute and exacting instructions on how to properly live and eat.

Thank God I'm a lazy person.  I could never have devoted myself to the rigours of following all the diet's dictums -- pages and pages on exactly what to eat, when, and how.  There were even instructions on how to properly shower and dry off!  To vigorously scrub off that non-Asian was the idea.  Yes, I did come to see the diet as faintly racist.

I'm intriqued by lifestyle diets which promise happiness and health if only the reader has the courage to follow the author's excruciatingly detailed plans.  Absolutism sells.  Just what leads so many of us to look for answers in such places?  Why do we crave giving up our own judgement in order to pursue some other person's definition of living correctly?  That is what that first peek into the world of controlling one's diet as a means to controlling one's destiny meant to me.  It's part of the answer to the riddle of  our nature as humans, particularly the nature of curious and intelligent humans, to seek solutions to our anxieties through a complete control of our digestive system.

Fuzzy Gollum

He was a cute kitten...