paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- captain obvious Sometimes I feel like Captain Obvious. I have this fear that I walk around saying only things that are blatantly obvious, so obvious that there is no need to mention them. My most famous example was in the eighth grade. One day, during lunch, a group of my classmates were oohing and awing over Thriller and I, in absolute disbelief, felt the need to point out that Michael Jackson was in the Jackson 5. Please. The little guy who sang �ABC� is now the king of pop? The table fell silent and, yes, it was 1982, several people said �well, duhhh� which if I had a pet peeve at 13, it was hearing that phrase. Only recently have I lived that one down, and only because I no longer know anyone from the eighth grade. And yes, I do have Thriller and several other Michael Jackson records. In class, I become afraid to speak because I just know that whatever comes rolling out of my mouth will not be worthwhile. Class is hard for me because my thoughts are typically quite different from the general track in the class. Even in my favorite professor�s classes, I find it hard to get into the rhythm of class participation. In most classes I only contribute a lot on the really hard stuff, like Foucault. Everyone looks at me a bit stunned because I have been so quiet. This works because when something is incredibly abstract or reverses what we accept as the way things are and exposes them for social constructions, it comes in handy to be Captain Obvious. I have only taken one class where I may have been accused rightly of being a motormouth --a class on The Gothic where the professor and I actually thought alike. Not only did I feel comfortable in her class, but my points were welcomed and deemed on target. And I am thankful that I was able to take a class with her during her last semester at the university before moving to Pennsylvania. I am still sad about this. I think about her from time to time and got to see her briefly at the conference last May. So I have had my moment of being in tune and I liked it. But in subsequent classes�. I return to wrangle with my fears of being painfully obvious. Today, I kept thinking about the relationship between the stages of the birth and growing of nations and the stages of the birth and growing of corporations. Isn�t it interesting� this tendency to move towards becoming one large power. Yet there are still many small countries and many small businesses both categories are struggling with the stranglehold the large powers and corporations have on resources. Captain Obvious strikes again. But I never thought that capitalism would follow patterns similar to government� and beyond. Will it surpass government? Is it similar to how we could construct growing up in America and our national history/historical context in parallel ways. The individual sort of plays out the myth of that history through developmental stages. There is that same relationship of pattern between individual and entity. We are born defenseless and then we live in this sort of feudal environment where we are the subjects of our parents, we have a revolutionary war during the teen years (or if we skip that, often we have it during middle age) and in our twenties we set about establishing the state. At some point in time we begin revising the state and our interests become corporate. Just some odd theory I thought I cooked up years ago in a story that I thought was great. In reality my story was highly derivative and the theory was not new, Captain Obvious. Such is life in a crowded globe with a history of being chock full of bright and talented people. There are studies that show that there are more dentists named Dennis than statistically there should be. In Maryland, there are more Marys per capita than in any other state. And cliches have become so used because sooner or later, they prove true in our lives. Only two more days before the weekend, and I am counting the hours. 9:50 p.m. - 2002-09-04 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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