Henri Reynard Speaks Out

Get Over It?

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Isn't it funny how phrases catch on in the minds of people? Do you remember, " Mikey likes it? I have no clue what product it was supposed to sell me but I can certainly tell you that I have heard it again and again since the commercial that spawned it disappeared. The air is full of slogans, catchy or otherwise at any point in our lives. We are drowning in a sea of phrases competing for our attention every day of our lives. Have you ever noticed that fact? Long dead products are dancing around inside my head competing for my attention with the newest kids on the block. Procter and Gamble own as much of my brain as the issues of who should be President and if we should be at war or not. My wife just says that I need a low level reformat, but then she's a computer nerd, what does she know. Most of us watch the Super Bowl for the ads now; does anybody care who wins the game anymore? The selling of the President series of books sits somewhere on my shelves gathering dust along with a batch of other books that warn against letting the toxic sludge of media campaigns into my brain.

War is being sold like soap as the answer to everything that needs cleaning up in the world. I read a book once, "1984", that warned me this would happen. As I remember it was written before we all started to take this media barrage for granted. It was even written before that year (1984) blew by me. That was just after I got over the trauma of being past forty and sliding downhill toward fifty. Time passes but the roar of the media gets louder and louder in our daily lives. Not much of the world is clear of its influence any more. I remember going on a camping trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area wilderness preserve thirty years ago. I came back and commented to a friend that while we were out there we ran into another group complete with their transistor radio and spent an evening catching up on the news. The whole point of that trip into real wilderness was to get away from modern life. But there we all were listening to that radio squawking away about things that didn't matter any more by the end of the trip.

I'm an information junkie, and the amount of stuff that clutters up my brain is hard for me to comprehend. I try to relieve myself of that constant psychic noise once in awhile by sitting on my patio and looking up at the stars. It's quiet out there late at night. I can hear the crickets and the coyotes yipping away in the hills behind our little town in the desert. I did that last night and came in to the sound of laughter from our library. My wife was watching Bill Mahr's new show, "Real Time" which had been recorded a couple of days earlier, so we could watch it in unreal time I guess. Humor evidently ages fast these days so you need to get it while it's hot. Mahr had Michael Moore, the author of "Stupid White Men" on his show. That title, which a lot on the people who lived on the street I grew up on would have called an oxymoron if they had known the word, was brilliant. It is evidently the best selling book in Japan today and would be in the Middle East if it had been translated into Arabic. Mooré's movie, "Bowling For Columbine" just won the Academy Award for best Documentary and his acceptance speech was the topic of discussion.

I understand that there are people who don't like Michael Moore in this country; some have even labeled him as unpatriotic. That is a word that means to some people in this nation that you have had the temerity to disagree with our divine "leadership". Michael called a certain Stupid White Man who lives in the best protected White House in the nation out in that short speech. He condemned him for being unelected among other things and Mahr felt that the problem with saying that was that it weakens Michael's other, more acceptable, positions on issues of the day. Michael disagreed based on the point that that election is the heart of what is wrong with this nation today. Elections are the basis for all of our other rights and if we just get over one that was blatantly stolen we give up too much of our franchise as citizens. I agree with Moore but he is swimming upstream against a flood of media dedicated to making his position work against him. The media decided that the catchy phrase, "Get over it" was the mood of the public. It was not, it was used to form the public reaction to the theft of that election.

"Get over it" is a phrase that can be used over again any number of times, it's really handy. "You lied to me"! "Get over it"! "I'm pregnant"! "Get over it"! "Preemptive war is wrong"! "Get over it"! "You stole my Social Security and gave it to your rich friends"! "Get over it" "You gave the whole world a good reason to hate us"! "Get over it"! "Your Preemptive wars will kill off international trade"! "Get over it"! "Terrorism will get worse no matter how what we do in Iraq after the war"! "Get over it"! "You are destroying the constitution in order to defend us against Terrorism"! "Get over it"! That catchy little phrase covers a lot of ground doesn't it? "Just keep letting that phrase run your reaction to outrages and your life will keep getting worse"! "Oh, would you please just get over it"!