“The truest characters of ignorance are vanity, and pride and arrogance.”
~ Samuel Butler
Divinipotent Daily has noticed a peculiar trend lately — drivers who pull up to red lights, stop briefly and then proceed on through. This is happening in broad daylight in New York City, not in the middle of the badlands of South Dakota. A growing number of people apparently consider themselves exempt from the traffic rules the rest of us must follow.
This brought to mind another trend. Here in the home of Wall Street, when the global economy first hit the skids it was common to see expensive European cars hurtling down the Long Island Expressway at breathtaking speeds, weaving in and out of traffic with inches to spare. Divinipotent Daily wondered whether the financial sector's mass despair had soaked itself in rage and gone for a spin, turning investment bankers into four-wheeled missiles.
"Stupidity combined with arrogance and a huge ego will get you a long way."
~ Chris Lowe
A rash of local highway tragedies suggest something even more pernicious than rage may be to blame. In the past few weeks, in two unrelated incidents, booze-sodden off-duty police offers have mowed down and killed unsuspecting pedestrians. (We have laws that penalize bartenders for serving alcohol to already drunk people, but it is easy to see how a barkeep might be intimidated by a drunk with a badge and a loaded weapon.)
But that's not the worst of it. Last July, drunken mother Diane Schuler got behind the wheel of a minivan filled with children and drove the wrong way down the Taconic Parkway, killing eight people. Just last month, another mother went for a drunken drive with seven young girls onboard and flipped the car, killing one child and sending the others to the hospital; survivors reported that she taunted the children about the odds of having an accident just before the crash.
"He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow."
~ George Eliot
Last month, at his New Yorker Festival talk, Malcolm Gladwell discussed drunkeness. He said the common belief that alcohol lowers inhibitions is incorrect. Instead, studies show that excessive drinking makes people focus on what is immediate and close at hand and, as a result, lose sight of longer range consequences.
With or without alcohol, the drivers described above seem focused on one thing only: their right to do whatever they choose. Divinipotent Daily wonders if they might be connected by some shared psychological dysfunction. Is it possible that road rage has mutated into road arrogance, and we are now sharing our highways and neighborhood streets with imperious, self-important egoists who consider themselves immune not only to human laws but the laws of physics as well? Perhaps someone will launch a study. However, the concurrent increase in the popularity of toxic sociopath Ayn Rand does make one wonder.
"As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves."
~ Daniel J. Boorstin
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Divinipotent About Cliché Day
“At the beginning there was the Word — at the end just the cliché.”
~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Divinipotent Daily is pleased as Punch, which is to say she is as pleased as a psychopathic killer puppet. And who could be more pleased than that?
The reason for this clam-like happiness: the Internet holiday authorities point out it's not only Election Day in the U.S. — it's Cliché Day! (Interesting coincidence, that.) To give this occasion its due, Divinipotent Daily plans to wake up, smell the coffee and go out and have more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Since monkeys in a barrel surely have less fun than, say, monkeys swinging through the trees, this goal is within reach. Hooray!
“Our writers are full of clichés just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliché undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.”
~ Wolcott Gibbs
Some people — we're talking about you, Wolcott Gibbs — have chips on their shoulders about clichés. Divinipotent Daily believes that sort of elitist attitude just won't cut the mustard — and since mustard cuts like butter when the butter has been left out in a warm place for an hour or two, that should be considered quite an indictment.
Some years ago Divinipotent Daily's favorite editor, let's call her Prudence, told her a story about seeing a Broadway production of a Shakespeare classic with a middle-aged man who had lost his mind and his young trophy wife ("The TW"). The play was The TW's first brush with the Bard, and when it ended, everyone asked her what she thought. Her response: "The acting was good, but there were way too many clichés." Prudence wanted to read The TW the riot act, but ultimately decided that silence was golden. But we digress.
The great English author Evelyn Waugh maintained that "to be oversensitive about clichés is like being oversensitive about table manners." Most people in today's United States have never even seen table manners outside of an old movie where people with butlers hold formal dinners, or perhaps this educational film from the 1950s. Doesn't the taboo about clichés deserve equal treatment?
"Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague."
