Apple, U2’s “Gift” Not Welcome

             

So Apple and U2 thought it would be cool to give every iTunes user a free copy of the super group’s latest album, eh?  How silly of them to think folks might welcome 11 free songs!  In fact, what kind of nerve do these giant corporate monsters have to have to take up that much room on the free cloud space they’ve provided us in the first place?  And free music?  Americans don’t want free music.  We recognize the effort artists put into making it, record companies put into manufacturing, promoting, and distributing  it, radio stations put into disseminating it, etc. and so on.  No way do we expect to get that for free! NEVER!

Do these bon-bon-eating, yacht-sailing billionaires not realize the burden they’ve imposed on folks who, for a variety of reasons, simply cannot have free music on their devices?  Really…the NERVE… forcing people to have to delete content if they don’t want it!  That could take seconds out of our busy days!  This invasion is almost as evil as including sample songs or pictures or videos in a copy of Windows!  It’s as invasive as buying a computer with a web browser or security software already installed!  It’s almost as evil as a 90-day trial version of productivity suite software that lets you use it to create all kinds of useful content, but then requires you to buy it AFTER you’ve created that content IF you want to maintain access to those things you’ve created!  What blatant disregard for our valuable memory space and personal time!  This ranks right up there with McD’s handing out free coffee for two weeks, or advertisers flooding our snail mail boxes with flyers and free offers that we then have to pass on to overcrowded landfills. We haven’t seen such disregard for personal privacy and safety since Little Caesar’s Pizza gave customers a second pizza for the price of the first!  That 2^nd pizza was clearly a ploy to get customers used to getting something for nothing, setting the stage for a communist deluge wherein people actually expect to receive the fruits of no one’s labor!  That would be like Burger King getting all the benefits of running a business in America – military protection, safe drinking water, regulated sewage, highways, power grids, stable government, police and fire protection, hundreds of millions of customers who can afford their products, etc. – and yet not having to pay their share of maintaining all of those benefits!  As Americans, the very thought simply sickens us!

Or do we just like to pretend it does? 

I work for an organization with over a quarter of a million employees.  All too often, folks will “reply to all” on an email sent out to a large chunk of those employees.  Shortly thereafter, someone else will “reply to all” with a message asking to be removed from that particular thread of messages, as if it actually took less time to type that message and send it than it would to simply ignore, or delete the original message in the first place.  But that’s not why they send the message asking to be left out.  They send that message (and take more time to do so than just deleting it would) in order to tell everyone on the list that their time is more important than anyone else’s, and surely more important than this message someone thought might apply to everyone on the mail list in the first place.

Oh sure, some of the whiners are complaining that it’s simply a matter of U2 or Apple being presumptuous by assuming that anyone could possibly like this U2 album in the first place.  As individuals, we like to pretend that our musical tastes are so refined and so important that receiving free, unsolicited music is an affront to our highly refined taste…that we may succumb to something new or different… and that such acquiescence would somehow have detrimental sway over the delicate balance of the universe.  We use the opportunity to rail against “sell outs” like U2 (or any other artist who has toiled away for years to gain some tiny little place, and – the horror – make a lot of money,  in an industry that breeds homogeneity.)  But that’s just another way of “replying to all” in order to demonstrate to the captive audience how important we are…how delicate our sensibility is…how much we need our insignificant complaint to be heard by ALL!

The uproar over having to do something with a free gift (other than just ignore or delete it) has become our forum to tell the world to LOOK AT ME.  I’m too important to get free music and my time is too important to be used by deleting or ignoring it. I didn’t get selected for a reality TV show, not enough people have seen my new tattoo…or beard…or newly adopted clothing fad or precious car.  I’m too important to have to ignore an email or music download that only slightly pertains to me, but the world will only know this if I reply to all and complain about it.

What people are really saying when they are offended, bothered, interrupted (or whatever the actual complaint is supposed to be) when they sound off about the burden of receiving free music on their iTunes device is this:  I am an ungrateful, whiny, low-self-esteemed cog in a giant wheel who wants some grease…not THIS grease that U2 and Apple teamed up to give me at significant expense, but some other grease that I’m not really willing to pay for except through my whiny complaining and all that it’s worth.  (ha!  The uproar is a lot like this ‘blog! …and yet here you are, reading it!)

Unlike U2 and Apple, who provided no possible method for the world to hear what people actually think about their generosity, I offer my many readers an easy-to-use comments section wherein you can tell me how much this post has benefited you and made your life better.  Feel free to use it, but please do NOT reply to ALL!  (my readers are WAY too busy doing important things to have to deal with that!)

Luth

Out

Why Are We Here

It’s a rather arrogant question when you think about it, as if everything that makes up the universe is supposed to have some neat, tidy, rational, and for humans, powerful reason for being.  How full of yourself do you need to be to continue asking this question? Squirrels don’t ask it. Rocks don’t ask it. Neither wind, nor musical notes, nor joy, nor sorrow ask it. How much must one’s self esteem be suffering in order to need an answer to such a useless question?

 
Sam Harris has even rededicated himself to the study of neuroscience to try to better understand why so many of us fill this void with religion.  In doing so, he has proposed groundbreaking ideas in the pursuit of ethics, and yet he seems to ignore the fact that Walt Whitman re-phrased the question so we could all understand it, and provided an answer over a century ago. 

 
In his poem O Me! O Life! Whitman puts into words the thoughts of the curious.  I use that word because in a philosophical sense, curiosity certainly has its place.  The problem as Harris and I see it comes when, in the absence of easy answers, we create systematic mythology and then try to get everyone to live according to it as though an answer exists, or is even necessary.   Beyond philosophical consideration, the question serves no purpose.  As such, Whitman asks and answers to such a degree that I am fascinated by the fact that we’re still even talking about it.

O Me! O Life!
By Walt Whitman
 
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
 
                                       Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
 
from Leaves of Grass (1892)
 
Even the non-English majors among us may recognize this poem as it was reintroduced into pop culture by the movie Dead Poets Society.  More recently, Robin Williams’s voice repeats the movie character’s lines for a television commercial for iPads. 

Harris's (no-longer, may he rest in peace) contemporary, Christopher Hitchens, notes that literature was far more suited to and effective at settling life's toughest questions than religion.  His eloquence bears more than paraphrase:

...we (atheists) have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Shiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and -- since there is no other metaphor -- also the soul.

Had Hitch included Whitman in that quote from God is Not Great:  How Religion Spoils Everything, I might not have been as compelled to create this 'blog entry, but who knows.  It is, after all, Friday the 13th, the day of a "super full moon."  I'm not sure what that even means, but it apparently hasn't happened in decades. If there's anything an atheist believes, it's that the powers of the universe are likely beyond our comprehension.

But this is not: The answer is clear, obvious, and only overlooked by fools who cannot see it in front of their faces, and who squander what time they have looking for it.  It is this:

That you are here--that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribue a verse.

Luth
Out