Fame, money, power II

Thought I’d chime in on Hedon’s question of yesterday’s post.

When I was a child in elementary school, fame, money and power for me all boiled down to being the best tether-ball player on the playground at recess. In case you’ve never played, tether-ball is a simple enough game. A ball is attached to a rope which in turn is tied to a tall pole set in the ground. Two players stand back-to-back and whack the ball at one another. The ultimate goal of the whacking is to get the ball past the opponent so the rope wraps around the pole (in the direction you are whacking), until the rope is all gone and there’s no slack left to allow for further whacking.

At our school, if you defeated your opponent, then you remained at your station and took on the next comer waiting in line. If you were very good, then you reigned supreme and never had to stand in line. If you sucked, then you spent most of recess waiting in line, watching others play, until at last you got your chance to go in and have your ass kicked in 30 seconds by the reigning champ. Then back in line with ya, to heckle or not heckle the current players as the mood moved you.

When I was in third grade, I regularly got my ass kicked at tether-ball. This would not do. I wanted the power to control the game. I wanted to be the hotshot who never had to stand in line, whose play prompted cries of “Ahh!” from the crowd, not “Ugh!” So I sweet-talked my father into setting up a tether-ball for me in the back yard. Then I practiced. A lot.

By fourth grade, I was the playground tether-ball champ. Defeats were rare and I spent little time in line (defeats mostly coming from infractions of the rules which I probably committed but swore to the crowd that I did not). It was sweet. Screw money — I had fame and power.

In junior high, money came into play. I recall thinking that if I had all the money in the world, I’d buy a huge ranch where I could live with and take care of all the unwanted, neglected and abused pets of the world. I clearly did not consider the technical and astonishing difficulties of such an undertaking.

Once I was well into high school, I decided I wanted to be an engineer, I think simply because I was good at math and science and our state had a highly-ranked engineering university. When I was asked how I’d make my mark on the world, I’d say that I planned to “discover the cure for cancer while searching for petroleum replacements.” Oddly specific, I know. I thought it was funny. And yet, it has all the hallmarks of the search for fame, money and power.

In college, I was far too entrenched in liberalism to bother with fame and power. If I had had power, I would have used it force everyone to change the world, for the better as I saw it (isn’t that how everyone sees it?). I supported Greenpeace and “adopted” a kid through Christian Children’s Fund, and occasionally gave to PETA and the ASPCA. If I had had the money, I’m sure the list would have been longer. I was, uh, a bit over the top. My car was plastered with bumper stickers telling others to save the whales, protect the environment, support abortion rights, etc.

I wasn’t much different in grad school, but had run out of money so I had to drop Greenpeace, et al (though dropping PETA was more about a growing dislike of their tactics). I taught two classes of freshman composition each semester and I remember my big thing at the time was that dolphins were being caught in tuna nets, so I ranted often to my students about how great it would be if they gave up eating tuna, or at least switched to albacore tuna (I had read something that said dolphins swim with albacore tuna in lesser numbers than other tuna species, so fewer dolphins were inadvertently caught, or something like that).

I remember when Hedon and “Ingrid” used to come home from their women’s history class. It was a once-a-week evening class, so it’d be close to 10 p.m. before we got home. To say they were fired up is a bit of an understatement. I, meanwhile, had spent the same three hours in a graduate seminar on Irish playwrights. This might have been interesting. I certainly thought it would be when I signed up for the class. However … the professor was 950 years old, had been tenured since before I was born, and had long since given up the desire to be, in any way whatsoever, the least bit interesting. I have never in my life, before or since, experienced such torturous boredom. I used to have to elbow one of my fellow students every 15 minutes or so because she’d start snoring in her sleep. There were only about eight of us in the class, so you’d think the prof would have noticed and picked things up a bit. No such luck.

