The "Good Sense" Test
You apply it to any questionable proposal and, generally speaking, it'll weed out the weak and infirm ideas on the table before they get up a decent head of steam. Problem is, most people don't have this benchmark in their critical repertoire, so a lot of stuff sneaks in under the wire and then we have to deal with it. The following examples ought to make this utterly clear.
The Chatroom Vultures
As should be obvious to anyone who spends a significant amount of time online, the people who congregate in chatrooms are not a good source of pharmacological know-how.
 But 21-year-old Brandon Vedas didn't know that. He died a couple of weeks ago while being egged on by a gang of modem misfits who wanted to see exactly how many drugs he could wash down with Bacardi hi-test.
- By his own account, bragging in the hour before he died, Vedas ingested large doses of Klonopin, Methadone, Restoril and Inderal, along with marijuana and 151-proof rum.
Broadcasting the event with a Webcam, Vedas taunted his onlookers by boasting of his "high tolerance" for his potent prescriptions. "That's not much," said a teenager from rural Oklahoma. "Eat more. I wanna see if you survive or if you just black out." Brandon dutifully continued his exercise in stupidity, his typing increasingly disjointed.
- "In fase anything goe wrong," he said, typing his cell phone number. "Call if I look dead."
His last words, recorded for posterity: "I told u I was hardcore."
We Could Be Heroes
MTV is in trouble with their new cartoon sitcom, Clone High, USA, which purportedly follows the DNA-regenerates of Abe Lincoln, Cleopatra, John F. Kennedy, and other notables now back in school and partying hard. The nice people over in India aren't too happy with the characterization of Mahatma Gandhi as "the ultimate party animal who gets himself and his best friend Abraham Lincoln into wacky schemes week after hilarious week."
  A pretty good likeness, we'd say, but we can't vouch for the authenticity of his diction, as evidenced by remarks like these in the school yearbook: "Yo yo yo! G-man here givin' a shizout out to my peeps and my boyz!" Still, it all looks like good wholesome fun, except perhaps for episode nine, in which Joan of Arc and Cleopatra move in together, and "Gandhi and JFK become peeping-tom buddies, hoping to spy on some hot girl-on-girl action." Howls of Hindi outrage were swiftly squelched by this ameliorative statement from the network:
- MTV US apologizes if we have offended the people of India and the memory of Mahatma Gandhi. We have the utmost respect for Gandhi and all he represents as a revered Indian leader and one of the most important figures in world history."
Is there anything else MTV has to say about Gandhi? "Oh, and did we mention he's horny? Because he is." Yes, there's that.
Hard Labor
One place you'll want to apply the Good Sense test is your own job. Are you being paid enough? Is the exchange of your labor for a paycheck satisfactory? Here's a story about some people who signed up for what they thought would be a high-paying Fortune 500 career, and wound up being a job from Hell. Their problems started after they nibbled on an ad for "management trainees" at Rhino Wireless.
- Operating on Long Island in various incarnations since 1994, Rhino Wireless sells AT&T and VoiceStream cell-phone plans and products such as knife sets and calculators.
Let's see what that job turned out to be. New hires discovered that their duties would include:
- Scrubbing toilets at the crack of dawn five days a week
- Gobbling like a turkey upon signing up new customers
- Simulating sex with an imagined celebrity in front of their co-workers
- Runing into the office yelling, "Ho! Ho! Hoooo!" then ringing a gong
The employees' class-action lawsuit cites an environment "rife with sexual and physical abuse and...psychological cruelty and exploitation." Sounds kinda like high school, or HBO.
Poet Ignoreate
Call me old-fashioned, but I'd say that if a state were to appoint an official Poet Laureate to represent its people in verses august and sublime, you'd want that poet to have a certain way with words, an ability to uplift the soul and capture the spirit of greatness that beats within the human heart. For some reason, New Jersey gave that task to Amiri Baraka (formerly known as Le Roi Jones), and they've been regretting it ever since.
 You'll recall the brouhaha over Baraka's torpid traducement, "Somebody Blew Up America," which led to legislative deliberations aimed at eliminating the position of New Jersey Poet Laureate entirely.
- By last week the state Senate had voted 21-0 to abolish the title. The move still needs approval by the state Assembly, where it has been sent to a committee, but no hearing has yet been scheduled there.
Throughout history, we've been debating exactly what poetry is, what it should be, and by what means we might determine a good poem from a poor one. I'll allow at the outset that in at least one sense, a poem is its own reason for existence—none require validation or justification. At the same time, various ideas have been forwarded by outstanding poets as to what the Good Sense test here might be, such as this definition by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
- Finally, Good Sense is the body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.
To be sure, the critics have been more than kind to Baraka, pronouncing his work as "a move towards 'disassociative forms' in which [he] breaks from traditional synthesis, becoming 'both interpreter and creator of of a new consciousness.'" At some point, however, we have to put down the reviews and look at Baraka's work, which should speak for itself:
- Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo
Who invented Aids
Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"
Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek
Who decided Affirmative Action had to go
Reconstruction, The New Deal,
The New Frontier, The Great Society,
Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere
Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop,
Who poison Robeson,
who try to put DuBois in Jail
Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs,
Garvey,
The Scottsboro Boys,
The Hollywood Ten
Who set the Reichstag Fire
The overall impression here is one of anger at the "establishment." But anyone could express their rage at life in rough stanzas. Poetry respects language in some way or another, even in works that thumb their nose at the medium of their own expression; whereas Baraka's work ignores language entirely, concatenating random images that are weakened and sullied for being strung together with all the thought a grade-school girl puts into the arrangement of charms on a bracelet. The power of words to move, to stir the passions, to take us someplace we have not been or to where we should be going is completely absent. This is the poetry of an empty heart and a soul that does not resonate to beauty. Words? Yes. But is that all that poetry is? Baraka for his part says that it's fine if he's fired, just as long as he's paid his $10,000 stipend. Otherwise, he's suing.
Update: While my comments regarding Baraka are directed at his technical ability as a poet, Rob's earlier observations at Emphasis Added offer a critique of Baraka's content and add depth to this discussion.
2:21:01 PM 
|
|
Sunday, February 2, 2003
