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40. LESS HUMAN, AND LESSER HUMANS (Dec. 2003)
"I don't understand. My son and daughter-in-law get divorced it's like the most casual thing. Now they're 'friends'. Two years, then they hit a bump and it's over. My wife and I had twenty bumps, we're still here. Thank god there are no kids-- like they promised they wouldn't. My other shot to become a grandpa-- that's another joke. My daughter's a beautiful girl. She's 26 and I haven't seen in a dress or skirt since she was 13. She doesn't have boyfriends, she just goes out with guys she's met on the computer and I know she's slept with some of them, and then they're gone. She says she's okay but her voice is dead. My two kids talk like flat. I listen to the politicians on TV-- they can't talk or think. Movies are flat, stupid. The only thing alive is the action and effects. I'm not going. Seriously, I think people know less words now. Baseball players don't know how to bunt. NBA guys have forgotten how to shoot. Big guys don't have hook shots. I went to the funeral of a friend-- honestly, I didn't see the grief in his people. It was like it was just sad, like he had an accident. I go to New York. All the new buildings are flat, like people's emotions, nothing for the heart. I listen to Billy Joel or 'Fiddler On The Roof '-- it's like Beethoven now, when you compare. We're rich, we're strong, science is just so great-- so tell me, Professor, what's happening? What's happening to us?"
We are shrugging off what we don't need. And, amazingly, human emotion, it turns out, was just an invention we needed for a while, it wasn't really part of us-- an invention we worked for 300,000 or 400,000 years-- to draw others to ourselves, for our own survival. I don't need to be connected to you to use you-- that is the modern message. No woman in the modern world, like your daughter, needs a man to survive, just there are things to get from him, while he gets from her. Nobody really "needs" a family anymore. Or passion. So we're exhausted and annoyed by emotion, it's like having to use your feet again if your car breaks down, but we think the car can't break d...
"Professor, Professor. You are killing me."
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