As I have marched and slunk through this long life of mine, it has been my privilege to witness all kinds of efforts that have a point. At the same time, there have been numerous examples that escape enumeration where pointlessness seems to prevail. Let me give you an example or two.
On one occasion, I witnessed a weight-lifting contest. On another I saw a weight-lifting exhibition on television. My antiquated mind tells me that the epitome of pointlessness is weight lifting. What in the world does it accomplish?
The people who pursue a career in weight lifting soon develop a neck that is hard to fit with a standard collar. Their biceps bulge and their chest sticks out, so that fitting them with a suit is a difficult maneuver. Generally speaking, weight lifters are built low to the ground. I would be greatly surprised to see a weight lifter standing five feet ten or higher.
In the weight-lifting exhibitions that I saw, when the weight is lifted over the head with great groans, the climax seems to come when it is released and falls to the floor with a great thud. From beginning to end, I have always asked myself, “What is the point in weight lifting?” My conclusion is that it is absolutely pointless. There may be those who will disagree with that conclusion but for the time being, it seems to me that, again, weight lifting is the epitome of pointlessness.
In the southeastern states of this great country, there is inordinate interest in auto racing. There is an oval track, measuring perhaps two-and-a-half miles in length, where the contestants race their cars in an effort to beat the other contestants. The drivers seem to have their doors bolted in to place, as they climb in through the windows, and as far as I could tell the window glass no longer exists. They race perhaps for fifty or more laps around the oval, cutting off other cars, and from time to time there are spectacular collisions.
In this era where we are dependent upon Middle Eastern oil, it seems to me that in addition to pointlessness, this is a most wasteful exercise. The automobiles used in racing have large engines and probably get no more than eight miles to the gallon. Spectators sit in the stands alongside the track, amidst the smoke and the fumes. They spend the afternoon or evening just watching the cars go around and around. If there is a more pointless operation than auto racing, perhaps it is drag racing.
In drag racing, automobiles with tremendous engines try to beat other automobiles with tremendous engines from a starting point to a finish point perhaps fifty to one hundred yards away. Why this is called “drag racing” is beyond me, but it consumes great amounts of gasoline and the cars are often the victims of overheating and sometimes burst into flames. I am at a loss to believe that there is anything more pointless than drag racing or auto racing.
Mr. Bush, our greatest president in history, from time to time seems to emulate the wasted fuel that is used in auto racing and drag racing. He loads up his 747, called Air Force One, with I believe as many as eighteen thousand gallons of jet fuel and takes off to visit the far far corners of the world. In February, Mr. Bush embarked upon a junket to Africa. His journey was pointless in the extreme. He danced with a Zulu king and read a speech that was of utter valuelessness. Then he climbed into his 747 Air Force One and flew to the next stop.
When he reached Ghana, he attempted to lecture the natives on abstinence. Now it so happens that I spent the last fourteen or fifteen months of my WWII overseas service in the United States Army in Ghana. The men and women there have a free and easy way of life and do not regard sexual intercourse as a cataclysmic event.
When I was the Night Line Chief in Accra, the big British base that we used in Ghana, there was time to kill and I spent that time in discussions with well-educated natives. Those discussions disclosed that they viewed the white man’s efforts at love-making as prudish. The natives of the Gold Coast, which was Ghana’s former name, held the view that if a young man wished to make love to a young woman, he would choose an appropriate moment to suggest such activity. The name given to love-making is “jig-jig.” If the female refused his advances, there were no hard feelings on either side. Perhaps it could be explained as just a bad day.
But in any case, the honorable Mr. Bush used his visit to Accra to lecture the Ghanaians on the virtues of abstinence. Lecturing the men and women on abstinence in Ghana is almost as pointless as weight lifting or auto racing. It is very much like lecturing Eskimos on the danger of wearing bikinis during the winter months.
Today we have a case where the employees of the State Department rifled through the files not only of Barack Obama but also of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. At this early date, we have no conclusion as to why they engaged in this snooping. Without one shred of evidence, the higher authorities in the State Department have called this “innocent snooping.” I remind you this conclusion has been reached without a single shred of evidence.
