Forget religion or politics. If you're interested in a knock-down, drag-out argument, try pop culture instead. Express your affection for some boundary-breaking filmmaker or lip-synching wunderkind, and someone is bound to energetically express their disbelief. We love to build up our idols almost as much as we like to smash them down.
Some years back, I wrote an article for this paper about Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards, speculating that the survival skills of the "Rock n' Roll Cockroach" might extend to thermonuclear war. This resulted in a lecture at a party from an inebriated reader
about my "uneducated" satire. I just nodded and shrugged, and minutes later the soused Stones fan fell to the floor and wiped out a potted plant. As punctuation to an argument, Keef couldn't have played it better himself.
Pop culture can infuriate as much as illuminate. During lunch hour gatherings with friends, sometimes the discussion veers into film. One lunch companion, a retired Jungian therapist, can take apart any given movie and explain its working parts with the expertise of a Swiss watchmaker. I have learned a few things from him about blockbuster and B-movies, but occasionally our opinions diverge. The table recently got into a dynamic disagreement about Quentin Tarantino's Oscar-winning film Django Unchained. The Jung-at-heart guy and another friend thought it a rollicking farce. I thought it was a hollow effort in hipster cool: a '60s spaghetti western crossed with '70s blaxploitation. Another friend agreed with me. The argument didn't quite descend into a food fight, but I was struck that it's not politics or religion so much as pop culture that amplifies our ego-fu-eled opinions. "Eye of the beholder" becomes "I of the beholder."
Luckily we were all sitting around eating. There's a theory that eating in close quarters encouraged civil behaviour in human evolution. The serotonin uptick tended to work against fight or flight reactions, and our ancestors began to dine in groups partly as a bonding mechanism that inhibited aggressive behaviour. (Besides, if you went ape on a fellow hominid with your piehole full of mastodon, there'd be no one around with the wits to perform the Heimlich maneuver.)
But I'm wandering away from my main point, as I sometimes do when I've got little to say and a lot of space to say it. So here it is: arguments over the merits of film, music, and the arts are subjective differences that can't be settled through a Wikipedia search - though I know a few people with the habit of pulling out their smartphones like geek gunslingers at the slightest whiff of factual disagreement.
Needless to say - but I'll say it anyway - the Internet has become our all-purpose, portable brain for both fact-checking and flaming. All bets are off in the online world when it comes to polite discourse. The subverbal, face-to-face social cues that humans have evolved over thousands of millennia have shrunk to the bandwidth of misspelled text messages, making it more likely that disagreements go nuclear quickly. A B-list actress disses a megastar singer and it's all over the Twitterverse in minutes, with the arthritic print media playing catch-up to inflate the most inane exchanges into tabloid headlines.
In fact, old-fashioned, face-to face interaction seems to be going the way of cursive script and quilting bees. Great numbers of us lurch around with our noses in our smartphones, tweeting, texting and Instagramming with the twitchy compulsiveness of the Walking Dead. (Did opposable thumbs evolve for this?) Actual phone calls now place a distant third to social networking and instant messaging.
Several years ago, I witnessed a woman on Venables go ballistic on a cellphone with her partner or boyfriend. She stopped and began screaming a volley of expletives, with her phone held at arm's length - presumably so she'd be heard clearly at the other end. You just don't come across that kind of considerate behaviour anymore.
All I say is thank God (or the Indefinable Whatever) that most of our digital devices are small and have rounded corners. For some folks, they'd represent lethal force if they ever met up in the real world. And for those who still do, there's always breakfast, lunch or dinner - the hairless monkey's trick for negotiating conversational minefields with good grub. www.geoffolson.com
