Brain Leeches

Three Related Stories

October 2024
Yesterday, an old friend drove into town to meet some folks for lunch. He got sidetracked by a trip to the emergency room — an unextraordinary event at our age. After performing some expensive tests, a kindly doctor gave him the requisite talk about eating better, exercising more, and faithfully taking the bucket-load of narcotics she prescribed for him. I was just there for moral support, so she didn’t berate the fat guy in the side chair but she did give me the stink-eye once.

If you’ve never visited the ER at Methodist Hospital in Richardson, it’s state of the art. My friend was in a ten-by-ten private room with every high-tech medical gadget and googah you could imagine. He was hooked up to tubes and wires with monitors and alarms — all this atop a bed that resembled a cross between a NASA rover and a Japanese Anime design. There was also a 36” flat-screen TV on the wall — either to distract him from his predicament or to help him embrace the prospective peacefulness of eternity without television.

I missed out on what could have been a great documentary as I failed to jot down how much his blood pressure and heart rate increased every five minutes when a new political hate ad populated the screen.

October 2020
Several years back, there was a story in the local news about a guy being beaten into a coma in the parking lot of our local NFL stadium. His offense: wearing a jersey of the visiting team that had just beaten the Dallas Cowboys — another unextraordinary event. I still don’t understand the emotional investment in “our” oversized steroid junkies competing against “their” oversized steroid junkies in a professional game of dogpile. Please don’t cancel me for thinking that.

October 1972
My pals, Ronnie and Wayne, and I, were riding around in Ronnie’s GTO one afternoon when we realized that our little town was buried in political yard signs. They were along every main road, in the medians at stop lights, and in nearly every front yard in town. There were signs for City Council, Mayor, Governor, State Senate, State Representative, U.S. Senate, U.S. Representative, and even President (remember “Tricky Dick” Nixon?).

Fueled by the foolishness of youth — and some recreational herbs — we decided to clean up our hometown. Around 4:00pm, we began clearing the shoulders and medians of main roads. We plucked up every election sign we could find and stacked them in the trunk of Ronnie’s car. By 7:00pm, we had progressed to cleaning up neighborhoods. As Ronnie idled his car down the middle of each street, Wayne would traverse the righthand lawns, plucking up signs while I scoured the lefthand side of the street.

Only once or twice did some middle-aged rube come outside and try to chase us down. Anyone knows that sixteen-year-old boys are much faster and more athletic than a middle-aged man, chasing them with a beer in his hand and his dinner napkin still tucked into his shirt. By 1:00am, we had filled Ronnie’s car trunk and entire back seat area from floor to ceiling. We had also strayed into the more affluent, country club section of town and that’s when the nosy Garland cop began following us.

Ronnie spontaneously concocted the plan that if questioned, we would claim we were doing a project for our Civics class. I distinctly remember thinking, “How the Hell did I get into this mess?” Fortunately, we never had to test what seemed like a completely feasible alibi because that officer hit his red lights and peeled off in another direction, leaving us free to plant roughly 100 political signs in the front yard of our intended victim.

So, what ties these three tales together? I just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “The Revenge of the Tipping Point” in which he explores the influence of “overstories”, those herd personas that emerge and dictate culture in ways the individuals of that culture would never have ventured on their own.

We all claim to hate negative political ads but studies consistently show that mud-slinging begets the best results. We’ve become so entrenched in political negativism that we routinely characterize the opposition as the spawn of Satan, maybe even worthy of being assassinated. Back in 1972, almost everyone displayed political signs in their yard. In today’s easily offended society, that practice is rare and likely to merit a rock through your front window if not worse.

It’s bad enough that we’re ready to go to war over who might be the next president or governor, but now, we’re even swayed by the herd to beat the crap out of a total stranger for the sin of supporting an out-of-town sports franchise.

When did we quit reasoning for ourselves? When did we let the group-think brain-leeches of social media and broadcast news suck out our ability to think rationally instead of emotionally? Even contemporary science is being perverted by political correctness. How long until we reach the tipping point and re-enter the dark ages? Perhaps we’re already there.

A meeting of great minds who think alike