Scrabble, Ozzy and Revolutionary Thought
Dave and Viviana came over last night for turkey tacos and Scrabble. Dave and Vivi are our neighbors to the east. Dave is a hometown boy of San Clemente and owns a custom cabinet and finish carpentry business here in town. Vivi works as a human resouces associate with Broadcom, a local giant in the electronics/computer industry. Vivi's home is Chile, mostly from the capitol during the years when her father had little work, then from the lake country near Temuco in the south of Chile. They recently purchased a plot of land in that area to set up Vivi's parents as well as to have a place to enjoy and possibly move to eventually. At some point this spring I will be heading down there to help build the house where the family will reside.
While playing Scrabble (I won with the intermediate score of 139) Dave asked the question, "what song from your childhood caused your first deep emotional reaction?"
This question caused me to really dig b/c music has always been a major cause of feeling in my life. I had to go way back, back to the days at Little Oak Elementary School in Slidell Louisiana. I was six years old, and had very little exposure to music other than the songs at sunday school at the local Mormon church. I was at a friends house, four doors down and well out of earshot of my parents. The song was "Crazy Train", the artist, Mr. Ozzy Osbourne. The emotion the song created was pure fear. I was convinced at that point that I was going to Hell. I waited in vain for the demons to come with gnashing teeth to grab me by the arms and drag me into the earth
to the burning core where I thought at the time Hell was.
After many recitations of songs from Air Supply, Debbie Gibson, the Bangles and Gordon Lightfoot. We decided that the question was an excellent one and worthy of repeat and publish to the blog. So comment away!
After all left and DM went to bed I stayed up to finish War of the Worlds which I had rented earlier in the day. I was further along than I thought, so I decided to look for another show at the conclusion. I stumbled upon some amazing scenery from the border area of Argentina and Chile. Turns out to be The Motocycle Diaries, a movie that Gene Sullivan commented on in Chill Stuff and Co. I decided to watch a bit of it and soon fell to sleep, not b/c the movie was boring.
What the movie did, was make me ask what the fascination about Ernesto was. I have never understood the attraction to a man who in the name of Ideals, murdered many of the people he was either supposed to help or to educate. Ernesto hardly came from a peasant background, and his followers were hardly indigenous farmers. His legacy was destruction and as Gene writes, "a very popular poster."While I love the lofty ideals of Utopia, where everyone has land to work, healthcare, freedom of thought, religion and it's expression, I know that this so called ideal is not possible for one reason. It goes against human nature. Like it or not we have a self survival instinct, this causes us to think of ourselves and families first. This is the basis for ownership and rights. We would not need them if we did not have this instinct. This natural occurence goes against the grain of Revolutionary Thought b/c it releases control of survival to intellectuals who know how to best distribute resources. The problem with this is that sometimes some animals are more equal than others. To assume that our leaders don't have the instinct we all have is naive and dangerous. You only need to look at the results of the glorious revolution to understand it's absurdity. Blame it if you want on poor US foreign policy, it still does not change the fact that this Utopian Ideal fails well in advance of it's final implementation.
posted by Prather @ 8:41 AM
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