Smurfship One

For most of my adult life, I have followed one basic rule: Do not buy a giant inflatable swimming pool. Do not, under any circumstances, put a giant inflatable swimming pool in your backyard, where it will destroy the lawn and make your neighbors think you’re even weirder than they already do.

Quarantining, though, as social media has made quite obvious, has brought out the dumb in most of us, and so it has happened. We did it. We performed our civic duty and used part of Santa Trump’s money to make this purchase.

And, let me tell you, it…is… huge. I mean, it’s a really, really big deal.

How big is it? Well, let’s see. It’s big enough to require all of the crap that makes owning a pool such a terrible idea in the first place. For example, it requires a pump and it requires chemicals. It requires a ladder. It requires constant adult supervision and it so big it even requires level ground (much more on that delight later).

In other words, it is big enough to cause a headache but not large enough to be useful to an actual adult sized human. It is the ultimate hangover without the punch.

And it isn’t at all subtle about it, either. This pool is so fat and unnaturally blue that we might as well use it as a prop in a movie about a Smurf alien mothership.

Now, grant it, there is a certain amount of social currency that comes with owning a real swimming pool. You can say things, like,

“Hey, come over for a cookout and the kids can swim in our actual swimming pool.”

“Oh, that sounds fun. What time?”

“I’ll start the grill at six.”

“Count us in.”

See? That is a real adult conversation. That is how friendships are made and cemented.

We are not inviting anyone to our house to swim in this monster.

“Hey, come over for a cookout and the kids can swim in our Smurfship.”

“No, man. That sounds weird.”

Friendship over.

But we did it, though, and, let me tell you, it is over. The pool is up and the pump is pumping, so the question becomes then, why did we do it? Why did we ruin a giant square patch of our lawn that I do not have the skills to redeem?

Well, why does anyone do anything these days, man? Because of the ‘ronna.’

We did it because of COVID-19.

When we purchased the pool, everything was cancelled for the summer, right? All the area swimming pools, the park districts sports, the church camps that promised us at least a few days each summer without our children yelling at each other…all of this was cancelled. And even if all of this wasn’t actually cancelled, it would be cancelled for us because, as I remind you every third column, our youngest has a compromised immune system, and so we are homebound for the long term.

Like I said before, we’ve been quarantining way before quarantining was cool, and we will probably be quarantining well past the point when most folks resume life as normal. We are here at this house, with very few places to go, and so we needed something to break up the dog days of summer so we didn’t break random electronic gadgets against the wall.

So, we bought this BAIP—A Big Adventurous Inflatable Pool—and therefore now I will offer you, totally free, some uncertified life coaching advice in the unlikely event you too will be so desperate as to purchase such a mistake.

Step One: Obviously, order the pool. The pool will come in a huge box with pictures of smiling people on the outside. These people do not own this pool, nor do they own the children swimming in the pool with them, unless they gave birth to the children when they were fifteen.  The family enjoying the pool on this box does not exist.

Step Two: Go on YouTube to find out how easy it is to put up this pool. All kinds of videos exist of people setting up their pool in less than three days. These families also do not exist.

Step Three: Find a level place in your yard. No, not that spot. That spot is not level enough. Seriously, I’m telling you…you’re wasting your time. OK, wow. You just wasted a lot of water.

Step Four: Find an actual level place in your yard and start all over, trying desperately not to think about the ecological disaster that was your first attempt.

Step Five: Inflate the top of the pool. Yes, you do look like an idiot.

Step Six: Start filling it with water. Try to get out all the wrinkles. Try harder. Keep trying.

Step Seven: Watch more YouTube videos for setting up the pump. Argue with your spouse loudly in the backyard.

Step Eight: Once the pump is functioning, tell your children they better jump in the pool right this minute regardless of how cold it is and they better like it because this is their summer fun so they better get used to it.

Step Nine: Sit and watch them enjoy the silly thing.

Step Nine is my favorite, because it will allow me to make a dent in my National Geographic collection. I’m currently reading the December issue of last year about this guy who went to prison for threatening to kill a lady because she didn’t approve of his business model.

