What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love, and Not Understanding?

Even these terms divide us, so we have to go deeper, if we dare—for the kids’ kids. Sketch by Bria of Antarctica

(7 minute read time—plus the two songs are worthy)

Okay…

To give credit where credit is due, and to tie this to Bug Stu, The coleoptera without a cause but not without a reason, here’s a newer video of Elvis Costello’s/Nick Lowe’s 1979 song. What a way to kick this off. A fun and conflicted song, to say the least. If you’re a long-time fan of Bug Stu (that sounds kinda funny, I know), your eyes might quake at the prominent “1914” shown after 53 seconds. Blinking might even become an unwanted impulse by micro-minutely obscurring the WWI theme as the graphics becomes clear, mixed with the Sixties-era simplistic slogan (is there another kind?) about making love not war, whatever that meant, or is. The Sixties were the beginning of the Fifty Year Fit we’re still in, but it was started, indirectly, by the earlier fit, fifty years before that.

And in listening to that song, my mind goes back to when our son Brandon was born (February 9th, 1985), when we lived in a minimalist little apartment in Morocco, Indiana, home of Where it All Began, according to Stu. Of course, Stu would be referring to the Stralfs landing there, but I’m only talking about my having returned from Nashville to do this, as in, do my on/off grown-up life.

So it is with these slightly weepy fingers that I type here while that song plays, reminding me of our little silver JVC jambox on the linoleum floor, doing its best to blare out Elvis Costello from one side of the cassette tape and Talking Heads from the other, over and over again. Minimalist, like I said. Were those the days? Young Tim and Jeanne and little Brandon and knowing exactly what we were supposed to be doing, because we had a new baby, and we were parents, and so on. Anyway, that song says a lot about The Pie, with and without those particular days from the days.

Yes. Anyway…

Fans of Bug Stu will probably remember that 1914 was the beginning of the Stralfs’ Hundred Year Plan, intended to result in our voluntary emigration to their (secretly crappy) planet, and they would replace us here. Only Stu and a few others know how I feel irrationally connected that Great War, which the U.S. entered in 1917.

The source of the irrational connection is that almost thirty years after the sweet and existentially secure jambox-on-the-floor days above, I had become involved in architectural restoration and preservation, for slightly different reasons than most people maybe. That’s too much to go into deeply, but it did result in my being invited to look over the wonderful Old Soldiers Home in Marion, Indiana, just before it was demolished. It had been a national treasure at one time, a tourist attraction even, built for Civil War veterans around 1890.

My crashed hard drive is clinging to the pictures I’d like to show you, sigh. Maybe someday. I’m confident they were the last pictures taken inside of that magnificent place. Due to the scale and nature of WWI battles, it had been transitioned from the original 300-acre self-sufficient collection of workshops, orchards, farm fields, dormitories, and beautiful large dining halls to a sprawling hospital and psychiatric center for the returning veterans. Maybe you had to be there, at the Old Soldiers Home, even if it was almost 100 years after the war. You could feel the pain and the slide from honor to tragedy to erasure on the personal, institutional, and architectural levels.

WWI meant the intended honor and bittersweet charm disappeared from the 1890 complex. Over time, even the most spectacular and ornate windows were covered with heavy woven wire. Somewhere I still have an old 4’ x 8’ chain link panel as was used for covering the hundreds of huge windows. Somewhere I have a picture of about 20 names scrawled on a wall, under something like, “We were the last people living in Building XXX,” probably written there twenty years before I visited.

A Twist Here

U.S. involvement in that war wasn’t necessarily a given, not to say whether we should or should not have been involved. There’s something bigger here though. So this, The Pie, is about a lot of things, including how a lack of caring, or confidence, or attention, about our minds, results in our misunderstanding our influences even today, or especially today, and those influences are how we understand ourselves, which is kinda meta in more ways than one. It doesn’t even have to rise to the level of spiritual.

But meta matters, especially for our kids and theirs, when that’s the biggest influence on the understandings we pass along, which is the biggest influence on whether they live well and happily or not. Our eyes need to be wide open so that they have a better start than we did on understanding ourselves —how things work on us and in us. (It’s not creepy, and it’s not creepy to care about this.)

The push for U.S. involvement in WWI was the first sophisticated use of crowd manipulation through Freudian insights. Sure, influencing crowds is nothing new, and it wasn’t back then either. But like a lot of things that are “nothing new”, it doesn’t mean scale, effectiveness, and impact aren’t. Sometimes we get so much better at things that they’re essentially new factors in society. Was the automobile really new?

We had wheels, gears, and engines of one sort or another, powered locomotion, long before we had cars. The arrangement and scale were different. And influential communication, commercialization, and manipulation weren’t new in the 1910’s, but the arrangement and scale was becoming different. The same sorts of manipulative techniques developed would soon be used to change minds on all sorts of subjects, for better and worse, built on an illusion of individual autonomy, built on the illusion that control would be obvious and complete, when it’s more about suggestibility and social psychology.

The techniques, based on Freud, came from reflecting on past crowd responses and developing more accurate mental models of our motivations. The better we’ve become in understanding both accuracy and models means the better we’ve been able to sell others products, experiences, and ideas, and emotions. Once we got on this path, we never looked back. We should have looked back. Our legacy could still be one of having looked back, even if with the qualifier of “Finally.”

A Twist There

Looking back, especially these days, can be an either defensive or offensive endeavor. It can be construed to be challenging or at least qualifying Right/Left-approved narratives. Looking back and not finding a villain or two, either in the physical or philosophical senses, would imply that a new script is needed, so to speak in our societal conversations. It would also attract a range of scholarly commentators, mostly disagreeing but magically still conveying the impression that they actually know.

So, I’m taking my friend Stu’s advice: When in doubt, call a Stralf out. Stralfs serve as a metaphorical villain, and we’ve shown that we’ll take what we can get, so that should be okay. And actually, due to the complexities, nuance, and aforementioned disagreement by scholars, maybe this is a reasonably accurate way to look at us humans and recent history, at least. Are we getting the complete story from somewhere now? Well, this might have better chance of being a complete story, right?

Oh, And…Bugs Like Music

At least according to Stu. So today, here at this first entry in this blog, on the first of February, in an effort that I think might go better than the first time I tried this, which was the first year of the Pandie, we’re referring to two special ridiculously relevant songs, Stu and I. First was the Elvis Costello/Nick Lowe song up there at the beginning (lyrics shown at that link), that you probably want to hear again. Could a song about the absence of peace, love, and understanding be any peppier? That’s how E.C. often rolled, as the kids used to say.

The second song, for which you probably saw a hint in the header, by another great songwriter you’ll see here often, is Caring Is Creepy, by The Shins (lyrics shown). Of course, caring is not creepy, neither is preparing to go a little meta and metacognitive and repairing the legacy we’ve inherited before we pass it on, which is for the kids and grandkids. (In this Age of Narcissistic Narratives, it might be necessary to remind ourselves that our legacy is not for us, but for them, never mind the Boomer b.s. We’ll be dust, right?)

This does all get complicated at times, and kind of out there. Simple answers might exist, but not simple and complete answers. So this can get kind of expansive. It’s also about caring in various meanings of that word, so it can be strangely cozy at the same time even though there’s reach. As I’ve mentioned before, the expression cozily expansive was created for this very thing. Maybe it was from Bug Stu. It takes a certain amount of security at times, as some iconic ideas often start looking a little different when sharing the right kind of dim light. So that’s what we’ll try to do.

Thanks for reading.

Tim