The Bad High

I've heard from various sources this week about the compulsion to wage war against things we don't like, a compulsion that surely I possess and that others feel.  It has to be remembered that while we get a hit of hormonal comfort when we sense or think things that are good and beloved, there is a like hit that we get from a shared despising of something else.

We're built this way.  We're built to cheer when the primitive beast that is one of our clan caves in the skull of an enemy beast with a rock.  We're built to urge on our clan members to keep hitting with the rock again and again, getting that sweet, sweet oxytocin with every wet crack of the stone.  The body's chemical bonus kept us working as a team, it kept us watching out for each other.  Us, the great Us, and the very bad Them, is hormonal.  And natural.

But nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above.  It is well to remember this.  The temptation to give into hate, because it feels good, is a damnation ... one that we are all, all of us, guilty of pursuing.

My purpose in fixing a final word on 5e is not to promote hatred, but to promote indifference.  Not to say, "Don't play 5e," but to say, "I don't care what you do."  You understand?  We not playing 5e on the blog and I'm not talking about it.  It is immaterial to my existence.  I may hate it, but ranting endlessly about it is a waste of my time.  And by extension the same is true of hundreds of other subjects related to D&D that I just don't care about any more.

This has not been an easy place for me to reach.  I don't think I'm here yet.  But I want to be here.  I want to be only here, where the only talk is positive.  But that is damn fucking hard, not because this is the internet, but because I'm human, and I want to get my hate on just like anybody else, for the same chemical hormone as anybody else.

This has got me thinking about the late 1970s, that I experienced and I know a lot of readers didn't.  This isn't about D&D in the 1970s, this is about culture in general, and television in particular.  I was 10 to 16 years old between 1974 and 1980 ... and I don't know why it shames me to admit it, but I watched variety shows, and Fantasy Island, and the Love Boat, and a mess of other ensemble shows.  It's awful stuff now but I was young, and there wasn't much to compare it to.

But there was a condition of television back then that I really, really hated.  Specifically, there were people, very popular celebrities, that I just ... well, we'll just say hated.  If you'll forgive the example, I really hated Sammy Davis Jr.  He was such a phony, cheap, sordid, pandering black sambo insult to my early conceptions of anti-racism and equality.  Maybe it seems strange that I cared about those things when I was a pup, but I was indoctrinated in politics very young.  Debate club at 12, political clubs at 14, aggressive young communist by 15, with Marx in my pocket.

Now if you don't know who Davis was, this won't mean much to you.  His schtick was to be "Black," with a capital B ... every repulsive stereotype of being black, massaging it hardcore every time he opened his mouth.  People thought he was funny.  And cool.  I thought this public persona was a walking atrocity — and I thought of it as a persona, because I couldn't believe that the real Samuel George Davis would present like this.  Going back to his work in the '50s, he didn't; but by the late '70s, his voice was like a fucking dentist's drill.

And because he was popular, he'd turn up on some show I liked.  Some show I waited all week to see.  Only to find it ruined by his presence.  And that happened a lot, with different people.  Charo.  Zsa Zsa Gabor.  Steve Lawrence.  Liberace.  Phyllis fucking Diller.

Now that I've demonstrated myself to be a complete asshole ... again ... what's my point?  It's basically this.  Growing up in the 1970s, there was no way to express that hate.  We really did live in a bubble.  People talk about how we surround ourselves now with people who think alike, and that makes a "bubble," but seriously, I grew up in a time when there was no one to surround yourself with.  You got your hate on for a celebrity, maybe you could find a friend who also didn't like that guy, but friends always end up liking someone you don't like.  

It's like an itch you can't scratch.

The internet lets you scratch that itch all you want.  You can find mountains of hatred for anything or anyone you hate ... and if that doesn't do it for you, you can go stir shit up and find others who will write messages like, "Hey, yeah, I fucking hate that too."

What's more, if all you want is to stir shit up, if you don't even have a belief system you're pushing, it's just goddamn fun.  We piss on them, they bitch, we piss some more, we don't fucking care, we're not invested in what we're defending, we just want to see people get worked up.  It's hormonal.

And now 20, 22 years on the internet, I guess I'm just getting older.  It's harder having something positive to say.  It's way, way easier to rail on someone else's post and make that today's post ... and understand, I've goddamned done that, not long ago, but last week.  And the week before and the week before that.

I look at my blog, I'm trying to think of a post ... and when it doesn't present itself, there are all those other posts on the internet to open and feed off.  There's the 5e handbook, right there, just waiting to be chewed up.

Thing is, though ... I don't get much fun out of it.  I ... feel it too much.  I angst over it.  When people get pissed at me, I don't laugh and point and enjoy myself ... I get sore and defensive and borderline.  I want people to play a better game of D&D.  When they don't, I think they're stealing something from themselves.  I think, whatever fun they're having, what social aspect they appreciate, they're missing the real party.  And I think it's a fucking tragedy ... made worse, because they're so fucking obtuse.

In my mind, I think Sammy Davis could have had a serious career, one where he didn't have to monkey it up for the white folk.  When I was a kid, I hated him.  But as an old man, I don't think it was him at all.

I think those were the tracks laid down for him; by the '70s, whatever he'd had in the '50s was flanderized out of proportion.  And that at the time, riding the tracks seemed the safest bet.  He got to stay in the spotlight.  You weigh the costs against the gains.

I want to apply that to D&D.  I want to argue that Mentzer, Katz and the others of their ilk are just old men trying to stay in the game, and that the guys who work in the company that made 5e are just hanging on to their paycheques and thinking about their homes and retirement.  I want to see how, from their perspective, it just all seems to be working out great.  They don't see any damage.  They don't see any fault.  They made a game, people play it ... that's all it is.

They don't see what I see.  And if they do, they've made peace with their demons.  They've weighed the costs.

I've got to weigh costs too.  I've got to settle on what my boundaries are; and I know part of that is letting go of that hormone.

Post script,

It was hard finding just the right pictures for this.  The celebrities that Sammy Davis worked with, who were close to him, loved him ... which only proves that the version of person he was in the late 70s was all an act.  Going through the pictures of him on line now, that period between 1970 and 1985 has been scrubbed clean; the images are all late 50s and early 60s, when he was close to the Rat Pack, Martin Luther King, the gods of Jazz and so on.  In the '70s, though, his name was synonymous with "the Candy Man," a horrible ditty that went huge at the time but is all but forgotten now ... but anytime he appeared in public, he was expected to sing it.  I notice his footprint online has had the song removed from his popularly remembered persona in the present, who want to believe that he was never forced to go down that road ... the way people want to believe that Stevie Wonder didn't perform those songs in the '80s.

History is funny.