Hedon and Ingrid came home all pumped up with ideas; I came home so drugged with boredom that my fondest wish was euthanasia before I had to return to that class the following week. All this meant that I missed out on a great deal of Hedon’s and Ingrid’s lively conversation, what with being overwhelmed by the rousing display of excitement and interest in life. They plotted all the ways they’d change the world. My contribution generally amounted to my desire to have enough money to buy my own island and shut out the rest of the world. To Hedon’s and Ingrid’s credit, they’d run with this idea, installing high tech security systems and working out plans for delivery of supplies.

Throughout the rest of my 20s and most of my 30s, I continued to not much care about fame and power. Money was my bane, and the struggle to get enough of it to pay the bills consumed far too much of my life. If I thought about vast amounts of money falling into my lap, it would be in reference to paying off those bills.

And now here I am in my 40s. I still have no desire to be famous. In fact, the very thought of fame just about gives me hives. I’m on the same page with Hedon about money, finding the thought of comfortable wealth ridiculously thrilling. If I had tons of money, then I’d love nothing better than to realize that dream from junior high about having a shelter for animals, though on a much smaller, more realizable scale, naturally.

Then there’s power. What is my idea of power today? If I’m speaking realistically, then power would mean being able to control my own days and nights, a.k.a not working. That takes me back to money. But if we’re talking fantasy here, and Hedon is generally talking about fantasy, then power would mean some serious clean up.

If I were the all-powerful, god-like ruler of the universe, the first item on my agenda would be some fierce smiting of Bush, Cheney and the cronies who guide them. Payback’s a bitch, boys. I’d strip them of their fame, money and power. I’d put Bush to work at a minimum wage fast food restaurant, demand that all the bitchiest people in the world eat there every day, and Bush would be forced to do whatever it took to appease them, and thank them gratefully for making him work so hard for so little. Forever. Except evenings, where he’d get to go home and worry over how he was going to pay the bills through the entirety of another sleepless night on a lumpy, saggy and urine-stained mattress. Oh, this may sound tame, but it would be like Chinese water torture over time. And he’d be humping burgers a very, very, very long time.

As Stace God, I would demand that all people be required to take courses in logical thinking, said classes lasting until they could prove they could make a single rational decision. I know, getting a single rational decision from many people even after significant training sounds far-fetched, but we are talking fantasy here.

The logical thing might go better if some serious population controls were in place. I couldn’t do much beyond providing universal access to birth control and abortion. I might consider limiting the number of offspring anyone can breed, like cutoffs at three or something. And oh, sure, the temptation is there to destroy all the wicked and otherwise undesirable. But even as Stace God, I don’t think I’d be up to making those kind of decisions.

Still, the wicked must be punished if we are going to have them wandering among us. Hedon’s Antarctica plan sounds good to me. As long as the penguins are left alone.

I’d quintuple crop yield so land could be reclaimed for wild animals, because I think animals have rights to life, too. Since I’m a god-like being, I’d keep one of my god-eyes patrolling the reserves, which means people could be completely kicked off the reserves and leave the animals to blessed, people-free zones. I’d stop all commercial fishing of oceans and give all the now-unemployed fishermen other jobs. Our poor oceans need to be left alone for a very long time to begin to recover from what we’ve done to them. Oh, and I’d blast that plant to smithereens (the one that’s eating up the Mediterranean and other areas as we speak).

I’d funnel all money from the world’s military machine into scientific research (there’d be no war, because I would, of course, thump anyone who tried it). I may be an all-powerful god, but I didn’t hear anything about being all-knowing. Therefore, I would still be curious about how and why things happen, and would want daily synopses of the research findings.

Oh, there’s more than that which I’d do, but surely that’s enough fantasy for now. Back to reality, where I’m headed into New Jersey to pick up a load that’s supposed to get us home. Yay! We’ll be home for election day, which means I won’t have to vote an absentee ballot, and that means my vote will actually be counted this year. Double yay! The truth is, that vote is part of the few powers I’ve been given in reality. It may not be as cool as being Stace God, but hey, in this life, we take what we can get.