Mind benders
Kasia February 27th, 2007
This was a weird morning for news. I keep my car and bedroom radios tuned to news radio (traffic and weather together on the eights!), and I listen to it while I’m getting dressed and driving to work. It gets annoying after a while (especially since I know most of the commercials by heart), but it’s what I do.
This morning was a really strange one. First, apparently a British couple might lose custody of their eight-year-old because he’s “dangerously overweight.”
Now, I don’t know this couple, I don’t know their kid, and I don’t know the situation. He might be a real-life Eric Cartman, being fed on chocolate-chicken-pot-pie and being told “You’re not fat; you’re big boned.” On the other hand, he might have a glandular disorder or some other underlying medical problem. I like to think that the British government wouldn’t be moronic enough to take the kid away from his parents if there wasn’t compelling evidence of gross neglect, but I’m sorry to say I’m just not that confident. But for the sake of argument, let’s say he has no underlying medical issue. Should teaching your kid bad eating habits – or allowing him/her to have bad eating habits - really be grounds for losing custody? If so, half the parents in America (the fattest nation in the developed world, thanks very much) should lose custody.
Second, I heard a report on a sociological study that has found that current college kids are the biggest narcissists ever. Remember all that emphasis on making sure your kid had good self-esteem? Apparently we took it too far (as we usually do). The funniest part was that one of the station’s reporters went down to my fair campus, my employer and alma mater, and interviewed a couple of students to get their reactions. The student who disagreed with the finding didn’t disagree with the premise that college students are narcissistic. His beef with the findings was that he doesn’t think his generation is any more narcissistic than those who came before. But isn’t it a classic sign of narcissism, to assume that everyone else is like you?
The baby boomers were narcissistic, but at least their narcissism was veiled in altruism. “We can change the world and make it better!” They were wrong about what was fundamentally good, but at least you can make an argument that they had good intentions. Now we’re looking at out-and-out, unabashed “It’s all about MEEEEE!” -ism.
Now that I think of it, a girl in my French class had a tee shirt that said “Actually, it IS all about me.” She also had one that said “Stupidity isn’t a crime…so you’re free to go.”
Finally, and those of you who haven’t known me as TBS has won’t appreciate this as she will, but I had a moment where I missed Ari Fleischer.
Ari Fleischer, for those of you who don’t know, was G.W. Bush’s first press secretary. I couldn’t stand him. He rubbed every nerve of mine the wrong way. However, much as I disliked Ari Fleischer, he was actually a very good press secretary. Maybe the press is just having fun with Tony Snow, but every time I hear him quoted on the air he sounds like a moderately articulate junior high schooler. Today it was something about “rounding up the bad guys.” Seriously. If you used that in a basic college speech class, depending on the teacher, you might be able to get away with it. But when you’re the public face of the President of the United States, when you speak for his administration, when you are basically the head of PR for the U.S. Government…can’t you think a little better on your feet? I still am not a fan of Ari Fleischer, but he was good at his job.
To be fair, it may well be that the press is intentionally airing some of Snow’s less brilliant moments, to make it look like he’s worse at his job than he really is. I don’t watch a lot of press conferences any more (no cable and no reception to speak of on network TV), so I don’t have a good sense of how he does at them by and large. It wouldn’t be the first time that the press messed with someone. So if that’s what’s going on, I apologize right now to Tony Snow for thinking he’s not up to snuff.
I live in a student-laden apartment complex. In the parking lot, I often pass by a little orange sports car with a bumper sticker: “As a matter of fact, I do own the road.”
Yeah, sweetie.
First re: narcissism: I remember a prof (I was a TA for one of his courses) REPEATEDLY saying “what we’re dealing with here is 700 cases of profound entitlement disorder.”
Re: the “stupidity is not a crime” t-shirt: I now have an opportunity to post my favourite “stupidity”-related quote (which I’m sure will be very much appreciated by the geeks in the audience) – “there is no patch for stupidity”
Re: Tony Snow – I think he’s just trying to express things exactly as GWB would.
Titlevariesslightly: yup, that about sums it up!
Canuck: you’re probably right about Tony Snow. At the very least, he’s able to get away with expressing things thus because GWB doesn’t see a problem with it. And your prof was dead on about the profound entitlement disorder. I wonder if we could get that listed in the DSM…right now the only way I know to diagnose it is “dancing on one side of the sociopathic line”…
That reminds me of a conversation I had with a psychologist I know. He does prison and parole psych exams, and an inmate tried to con him into recommending him for release by saying he had antisocial personality disorder, and that being in prison forced him to be too social. He said that by releasing him, they’d put him in a position where he could function again by avoiding people. Apparently he was banking on the shrink not remembering basic definitions, and/or being as ignorant of what “antisocial” means in that context as that guy was…