Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Happy isn't always easy

Here is the latest column as it is published in the Dodge City Daily Globe newspaper.


I used to think everyone’s goal in life was to be happy. I fully realized different people had different ideas of what would bring happiness. There were of course times someone would desire something which made absolutely no sense to me. For example, in high school a girl named "Joan" decided she would rather go to the prom with "John" instead of the more sensitive, more intelligent, and more handsome "Chris." (Some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent, but you know who you are. Don’t you, Mary? You remember stomping on the fragile male ego of a shy young man crushing his spirit like an aluminum can in one of those things which crushes aluminum cans so you can turn them in at the recycle center in order to do your part to help keep America clean and save energy. You remember, huh, don’t you?!? Sorry, I guess it is more of an open wound than I thought it was.)
As I grow older and spend more time with a greater variety of people my newest conclusion is there are a lot of people who are not only not happy but they do not seem to want to be happy. The things they say and do indicate there is some sort of perverse need to be unhappy. If you stop and think about it you probably know someone like that yourself. These are the people who see the glass half empty, but they also believe the drink in the glass is carcinogenic, laced with lima beans and has an aftertaste worse than diet soda.
I think part of what validates the negative thinking of so many people is the way people rate what is good and bad in the arts. I have named this the Oprah Disease. The reason I have given it that name is because of the daytime talk show host’s book club. When she first decided she was not only the person to decide what was trendy and important in relation to issues facing the women of today, but was also to be the bell cow for what was true literary greatness, she chose book after book with such depressing storylines it was hard to find a building high enough to jump off of after reading one. I mean really, just because the main character is an unwed teenage mother working in a coal mine whose son suffers from a rare skin disease requiring him to live his life wearing clown make-up doesn’t mean it is well written. It just means the author has mercilessly beaten the audience over the head with the pity stick causing them to put a strange value on the book.
To be fair it did not start with Ms. Winfrey. Look at the books we grew up reading. Old Yeller? The dog dies. Where the Red Fern Grows? Two dogs die. It makes you glad Dr. Seuss didn’t try to earn a few extra bucks writing for this demographic. One fish, two fish, dead fish, horribly mutated due to the accident at the nuclear plant fish. Or maybe the Woset is forced to come out of the closet and is persecuted for his alternative lifestyle. Or even worse…The Cat in the Hat is diagnosed with feline leukemia and leaves Thing 1 and Thing 2 alone and destitute in their box.
The movies are just as guilty. Look at the Oscar winners for Best Picture over the years. A comedy won when F.D.R. was president and not again until Nixon was in the Oval Office. Both are times in history when the world needed a good laugh. (Judging from the present state of affairs a comedy should be winning again quite soon.) The most recent winner stuck to the trend of depressing must be good. Crash featured an all star cast of very talented actors and an intelligent script, but was there a single likeable person to be found in the entire film? One of the most suc cessful movies of the recent past was Titanic. Everyone who bought a ticket walked into the theater knowing the boat was going to sink. The King of the World became fertilizer for a kelp bed, but that was not the worst of it. Not only was the romance doomed. Not only did Leo DiCaprio and hundreds of computer generated extras die. All these horrible things happened AND Celine Dion sang. What’s next? Hindenburg starring Matt Damon and Kate Hudson as doomed lovers traveling to New Jersey on the airship and the theme song, "Oh, The Humanity," is performed by, no, dare I even think it…Barry Manilow.

No comments: