Updated on April 10, 2022
Halo: Infinite and Character Connections
I warn you now, we are about to embark upon a story critique of the new Halo game that involves at least a passing understanding of the series history and lore. If you have no interest in genetically modified super soldiers, giant floating rings in space, or a stumbling appraisal of such things, this is your stop.
Still with me? Grand, let’s push on. I finished Halo’s most recent installment “Infinite” earlier this week, and it left me both satisfied and disappointed—satisfied because I enjoy punching aliens in the face as much as the next guy or gal, but disappointed because it could have been something more. Tomes of reviews already exist for the game, so I’ll focus on one small area: the game designers should have let the Master Chief lead.
First, some background. Halo: Infinite takes place an unspecified time in the future past the events of Halo 5 and Halo Wars 2, thrusting you right into a cut scene where the big baddie Atriox wipes the floor with the Master Chief and tosses him into space. It’s an ignoble start, one we don’t often see. Right from the start, we have a crisis of competence for the character. While we don’t know much of the context yet, we at least understand that things, in the parlance of the day, be jacked.
From there, we get a little exposition on a new character—the Pilot. This man serves as a counter to what the series usually presents. Instead of super soldier demi-gods, the Pilot is just a normal, scared man who tried to run away until Master Chief conscripted him as a convenient taxi service. This is a nice touch, as it grounds our experience playing as the Master Chief against something tangible. It provides a lens to view all the insanity the Master Chief gets into as what it is—impossible behavior for any normal human being. Adding the Pilot helped round out one of the most famously iconic characters in video games.
The addition of Cortana-lite also worked, in its own way. But while I can respect the decision the game designers made given the backlash to Halo 5, I would not have played it the same way. The strong callbacks to Halo: Combat Evolved evoked nostalgia, even outright laughs at a few moments. Unfortunately, it brushed the previous game’s story under the rug in a haphazard way. For what they tried to do, however, it hit most of its marks. The relationship between Cortana-lite and the Master Chief—like his relationship with the Pilot—helped give a few rounded edges to an otherwise monolithic character. The scenes of distrust between the Master Chief and Cortana-lite help show that while the Master Chief can brush off any physical harm, he carries plenty of emotional scars.
This is where I break for a moment to confess something to you—I am a heretic. You see, I enjoyed the stories in Halo 4 and 5. Sure, they weren’t perfect, but the vast majority of games aren’t. What those games did was take Halo in a new direction. They took the Master Chief from the first three games—iconic, monolithic, unchanging—and tried to put something deeper behind the expressionless faceplate. This, as one might imagine, ruffled feathers.
People don’t like having their escapist fantasy vessel tarnished by pesky things like PTSD or heartbreak. I acknowledge that how they handled it came across heavy-handed, but it still worked for me. Take the ending of Halo 4. When the Master Chief stares at Cortana fading away as the virtual world she created around them falls apart (again, not subtle storytellers), I felt something. The game designers made the bold choice to disrupt the successful flow established by the first three games, and paid the price when the nerd hordes bayed for their blood. But to their credit, they kept trying with Halo 5. That story didn’t land for me as well as 4’s, but I still enjoyed it as a decent space opera.
This leads us to Halo: Infinite. It’s a compromise between what the game designers have tried to do with 4 and 5 and what the long-term fans of the series loved about the first three. We have Master Chief and his plucky AI sidekick wreaking havoc on a reskinned Covenant across a beautiful ring world, but we also have the Pilot expressing how psychotic the whole endeavor is and showing the mental and emotional impacts so often ignored in the first three games. It was a tricky path to walk, but I think they managed it with only a few stumbles.
That brings me back around to my original point—the game designers didn’t let the Master Chief lead. This is a man humanity built literal monuments to after he almost single-handedly saved the human race, for crying out loud. In Halo 4, he completely ignores the orders of the captain of the UNSC’s most powerful ship and not only gets away with it, but has people help him commit mutiny because why wouldn’t they? He’s the Master Chief.
So we get dropped onto this new Halo ring in Infinite, only to discover that the Banished wiped out the UNSC forces six months prior. Ok, you think, guess I have to do this myself with one pilot who managed to hide on a shuttle that whole time (can you imagine the smell?). But wait! One of the first things you do upon ringfall is claim a forward operating base (FOB) for the UNSC! Heck, your new AI buddy even manages to scrub its location from the Banished’s systems so you have a secure base to operate from. Then she tells you it’s time to rebuild the UNSC and highlights a few FOBs for you to liberate, along with some Marines that need your help. If it sounds familiar, it’s because it has strong echoes of one of the best levels of the original Halo where you scoot around in a Warthog blasting baddies and saving Marines. But this time, you’re rebuilding the scattered forces to take back the ring!
Except you’re not. Oh, you can rescue Marines and reclaim FOBs, sure. The problem is none of it matters. You could go through the entire game without rescuing a single Marine or taking a single FOB past the few required to advance the story, and it would change literally nothing. Yes, I get that the more FOBs you liberate, the more weapon and vehicle options you have to play with and more Marines will wander aimlessly around said FOBs, but that is all cosmetic. It doesn’t impact the story at all, which is where the game designers missed their biggest opportunity. They do a decent job with the tactical story telling (Cortana-lite, the Pilot) and the strategic (stopping the Banished, preventing the Harbinger from…doing whatever she does), but they completely miss the operational level linking the two. What they needed was a Sergeant Major Avery Junior Johnson.
In the first three games, Sergeant Johnson provides a tangible link to all the UNSC forces Chief sometimes fights alongside. A brash, quippy, over-the-top character, he is a caricature of what pop culture makes Marines out to be, and is all the better for it. He gives the UNSC a face and some otherwise lacking life. When played off other characters like Captain Keyes (both of them) or Admiral Hood, you got the sense that there was an entire organization out there you stood with and in defense of.
Halo: Infinite has no Sergeant Johnson. Its links to the UNSC are the Pilot (a contractor and admitted coward who ran away) and Cortana-lite (referred to as The Weapon and never given an actual name until the very end where one assumes she takes on the name Cortana). The nameless and often faceless Marines have no link to you, the player. They repeat the same lines over and over when you rescue them from increasingly identical scenarios with identical results. After rescuing my second batch of Marines, I lost any desire to rescue another unless it had a direct benefit on the immediate situation I faced. And why not? Usually they were out of the way, and I didn’t have to worry about a Sergeant Johnson yelling at me for leaving his men behind.
This is why I think the game designers failed to let the Master Chief lead. He leads on an individual basis—his interactions with the Pilot establish real character growth—but does not do a thing to lead the rest of the UNSC forces. Considering he likely outranks almost everyone else still living, this is a huge abdication of responsibility. To be fair, though, he also doesn’t do much leading of UNSC forces in previous games aside from leading Blue Team in Halo 5. If that precedent has to hold, then there should have been another character to take on Sergeant Johnson’s role. The Master Chief needed someone to organize the disparate forces and FOBs he liberates on his merry way chewing up the Banished. A few cutscene conversations with that character across the game would allow the Master Chief to lead the UNSC forces without new game mechanics, giving the player a solid connection to the Marines around them.
The Master Chief has always suffered from a lack of connection as a character. That’s why the super soldier without facial expressions needs others to shore up connections to the game’s world. Losing Captain Keyes in the original was painful, because he had established himself as your commander and you thought you could save him. Losing Sergeant Johnson in Halo 3 was worse, because he treated you as a human being and tied you into the otherwise faceless mass of the UNSC across three games. There’s no similar loss in Infinite with any of the Marines, so they exist only as a map icon for completionism purists. Give me a reason to care and I will, but leave it at the mercy of checking a box and I’m going to ignore it.
I recognize I just spent 1700 words to bash a game I said I enjoyed, so please don’t take this the wrong way. It’s a fun game! The gameplay is snappy, I enjoyed the relationship between the Master Chief and his small cohort, and I’m a sucker for mysterious alien threats that threaten humanity. Heck, I even enjoyed all the villainous monologuing from the arch-baddie given exclusively in two forms: sinister growling or thunderous yelling (BAAARE YOUR FANGS, SPARTAN!). This entire piece is less a spear thrown at the game designers and more an attempt to recognize potential story pitfalls to improve my own writing. I am grateful for that lesson, just as I am grateful for the example they set with their willingness to try something new. Here’s hoping they continue to do so.
Updated on April 10, 2022
Lifts of Historical Figures
I lift weights as my workout of choice. This isn’t driven by some desire to set personal records or yell like a wildebeest in the weight room. I just recognize the need to marry up my understanding of physical fitness’s benefits with my palpable hatred of running. My years invested in the activity, however, have had an effect on me. The ancient art of picking things up and putting them down impacts us all in different ways, with one interesting facet being which lifts one prefers. Being a huge fan of gross oversimplification, I firmly believe that one’s lift of choice can and does say volumes about an individual. With that in mind, here is the definitive guide to some well-known historical figures’ lifts of choice and what that says about them.
- Abraham Lincoln
- Noted Accomplishments: 16th president of the United States, led the country through its vicious Civil War, wrestled for 12 years with only one recorded defeat
- Lift of Choice: pull-ups
- Reasoning: Having the carry the team on his back for his entire presidency, Lincoln understood the importance of broad shoulders and full body exercises. Also, his late nights in the office likely kept him from the gym, so he would need a lift he could do around the Oval Office
- Mahatma Ghandi
- Noted Accomplishments: One of the greatest national and civil rights leaders of the 20th century, popularized satyagraha (non-violent protest) to achieve Indian independence from British rule, five time Nobel Peace Prize runner-up
- Lift of Choice: yoga
- Reasoning: Ghandi recognized the need for flexibility in his efforts against the British Empire. Non-violence also takes plenty of focus on the inner-self when the other side may not share those lofty ideals. And given some of Ghandi’s more nationalistic stances, India as the birthplace of yoga probably checked a few political boxes
- Napoleon Bonaparte
- Noted Accomplishments: Conquered most of Europe in four years, established numerous government reforms that served as inspirational elements for many other nations, fabulous portrait posing
- Lift of Choice: lateral lunges
- Reasoning: Napoleon’s brilliance as a commander stemmed from his understanding of mobility. He maneuvered around his opponents in ways people had never seen, and his armies marched circles around Europe’s best and brightest throughout the Napoleonic Wars. If only he had worked more long-distance training into the schedule prior to his misadventure in Russia
- Alexander the Great
- Noted Accomplishments: Created one of the largest empires the world has ever known, conquered the Persian Empire, named more cities after himself than many people at the time visited in their lives
- Lift of Choice: Squat, but with poor form
- Reasoning: Alexander knew he needed a strong foundation for his conquest hobby. He did manage to pull of eleven years of undefeated campaigning, but his poor form came back to haunt him in the end since all that he built couldn’t be sustained
- Marcus Aurelius
- Noted Accomplishments: Emperor during Rome’s Golden Age, authored a timeless work on Stoicism and life, pulled off the perm look centuries ahead of its heyday
- Lift of Choice: visualization
- Reasoning: Marcus’s Meditations has sat on the nightstand of many successful people in the millennia since he put nib to paper. Through his reign as one of the Good Emperors, the Roman Empire could see itself as a triumphant force far into the future. It’s a shame his son couldn’t keep it going
- Suleiman the Magnificent
- Noted Accomplishments: 10th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire that expanded its territory into Belgrade, Rhodes, and Hungary, talented poet and goldsmith whose works are still read today, tremendous hat style
- Lift of Choice: deadlift
- Reasoning: Deadlift is the king of lifts, and a ruler doesn’t earn the title “The Magnificent” without being able to back it up. Between his consolidation of Constantinople into Istanbul, the multiple administrative adjustments he made to the Ottoman Empire, and his talent with a quill, Suleiman was the whole package
- Marie Antoinette
- Noted Accomplishments: Queen consort of Louis XVI of France, lavish party planner, terrible situational awareness
- Lift of Choice: admiring herself in the gym mirror
- Reasoning: Marie knew what she liked, and what she liked was an extravagant court life. Putting in the work for that was someone else’s problem. And if they didn’t have the bread to support themselves? Well, let them eat cake!
- Vladimir Lenin
- Noted Accomplishments: Founded the Leninism school of thought, led the Bolshevik coup that overthrew the Russian government and won the Russian Civil War, famously poor choice of followers
- Lift of Choice: doing one set of a dumbbell lift before talking to you for 30 minutes
- Reasoning: Lenin knew the importance of being in the gym, but not for the same reason most did. No, he valued the captive audience who would listen to him rant about the threats of the bourgeoisie. Too bad he didn’t see Stalin getting his reps in behind him
- Pharaoh Khufu
- Noted Accomplishments: Second King of the 4th Egyptian Dynasty, builder of the Great Pyramid at Giza, target of some of the world’s first documented haters
- Lift of Choice: tire pulls
- Reasoning: Khufu saw an empty plot of sand and thought to himself, why not build the largest building in humanity’s existence? To fulfill the sheer audacity of that power move, the stone blocks used to build Egypt’s largest pyramid came in between an average of 2.5 and 15 tons. Seeing as it remained the tallest structure in the world for 3,500 years, his plan seems to have worked out
- Queen Elizabeth II
- Noted Accomplishments: Served in multiple capacities during World War II, helped pass the 2013 Crown Act for gender equality, immortality
- Lift of Choice: long distance cardio
- Reasoning: Queen Elizabeth II has outlived every one of her contemporary leaders and remains the head of state for fifteen countries. Her long service to the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth will continue for all time and eternity, and her subjects look forward to the many fun hats she’ll don over the coming centuries
Remember, lifting is the great equalizer—gravity and mass don’t care who you are or what you’ve done. Don’t skip leg day!
Updated on April 10, 2022
All Is Lost: Search Engine Optimization Is a Sign of the End Times
I have looked into the jaws of the future and beheld only fear, guilt, and anger. From fortified homes and fiber internet connections, forces will sally forth to wage their culture wars. We will click ourselves into oblivion one rage-inducing link at a time, and we will love doing it. So the most important question to ask yourself is this: how do I make a buck off it?
Let’s back up a step. I started this blog to work on my critical thinking skills and to have something of an established platform for my theorized writing career later in life. There is no real push towards monetizing it or gaining legions of followers, but such things dazzle even closed eyes. Combine that with how oddly forceful WordPress is on search engine optimization (SEO) suggestions, and you have me scratching my head trying to figure out how to best play the modern Internet’s game.
At first, these recommendations seemed insulting. My sentences run on too long? How dare you judge me, anonymous algorithm? I wouldn’t be surprised if your coder hasn’t willingly read a book since the one about a hat-wearing cat justifying home invasion. Since my readership consists primarily of me, I can say with certainty that the sentence structure meets audience desires to the letter.
Insult turned to curiosity, however, and then amusement. Allow me to share one with you (anything you see in quotations is direct from WordPress and plugins on the site designed to improve a website’s draw): “3 of the paragraphs contain more than the recommended maximum of 150 words. Shorten your paragraphs!” Notice the demand there, implicit in the short sentence capped with the strongest punctuation available to the English language. WordPress does not ask for some fine-tuning—WordPress requires my submission. All hail our website hosting platform! Granted, can a paragraph go on too long? Absolutely. Not everyone can pull off a Dickens and write like if he stops the sentence, the universe ends. And yes, readers are like runners—it takes a special sort of masochist to endure a marathon and smile at the end. All that said, I like to think that the average reader can maintain their attention long enough to read more than 150 words without taking a breather. (This paragraph comes in at 163 words—fight the power)
My amusement did not last. “No internal links appear in this page, make sure to add some!” Yes, let me stroke my ego by littering my post with links to other posts I’ve made. But this goes beyond a creator’s craving for approval and into machinations on a reader’s attention. If I link them to other content on my site, it guarantees their eyes stay glued here instead of elsewhere. That means more of that sweet, sweet ad revenue flowing into my coffers instead of the competition. Wait, when did they become competition? Who is “they” anyways? Ah, yes—they are the people trying to steal the finite amount of reader attention I so obviously deserve. Keep them on your hamster wheel of content, WordPress commands. Let it spin forever.
Ok, but is it all that bad? A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, right? WordPress scoffs at your naivety and goes for the jugular: “Negative headlines are attention-grabbing and tend to perform better than neutral ones.” Ouch. Hard to misconstrue that one. Notice the lack of mentioning positive headlines at all? Or how the implications of feeding into national and international conversations that have devolved into screaming matches boil down to performance metrics? It’s like WordPress is Alec Baldwin’s character from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, except now A-B-C stands for Always Be Clicking. If that means you have to add to the anxieties, frustrations, fears, angers, and whatever other negative emotions you can rile up in random people across the globe to do it, so be it.
On a certain scale, that argument bears weight. Human nature is what it is—we are wired to respond to negative stimuli to avoid potentially dangerous situations. Why not take advantage of that? Bring on the doom, so long as the clicks come with it. If I don’t, someone else will. Who’s to say their content will be any better than mine? What if my negative headline draws someone in that otherwise would have perused a conspiracy rant? Heck, in that light it’s my moral duty to write as negative as possible! I am defending freedom!
Except none of that is worth the cost. Feeding into the negativity spiral of public discourse encourages embracing our base nature. Why would I ever want to strive for that? Actually, a base nature suggests no striving whatsoever. By its definition, striving for something implies work, something that I find quite unpleasant. It’s sweaty, difficult, and prone to lasting far longer than anticipated. But ahh, it’s payoff…imagine a world where you could leave every conversation you had, every article you read, every thought you pondered with a positive feeling? If after every interaction you carried a desire to work with others to make the world a better place instead of identifying who to label as an enemy of whatever cause you picked up in the last five minutes? We can be better, and it starts with not bowing to destructive subversions of the human psyche to gain attention.
Conclusion: this website is not going to do well.
Updated on April 10, 2022
A Shadow Too Far
Note: The Wandering below contains spoilers for Orson Scott Card’s Ender Sextet series and his Shadow Saga series. Beware, all ye who enter here.
My usual audiences for critical reviews consist of either my showerhead or my wife when she is trapped in a car with me moving faster than she can safely exit. Such environs don’t lend themselves to critiques full of nuance and logical flow, but today calls for something more. And yes, I recognize the irony in passing judgement on something in the Wandering immediately following my debut argument defending a lack of cultural taste—hypocrite, thy name is Jake. That said, this one hit close to home as it involves the legacy of my favorite character in all of fiction: Bean (aka Julian Delphiki) from Orson Scott Card’s Enderverse. I now ride to the defense of a fictional character that were he alive would be baffled as to why I bothered. Alas, the things we do for our heroes.
I recently finished Card’s The Last Shadow, which tied together the Ender Sextet with the Shadow Saga. If you haven’t experienced them, I’ll give you a moment to read all eleven books. Finished? Excellent, let’s continue. I won’t rehash Ender’s Game, which earned its Nebula and Hugo Award wins as a brilliant science fiction novel. What I do want to focus on is a minor character in Ender’s Game who received his own parallel series. I speak, of course, of Bean, so named for his tiny size due to (again, spoilers—last warning) a genetic abnormality forced on him by a scientist too focused on ‘could’ as opposed to ‘should’. As an international affairs enthusiast, I adore Bean’s Shadow Saga that focuses on how the world falls apart after the unifying threat of the Formics disappears overnight. Bean plays an integral part in navigating that morass with other members of Ender’s Jeesh, eventually working with Ender’s brother to establish a new world government under the Hegemon. Card does a wonderful job offsetting Ender and Bean. Where Ender is a leader whose empathy enables his brilliance, Bean is the opposite—one whose brilliance thwarts his empathy. Thus, we get a character arc developed over five books where Bean comes to grips with both his ability to love others and his short-lived mortality. It ends with a heart-rending scene at the end of Shadows in Flight that years later still gives me pause, the culmination of Bean’s struggle and a final rest for a giant.
Which is where I pick up my first bone to start swinging. The Last Shadow disregards the character development on Shadows in Flight for Bean’s children and makes Bean’s final moments seem meaningless. His children have to move beyond their selfish battles to understand their father and everything he sacrificed for them, and eventually act on that wisdom to prevent their father from ruining the chance he gave them by reaching out to his long-thought-lost friend Ender. But what do we get at the start of The Last Shadow? Bean’s three children now grown with children of their own, but each of them as selfish and self-serving as they were at the start of the previous novel and doing their best to pass along similar traits to their offspring.
There is some measure of comfort that one of Bean’s grandchildren approaches the problem in The Last Shadow with empathy instead of pride, proving that something of Bean’s hard-earned wisdom wasn’t snuffed out, but it is overwhelmed by all the others displaying levels of pride even Bonzo Madrid would pump the brakes on. I recognize the need for flaws to overcome to enable character development, but this is territory already trod by the entirety of the Shadow Saga—brilliance trampling empathy to the detriment of all. I could not appreciate their struggle through childish pride because the whole time I pictured Bean’s last steps before he died, thinking he had set his children on the right path.
The second point of contention revolves around the story’s conflict resolution. Summarized: the virus Ender and his family struggled against across four of the Ender Sextet’s six books turns out to be a fluke. Oops! Also, birds are smart and then some more attempted xenocide for good measure. Audiences love subverted expectations, but only to an extent that fits within a rewarding frame. If an author implicitly promises a showdown with an alien species whose biological technology makes humanity’s look like a middle school science fair, not getting that leaves me like a kid in a sugar-free candy store. While I respect an author’s right to end a story in the way he or she feels appropriate, I as a reader maintain the right to cock an eyebrow at finishing off what amounts to an eleven book series with a shrug.
The final and most egregious point is one that I admit is subjective. As I mentioned earlier, Bean is my favorite fictional character. His struggle across the Shadow Saga, the burdens he carries that no one else see, the choices made because of his emotional and empathetic growth, they all combine to form one of the most inspiring and tragic figures I have ever encountered. He goes from being known as Bean to the Giant, and gosh dang it, it fits. So when I saw this giant reduced to little more than a failed father figure as we move onto his flawed children’s children, I feel entitled to wail and gnash my teeth a little. The few mentions we get of Bean in The Last Shadow carry no weight of his emotional depth, or of the burdens he bore for humanity and his brother-in-arms Ender. Instead, we get a few off-handed comments about how smart he was and how his legacy culminates in his children fixing the genetic abnormality they all inherited from Bean. It puts Bean back into the box of his first novel Ender’s Shadow, the brilliant boy who lacked empathy because it wasn’t technical enough to bother with. That is the true shame of this book, that the last shadow the Giant casts is not one of his mature humility, but one of his childish pride.
Now that I’ve ranted, here’s some whiplash for you: I want to highlight a spot of wisdom from Pixar’s Ratatouille. The food critic Anton Ego writes the following: “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment.” So it is with the thousand words you see above. I am no expert critic, nor do I think I have a complete understanding of what Card set out to do with The Last Shadow. I have written exactly one novel that remains unpublished for delicate reasons like it’s not that good. Card has literally written more books about the craft of writing books than I have written completed stories. I do not claim to hold any sort of superiority over him, nor will I. What I can claim is that by identifying areas of frustration in this book, I hope to improve my own craft down the line. If one of those self-identified issues worms its way into my psyche and changes even a scrap of what I produce going forward, this entire exercise will prove its worth to me. That is enough.
The Enderverse is a fantastic creation of fiction, something I have and will continue to return to so long as my eyes can make out words on a page. I will forever be grateful to Card for introducing me to that universe and the characters who inhabit it, especially Bean. But while I cannot claim to know Card’s work better than he does, I can say is how his latest book made me feel. I can describe my desire to defend a character of his I have grown to love over decades of reading about his struggles and triumphs. The Giant did not need to be made small. Bean deserved better.
Updated on April 10, 2022
In Defense of Being A Cultural Ignoramous
There is something otherworldly about experts who can nibble on some exquisite morsel and identify what type of clover the cow who provided the milk eats. These pinnacles of cultural judgement have worked for years to refine their tastes to such a degree that if they say something is worth having, you’d be a fool not to listen. I acknowledge the amount of effort that goes into mastery of that level, and I wish them well for it.
That said, how fun can life be living on that extreme edge of human existence? To have refined your pallet to such a degree that save for rare nostalgic exceptions, anything less than fantastic has a chance of being spat into a napkin when no one is looking (or done so blatantly, if one enjoys making statements)? And by no means is this limited to the culinary arts—similar situations exist in every medium through which culture is transmitted. The movie critics that pride themselves on how many skewerings they’ve delivered that year or the musical aficionados that shudder if they hear Bach performed by anyone less than a philharmonic orchestra may not travel the same physical roads as the food devotees, but they share the same soul of one who has touched something of the divine and can never truly descend from those lofty heights. While their critiques drive the masters of those fields in new and bold directions, they lose touch with us common folk.
This is the part where I tell you of my clear bias on the subject. By no observable metric should you consider me anything close to an expert on matters of cultural taste. I enjoy Jack in the Box tacos, think that Gattica is as fulfilling as watching paint dry, and idly daydream about how I could totally be a DJ if I wanted with zero musical training beyond driving my wife insane replaying whatever song currently strikes my fancy ad nauseum. I am the salt of the earth, poured out of a bulk-produced batch of store brand table salt onto a microwave dinner. Of course I am on the side of the cultural ignoramus—who doesn’t root for their home team? But my reasoning hopefully goes beyond a simple us and them mindset.
Allow me a slight digression. My wife and I once enjoyed an evening at a restaurant in Rome with three Michellin stars. The service was impeccable, the ambience was at the height of sophistication, and the views of the city at night were fantastic. Even my culturally ignorant self can confidently say the place oozed class—how else do you define a place that has a separate water menu with eleven pages? All that said, the meal left us…underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed every bite of it, but not with a noticeable bump in pleasure over a favorite fast food item when I’m in the mood, or my wife’s grilled cheese sandwiches. Had I been a food expert capable of noting the intricate blend of flavors the chef worked into his or her dish, perhaps it would have been different. But such details are as lost on me as the beauty of a Van Gogh to an errant pigeon that made its way into the exhibit via an open skylight; the colors are all there, but mostly I’m just looking for something to eat.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder may be a cliché, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And while there is a place for maintaining the highest of standards for what makes a recipe or a movie beautiful, so too is there one for lower standards. My failure to appreciate the finer aspects of the culinary art may mean that my meal in Rome only carried a modicum more satisfaction than what I can get from the Jack in the Box up the road, but it also means my options for what provides that satisfaction are far more available to me both financially and logistically. The same goes for other forms of culture, where I can base my preference on participating in a given venue or medium entirely off my own low standards, instead of at the heights of cultural awareness. Again, I am not mocking or decrying those that spend their lives perfecting their tastes to levels I can only dream of. I see the value in such experts as forcing functions to drive the creators of the world. When they achieve breakthroughs, eventually those masterpieces trickle down to the ignorant masses in which I reside as a diluted form of their original intention, but one in which I can still feel something of that same joy the expert and creator both agree upon. I am the child sitting in a puddle, content to splash about with my hands and feet while the adults spend their time dreaming up water parks. But where their water parks are few and far between and their options shrink the higher their tastes climb, the world is full of puddles that remain just as satisfying to splash in a hundred times from now.
