“Beware of serious people for their reality is flat; and they have come to think of themselves as merely flat paste-ons. Their rage at the flatness of their lives knows no end; and they keep all their little imitators scared to death."
They are everywhere the flat people: vituperative and a bit greasy and their eyes are popping and they wave paper or they sneer because they don't need to wave paper they're so damned smart who needs to advertise facts--but anyway you get it in the pus because they're angry and they're flat as sandwich boards that say "Eat at Joe's".
I say the whole situation would be tolerable if the flat people were limited to TV. You can always turn off the overgrown fraternity boy who's spouting about Obama's recovery package as if he's ever in his life swallowed a morsel of a thought but what to do what to do when the flat ones are all about you and you're still a round hominid and you've got a book by Kropotkin under your arm? You think about hiding. But you don't.
Flat people are addicted to verticality. They think money is supposed to flow upwards. Power is supposed to course downwards as if from Mt. Olympus. This makes sense because flat people come from the ancient Grecian underworld and by the way they also live on blood.
Flat. Serious. Addicted to vertical power relations. Filled with envy.Sounds like a good resume for working in the punditocracy. Trouble is you can find them in business; higher education; churches; local school boards--people flat as roofing tiles, serious as porcupines, and not a shred of community minded curiosity in a one of them.
And that's the true idee fixe of the Flatsters: they don't want anymore communities in America. They're done with all that Bingo and bake sale sentimentality.
"Close the failing banks!" they cry. "We don't need a middle class main street!"
The Flat people are impatient cuz they want to stack together in their verticalized heaven which trust me ain't taking you or your vaguely round children or your dogs.
S.K.
You worry about the flat people, and Sartre worries about the stone people who are, “...attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable.... They want to exist all at once and right away. They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found.... If you insist too much, they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed.” He seeks the rational person, who, “seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; he never knows too well where he’s going…”*
I still believe that the biggest threat by far are the people with the permanent wedgies.
*(from Satre, Portrait of the anti-Semite)
Posted by: Leslie B. | March 11, 2009 at 02:45 AM