~ William Safire
The late Mr. Safire was barking up the wrong tree. Clichés save time — and as an arch conservative such as William Safire must have known, time is money! Anyone who eschews clichés misses out on a whole kit and kaboodle of handy phrases that alleviate the burdensome task of figuring out how to say what one actually means. No less an authority than Matthew Vaughn, the husband of former supermodel Claudia Schiffer and producer of films this writer almost certainly will never see, goes farther, maintaining:
As Divinipotent Daily was writing this her friend and fellow writer Mary Ghiorsi, a cliché savant, pointed out that the phrase "Just because it's a cliché doesn't mean it isn't true" has become a cliché itself, and then added, "that is so meta." Yes, it certainly is.
Interestingly, yesterday (November 2nd) was the date the world celebrates Plan Your Epitaph Day. Guess what Divinipotent Daily chose:
Last but not least — many thanks to the wonderful Web site known as The Phrase Finder, without which this post would be little more than a twinkle in Divinipotent Daily's eye.
~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Divinipotent Daily is pleased as Punch, which is to say she is as pleased as a psychopathic killer puppet. And who could be more pleased than that?
The reason for this clam-like happiness: the Internet holiday authorities point out it's not only Election Day in the U.S. — it's Cliché Day! (Interesting coincidence, that.) To give this occasion its due, Divinipotent Daily plans to wake up, smell the coffee and go out and have more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Since monkeys in a barrel surely have less fun than, say, monkeys swinging through the trees, this goal is within reach. Hooray!
“Our writers are full of clichés just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliché undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.”
~ Wolcott Gibbs
Some people — we're talking about you, Wolcott Gibbs — have chips on their shoulders about clichés. Divinipotent Daily believes that sort of elitist attitude just won't cut the mustard — and since mustard cuts like butter when the butter has been left out in a warm place for an hour or two, that should be considered quite an indictment.
Some years ago Divinipotent Daily's favorite editor, let's call her Prudence, told her a story about seeing a Broadway production of a Shakespeare classic with a middle-aged man who had lost his mind and his young trophy wife ("The TW"). The play was The TW's first brush with the Bard, and when it ended, everyone asked her what she thought. Her response: "The acting was good, but there were way too many clichés." Prudence wanted to read The TW the riot act, but ultimately decided that silence was golden. But we digress.
The great English author Evelyn Waugh maintained that "to be oversensitive about clichés is like being oversensitive about table manners." Most people in today's United States have never even seen table manners outside of an old movie where people with butlers hold formal dinners, or perhaps this educational film from the 1950s. Doesn't the taboo about clichés deserve equal treatment?
"Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague."
~ William Safire
The late Mr. Safire was barking up the wrong tree. Clichés save time — and as an arch conservative such as William Safire must have known, time is money! Anyone who eschews clichés misses out on a whole kit and kaboodle of handy phrases that alleviate the burdensome task of figuring out how to say what one actually means. No less an authority than Matthew Vaughn, the husband of former supermodel Claudia Schiffer and producer of films this writer almost certainly will never see, goes farther, maintaining:
"You need clichés. Clichés are what people respond to."
As Divinipotent Daily was writing this her friend and fellow writer Mary Ghiorsi, a cliché savant, pointed out that the phrase "Just because it's a cliché doesn't mean it isn't true" has become a cliché itself, and then added, "that is so meta." Yes, it certainly is.
Interestingly, yesterday (November 2nd) was the date the world celebrates Plan Your Epitaph Day. Guess what Divinipotent Daily chose:
Last but not least — many thanks to the wonderful Web site known as The Phrase Finder, without which this post would be little more than a twinkle in Divinipotent Daily's eye.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Divinipotent About Hospitals
“A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.”
~ Groucho Marx
A sad fact of life: As you grow older your friends and relatives grow older, too. As a result, even if you are healthy, you spend more and more time in hospitals. And the more time you spend there, the more you realize what strange places they are.
“One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is the assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.”
~ Jean Kerr
Hospitals house two simultaneous, conflicting realities. For patients and their loved ones, hospitals are places of crisis, with all the drama, heightened emotions and tunnel vision crises create. A normally kind and caring person may be a little less so in a hospital. A demanding, selfish or controlling person will be a nightmare. Meanwhile, to doctors and nurses and other trained staff, hospitals are like NASA on launch day: professionals are calmly going about the business of making life and death decisions.