Now we turn to the pointlessness of this exercise. We are told that the investigation is going to be turned over to the Inspector General of the State Department. In the first place, there is no State Department Inspector General in view of the fact that for the past many months, the Bush administration has refused to name a new Inspector General and so there is only an acting Inspector General.
You may rest assured that turning over the investigation to the Inspector general of the State Department is a pointless exercise in the extreme. At the most, he might hire a low-level contract employee but in the end, “any investigation” will be held back until the term of this Republican administration which ends in January of 2009.
Now there is the forlorn hope that if the Inspector General of the State Department finds some violation of law, he is supposed to turn over such violation to the Justice Department for prosecution. You may recall that the Justice Department allegedly has been conducting an inquiry into the activities of the former Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. That investigation seems to have gone nowhere, in spite of the fact that there is a written record on several occasions where Gonzales obviously lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The intent in the Justice Department is to, again, play out the plot.
In the final ten months of the most corrupt administration ever in American history, you may expect no significant charges to be found by the authorities at the State Department or at the Department of Justice. In basketball, this is called “playing out the clock” or “freezing the ball.” And if Alberto Gonzales is found guilty of lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is hard to imagine given the current Attorney General, he will be pardoned as was the case in the Scooter Libby matter. The point is that there is total pointlessness in referring to the Inspector General of the State Department on the matter of raiding the files of the three candidates for the presidency, just as there is pointlessness in the investigation of Alberto Gonzales. You may remember that on several occasions, the new Attorney General has declined to identify waterboarding as torture. He says that he wouldn’t like it to happen to him, but he must protect the administration at all costs. And so the new Attorney General has prostituted himself on this subject. Expect nothing, because that probably is what we will get.
Well, there you have a few examples of what my alleged mind has produced as pointlessness. Perhaps pointlessness has a legitimate role to play in the affairs of the American republic. But certainly, our scholars and politicians are capable of better activities than weight lifting, NASCAR racing as well as drag racing, abstinence, and the like. The degree to which pointlessness exists in American life has been a concern of mine for a good many years. Now that I have written this gentle essay, I know that nothing will change. But for better or worse, it makes me feel a little better.
E. E. CARR
March 23, 2008
Essay 299
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Kevin’s commentary: Back in high school, I often took English classes wherein participation was required. That is, in order to receive full marks in the class, one had to raise his or her hand and contribute to class discussions at least, for instance, two times a month. This doesn’t seem like much because it isn’t. That said I still knew several people who could not bring themselves to do it. I guess the reason would be shyness, or perhaps unfamiliarity with the material at hand. Despite being an introvert I was never one of these people, because if nothing else I had a penchant for correcting people who said dumb stuff. Indeed this is how I got the majority of my participation credits – by providing arguments.
However, worse than the people who didn’t say anything at all were by far the “agreers.” They were the dumb or quiet folk who either did not read the material or did not have anything to contribute, but who were conscious enough of their grade to contribute anyway. Invariably this was at least a third of the class. To avoid embarrassing themselves with an original thought that might be wrong or at least worth discussing further, they would wait for someone to volunteer something useful, and then at the conclusion of that person’s thought would immediately raise their hand. Upon being called on, they would say “I completely agree with so-and-so.” Sometimes they would then follow that up with a pertinent thought, like “you can find even more evidence of that on page 50” but more commonly you would hear “I thought the same thing when I was reading, and I really think the diction shows that that’s what the author meant” or some horseshit.
I’m making two points here. The first is that on a lot of Pop’s essays, I feel like one of the agreers, and I find that upsetting. As much as I’d like to play devil’s advocate here, to me NASCAR is indeed about as pointless as you can get. So far as lifting weights are concerned, I might be able to make a point about how it is a practice from which the lifters derive personal satisfaction and respect from their peers, which makes them happy and that’s a use (albeit a small one) onto itself. But such a point would be a stretch, because at the end of the day it’s about people making a heavy thing go up for six feet and then down for six feet. Whoopee!
The second is that the agreers are pretty damn useless themselves. And that means by extension, when I write a commentary that pretty much consists of the sentiment that “I agree with the contention of the essay,” I feel similarly useless sometimes. But the fact remains that often my thinking and Pop’s are well aligned. So be it.