Did you know that in the United States, there are more tigers living in captivity than there are living in the wild? Did you know that you can, if licensed, actually own a real tiger?  If you’re interested, I know where you can find a bathtub.

Mending Fences

Each spring when introducing the research paper I ask my sophomores how many of them are biased. Most of them don’t move; a few of them slowly raise their hands; there’s always at least one student who shoots up his hand for attention. After a few moments, I raise my own hand and admit that I’m biased, we’re all biased, and that’s how our brains work. The trick, I explain, is to write well despite that mental baggage.

While it’s true that our biases can quickly take us to some very dark places, they don’t have to. Part of being a reasoned human being is confronting our impulses—intellectual and otherwise—and rising above them. Unfortunately, rising above anything nowadays is much easier said than done, and one reason is that we are now reminded of our biases all day long.

Back in olden times, there was a thing called the evening news. The evening news was offered by a handful of major broadcasting networks and it aired each day, as its name suggests, in the evening. There was also the morning news, of course, and a handful of other places to sit and listen to someone tell you what was happening in the world, but our diet of such discourse was limited. It was limited from chronological and quantitative standpoints—by when we could get the news and by how much—and also limited in ideology. After all, the networks were businesses geared toward profit, thus it was in their best interest to present information that would appeal to the broadest audience possible. That is what broadcasting is, and so ideological biases, while certainly present because humans are biased, were generally not overt.

This began to change with advent of the cable news networks, first with CNN in the early 1980s and FOX news later. Twenty-four hours news seemed like a stupid idea for quite a while, because it is, but after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 the die was cast. It was a perfect fit—perpetual access to a brief, victorious, made-for-television conflict—and we have been watching cable news ever since, devouring one sex scandal after another, bemoaning every other constitutional “crisis” as if the sky was falling for the first time in our nation’s history.

CNN and FOX were, and are, ideologically biased. CNN is liberal because its handlers are liberal and its consumers are liberal. FOX news is the conservative answer to that world view. Conservatives don’t watch CNN, or the MSNBC that came later, except to mock them for their progressive slant. Liberals, of course, treat FOX with the same contempt.

This is not new information, of course, but it is relevant to camp out on this idea. A generation ago, these two distinct audiences that are now getting their news from sources that validate their world view all day long, would have been one audience that digested the relatively same version of events for fifteen or so minutes a day.

Our ancestors would get their news and go do other things, like mend fences or talk to neighbors, often unaware or even concerned of how that neighbor was going to vote in the next election. People had their ideological differences, of course, and would certainly take time to voice them, but they weren’t reminded of those differences all day long.

As an illustration, if you tell a kid he’s a thief fifteen times a day, don’t be surprised when he steals your wallet. These days we are told what to think and who we are, and, more relevant to this discussion, we are told who we are not. Most importantly, we are not “them,” those idiot suckers watching the other channel.

And we wonder why everyone is so mad all the time. We wonder what has happened to trust.

Now, one could construct a decent argument that the “now” version of news consumption is better, because we have more options. Thanks to 24-hour cable news, we are not limited in time by when we digest the version of information we want to digest. Thanks to the advent of smartphones, we are not even limited in space by where we digest the version of information we want to digest. From a marketing and consumer standpoint, this seems like a ‘win.’

Right?

I could try to answer that question, but I won’t, because, thanks to modern technology, dozens of people we will never meet have already answered the question for us, and have given us the version of the answer we want based on our browser history.

So, instead, I’ll ask another question: Are we consumers, or are we humans? I’m certainly not advocating for ignorance or apathy, but perhaps some perspective and humility to help us digest all the “knowledge” we gulp down each day.

In closing, another lesson I try to teach my students is that when it comes to doing research, the problem is not finding information but finding information that is helpful. They often look at me with pity when I try to explain to them the horrors I faced while writing my own research papers last century in a place called a library: sifting through card cabinets, wandering down stacks of books, plugging nickels into Xeroxes and writing notes by hand.

How archaic.

And, if I’m being honest, they’re right, because it is easier to get information now, and that is wonderful. How can it not be?

 It’s one thing, however, to read, think, reflect, and decide.

Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have time for such luxuries anymore. We’ve outsourced those jobs to whomever will tell us what we want to hear, and can do it in the loudest voice.