"Hospitals, like airports and supermarkets, only pretend to be open nights and weekends."
~ Molly Haskell
A hospital at night is far eerier than any haunted house. The lights are dimmed and the soundtrack consists of muffled televisions, beeping and clicking machines, the moans of people in pain and the occasional clatter of carts and staff racing to an unlucky patient's room. And those are just the expected atmospherics. Some years ago, while staying overnight with a sick child in one of New York's best known hospitals, Divinipotent Daily was not at all pleased to see mice racing around the halls and across the countertops of the patient kitchen. This is when a hospital begins to resemble the frenetic and hilarious 1971 Paddy Chayefsky film, The Hospital, where a serial killer stalks the darkened corridors.
"A hospital is no place to be sick."
~ Samuel Goldwyn
Some hospitals are so understaffed, so filled with stressed out, angry people, that you fear to leave your loved one there. The worst of the worst in this visitor's experience was the geriatric unit of a major suburban hospital. Located out of the sight of the main hospital, the geriatric building was a warehouse for the elderly and helpless that might have been modeled on an inner ring of hell. Room after room contained patients who were totally unable to care for themselves. Many had dementia, most were incontinent, all were severely ill. And yet the hospital had allocated only one nurse and one aid for an entire floor. It was no surprise when a month or two later the hospital lost its formerly glowing rating.
“I recently went to a new doctor and noticed he was located in something called the Professional Building. I felt better right away.”
~ George Carlin
Almost all hospitals are better than that, and some are are truly wonderful places where staff are not only intelligent and well-trained, they make you feel safe. New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan and St. Francis Hospital on Long Island are two where, in Divinipotent Daily's experience, people work hard to live up to the ideal described by W.H. Auden:
"A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own."
~ W. H. Auden
~ Groucho Marx
A sad fact of life: As you grow older your friends and relatives grow older, too. As a result, even if you are healthy, you spend more and more time in hospitals. And the more time you spend there, the more you realize what strange places they are.
“One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is the assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.”
~ Jean Kerr
Hospitals house two simultaneous, conflicting realities. For patients and their loved ones, hospitals are places of crisis, with all the drama, heightened emotions and tunnel vision crises create. A normally kind and caring person may be a little less so in a hospital. A demanding, selfish or controlling person will be a nightmare. Meanwhile, to doctors and nurses and other trained staff, hospitals are like NASA on launch day: professionals are calmly going about the business of making life and death decisions.
"Hospitals, like airports and supermarkets, only pretend to be open nights and weekends."
~ Molly Haskell
A hospital at night is far eerier than any haunted house. The lights are dimmed and the soundtrack consists of muffled televisions, beeping and clicking machines, the moans of people in pain and the occasional clatter of carts and staff racing to an unlucky patient's room. And those are just the expected atmospherics. Some years ago, while staying overnight with a sick child in one of New York's best known hospitals, Divinipotent Daily was not at all pleased to see mice racing around the halls and across the countertops of the patient kitchen. This is when a hospital begins to resemble the frenetic and hilarious 1971 Paddy Chayefsky film, The Hospital, where a serial killer stalks the darkened corridors.
"A hospital is no place to be sick."
~ Samuel Goldwyn
Some hospitals are so understaffed, so filled with stressed out, angry people, that you fear to leave your loved one there. The worst of the worst in this visitor's experience was the geriatric unit of a major suburban hospital. Located out of the sight of the main hospital, the geriatric building was a warehouse for the elderly and helpless that might have been modeled on an inner ring of hell. Room after room contained patients who were totally unable to care for themselves. Many had dementia, most were incontinent, all were severely ill. And yet the hospital had allocated only one nurse and one aid for an entire floor. It was no surprise when a month or two later the hospital lost its formerly glowing rating.
“I recently went to a new doctor and noticed he was located in something called the Professional Building. I felt better right away.”
~ George Carlin
Almost all hospitals are better than that, and some are are truly wonderful places where staff are not only intelligent and well-trained, they make you feel safe. New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan and St. Francis Hospital on Long Island are two where, in Divinipotent Daily's experience, people work hard to live up to the ideal described by W.H. Auden:
"A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own."
~ W. H. Auden
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