October 12 2010
More than anything, before I die, I’d like to create an idea that takes root and passes through society. I want to be a virus when I grow up.
This isn’t as hard as it used to be, with a technology built seemingly for the sole purpose of spreading ideas quickly as the central medium of our age, and a culture that is in the throes of meme gluttony. And it’s also a dangerous occupation to aspire to. Big Ideas sometimes fuel Evil Regimes. In fact, it’s hard to find any Evil Regime that did not, at its core, gain power through someone else’s Big Idea.
Still, even though I’ve spent most of my adult life in the belly of the media beast, I’ve yet to feel satisfaction of seeing something I thought up race around the country, or even a decent-sized city, and bounce back to me through the voice of a stranger. I want to encounter one of my ideas as an orphan on the streets, begging for tuppence. I want to see a bastardized, telephoned, garbled transmission with recognizable roots in my own bean.
I suppose I’ll settle for fatherhood.
Sometimes I wonder (back on this narcissistic desire that’s one whisker shy of fame whoring) how many of my ideas have rattled around amongst strangers only to slip away into nothingness, how many were just poorly played pinballs that took a bad bounce off the broken left flipper.
If andor when I do succeed —
— quick sidebar: I once had a blog on which I tried to promote the need for and/or to become a single word, andor, that would join the hallowed list of conjunctions in English —
— I wonder if I’ll be big enough to let the idea come to rest before me in all its unattributed glory, maybe even with a wink, and not comment. There’s a koan-like quality to the practice of letting go of writing that any cub reporter learns on day one, when that first editor takes that first red pen (oh, who am I kidding, that first blinking cursor) to your piece and makes it something else before the public is allowed to see it. But it’s a quantum leap from that to the ability to let an idea live and breathe by itself, without asserting ownership and smothering it with helicopter mom love.
America has fallen in love with its own ideas. Fitting to talk about this on Columbus Day. Not because we still have a Columbus Day, but because the only tenor in which it’s mentioned is in a passing dismissal with occasional elaboration on the white guilt we must all bear for the eventual extinguishing of Native American cultures, as though it was Christopher Columbus who led 300 years of United States expansion, at the point of a musket, from sea to shining sea. That’s the latest idea: Columbus Day is stupid because it’s a celebration of the white man taking North America. First of all, that’s one of those facile expressions of white guilt that carries seeds of white absolution in it; come on America, own up to the fact that Columbus had as much to do with the plight of Native Americans as Orville Wright did with 9/11. Second of all, yeah, dumb holiday. But third and most of all, this take on Columbus Day has gone from subversion to mainstream idea to cliche and popped through to the other side as accepted wisdom. So stop thinking you’re smart for saying it.
(I’d also like America to fall out of love with International Talk Like a Pirate Day, but those timbers just keep shivering. I guess it will finally die when Dotty, the receptionist, has a calendar at her desk with kittens saying ‘yarr’ every month.)
But I digressed horrifically. What I meant to say was that America is currently in a sick love affair with its own ideas — indeed with the idea of owning ideas — and attempting to export this idea-love as some sort of meaningful product to the rest of the world. This is all we have? Patents and copyrights? It was barely a century ago when magazines routinely ran house articles without bylines, and now we must enforce every claim to authorship so thoroughly that every company is suing every other company over it?
Just when the internet seems to be training us to donate our ideas to the common green, corporate America (a phrase I don’t use much) is working uncommonly hard to mine ideas for green.
This thought isn’t going anywhere, really, so I’ll try to wrap it up with bullets:
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