VAMP 1: What is your malfunction, man?!
SPIKE: It’s Halloween, you nit! We take the night off. Those are the rules.
VAMP 1: Me and mine don’t follow no stinkin’ rules! We’re rebels!
SPIKE: No. I’m a rebel. You’re an idiot. (dusts the vamp) Give the lot of us a bad name.
- “All the Way” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode), written by Steven S. DeKnight
I don’t really follow sports. If I did, I’d probably follow baseball. I enjoy a nice summer day at the park with some friends and a drink or two. Baseball has a nice, leisurely pace that lets you watch without just staring at the field in case you miss something. It’s relaxing. Whether my team wins or loses, I always come away feeling happier and lighter and more in touch with the world. (That may be the Smirnoff Ice talking, but I like to think it’s the game.)
And if I followed baseball, I’d be a Yankees fan. Why? Hard to argue with the best record in baseball. Sure, they can afford to pay big salaries to get the best players. Success breeds success. I’m cool with that. Plus my brother is a Dodgers fan, so that choice made itself a long time ago.
I could never be a Cubs fan. I’m not generally a fan of the underdog. I don’t have anything against underdogs per se – if they have a good cause, I can get behind them. I just don’t see the point of rooting for someone just because they’re losing or likely to do so. Maybe they don’t deserve to lose, but there they are losing anyway. Unless they’re your team, why get behind them if the odds are they’re going to let you down? Why fight the uphill battle for no better reason than the slope?
I don’t entirely get the appeal of the outlaw, either – that persistent anti-government, anti-authority streak that’s been a part of American culture since the beginning. (Am I the only one who finds it troubling that our Founders basically enshrined a right to revolution in our founding documents? It’s like adding “or if you get fat” to “until death do us part” at the altar. You’re in or you’re out.) If the government is “We the People”, then isn’t it kind of silly and counterproductive to be “anti-government”? You want us to co-operate less, be more divided, maybe demonstrate less compassion for our neighbors? Okay then. Enjoy your crazy pie with crappy sauce. It comes with a side of “you just got your ass kicked by the next biggest jerk on the pile”, by the way. Free of charge.
I think that these ideas are often linked to a certain level of nihilism and contempt for clarity. There’s a distinct strain of anti-intellectualism and willful ignorance in American culture that’s always troubled me, and I associate them with the love of the underdog and the rebel. It’s a stubborn desire to see things as simple, linear, and binary because that’s what you’ve learned to understand and feel comfortable with: right and wrong, white and black, them and us. It’s a lot easier to argue for term limits than it is to figure out who to vote for. Anecdotes are easy, analysis is hard.
I’ve run into too many people who think it’s smart to reject received wisdom wholesale, deny every asserted truth, and spit every sacred cow. I realize that we can’t take what we’re handed for granted – that those givens often come with strings attached, fine print at the bottom, and a distinct whiff of falsehood. But it makes no more sense to throw out the baby with the clean bathwater than it would with the dirty. Wisdom isn’t about reinventing the wheel. It’s about learning why the wheel is round, what a wheel does and doesn’t do, and whether the wheel is right for you.
I’m open to a “re-evaluation of all values”. But here Nietzsche and I part ways – he seems to take the rejection and replacement of Christian (and to our Western culture traditional) values as a given. Quite the provocateur and advocate, but perhaps not the ideal sage for this or any time. What’s needed is intelligent and critical affirmation, not wholesale rejection – “no” is the single least useful word in any language absent some accompanying affirmative. Not for nothing is Faust – the man who would affirm all life, embrace even the feared and the forbidden – tempted by “the spirit that ever denies“.
Taking a part a malfunctioning car is the easy part. To put it back into some kind of working order, you need more than a wrench and some leverage. You need to know how it works and what you want it to do. Until you get that, you’re better off leaving tune-ups to trained professionals.
