Saturday, May 8, 2010

Dread People

I knew a lady many years ago who insisted that the world was full of NARPs. “Not A Real Person”. My wife Annie called them pod people after the science fiction movie about how the alien replacements grew in cocoons and slowly the human race was being replaced. There were others of whom she complained they walked around with cobs up their butts, making other people pay for their discomfort. I presume the cobs were stripped of kernels and were dry before they were inserted. Here is my version. I think these people are filled with dread.

We are called to love them. This is good for the soul. Heh.

Oh yes, I borrowed the first line from a song by Randy Newman which asserts "short people got no reason to live". That lyric has stuck with me.

Dread People

Dread people got no
reason to go on but they
do, just plod along
maybe at the mall, yo
maybe 'round the block, taking
time as if they had
all the time they need.

May 15, 2009 2:58 PM

The Short People song is mean. Here it is. Probably it fits Dread People better.

Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason
To live

They got little hands
Little eyes
They walk around
Tellin' great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes
On their nasty little feet

Well, I don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
`Round here

Short people are just the same
As you and I
(A fool such as I)
All men are brothers
Until the day they die
(It's a wonderful world)

Short people got nobody
Short people got nobody
Short people got nobody
To love

They got little baby legs
That stand so low
You got to pick em up
Just to say hello
They got little cars
That go beep, beep, beep
They got little voices
Goin' peep, peep, peep
They got grubby little fingers
And dirty little minds
They're gonna get you every time
Well, I don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
'Round here

The song reminds me of M. Scott Peck's book People Of The Lie.

6 comments:

  1. Ohhh, this is hard, Christopher. I wonder on these sorts, as I'm sure others wonder on my sort with pity. Are they really born already stripped?

    I wonder on the nature of the biology, the chemistry, and then later the environment, that makes us. I think about how I am only one good jar of the head away from being someone else. And then I have a little sympathy. Terribly egotistical to have the sympathy then, but I do. I realize it is perhaps within all of us to act differently. And then I hope like hell I never spend my life vacuously. (I know there are some who would argue I already do:))

    xo
    erin

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  2. Quickly back. This is not a criticism of how you feel but rather an explanation of how I feel. (Ooooph, I can quickly get myself into trouble.) I am mostly puzzled by those kinds of people. I think they mostly don't see me at all.

    xo
    erin

    ReplyDelete
  3. Erin, I actually hold the attitude "how terribly sad that a person may be filled with dread." I take these people to be so toxic that I must stay as far as possible away from them, that I have little to offer, that I have already learned in some life their lesson or else they are so placed beyond my own life that I cannot learn from them in this life. In any case we are too far apart.

    I don't know if you know of David Horowitz, a political thinker and public speaker who started on the extreme left, got it so wrong that he went fairly far right in his own self criticism. He had a daughter who died too early of a terrible disease who lived and did as best she could committed to liberal causes. This man has apparently reacted and justified his whole life based on his disappointments and has just written of his life with his daughter.

    He claims she has been his teacher of compassion, primarily in how in his politics of anger he stomped on her heart in critical ways even though he loved her desperately. While I see his point, in his breast beating regret I also see how he is still doing it, taking her public like this and trying to make a teaching point out of the whole situation. These people just can't stop doing it. Theirs is a false consciousness, false compassion. David Horowitz is former editor of Ramparts magazine.

    Dread people. David Horowitz is one, at least in my life.

    ReplyDelete
  4. That's why I wrote in my post that Randy Newman's song is mean. If you listen to it, then it obviously is not meant seriously, is a humorous song, but behind the humor is a coldness that even permits Newman to write it. What troubles me about myself is that I can't help finding it funny that "short people have no reason to live". Why should such a line stick with me?

    It sticks because it is accurate to my fallible heart. It sticks because I suspect it is true to some group or other as a group. Aligning the sentiment with short people is obviously parody, but as an allegory it holds water.

    "Avoid then the deliberate manufacture of (your own) misery," AA's Big Book asserts. The biggest trouble on the planet is precisely the deliberate manufacture of misery. Dread people live miserable lives that are in very large measure self created, though they do not think so. And then within a larger context, when you self create your own misery while surrounded by people who also create their own misery, and all of you build a self justifying culture that perpetuates the situation, then how are you supposed to successfully rise above yourself? Just getting conscious is a life work.

    I am amazed when I stop to think of it. We have lived in the last fifty years through so many doomsday scenarios. It is either amazing that we so consistently escape by the skin of our teeth, or it is amazing that we have so consistently got our own situation so wrong. I have no idea which attitude is more correct, or perhaps some other that I cannot think of. It is as if we insist on our own destruction and yet try to escape too, just to give ourselves something big to do. Dread people.

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  5. Just a quick note...I think I imposed my idea of dread people onto yours. Mine being, people who have or see or strive for little purpose. The toxic ones have a purpose all their own. They're their own class of people. Not my kind...

    (I'll have to read up in a few days when I'm off again.)

    xo
    erin

    ReplyDelete
  6. See ya round the neighborhood :)

    ReplyDelete

The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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