Hawking Up Hairballs

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

We're All Monkeys On This Bus

I was watching this show on TV called Gangland. Well, okay, I wasn't actually watching it in the sense of sitting there on the couch watching it. I was doing something on the computer at the same time. I do that a lot, have the TV on while I'm doing something else. It's a kind of company. This is especially true in the evenings. I rarely have the TV on during the day. It must have something to do with the remnants of my workaday schedule. Of course, it also reminds of this claim that I read somewhere a long time ago. It seems that the mental hospitals calmed down a lot when they first got TV's. The patients stopped raising so much hell in favor of watching the tube. Of course, my hellraising days are long over anyway, so I guess I really am part boob, just like all this rest of peering idiots.

Anyway, I got off track there. So, I'm watching this Gangland episode. They're profiling this supposedly notorious motorcycle gang whose name I don't recall. As part of demonstrating what bad asses these guys were, they showed the photos that they had taken of themselves, posing with their guns. One thing came to mind right away. In Ken Burns' documentary on the Civil War, he shows these soldiers, both Union and Confederate, posing with their guns for photographers. But for the more extravagant posturing of the gangbangers, they looked remarkably the same. It's interesting that you don't see such photos of soldiers in World War One or Two. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that the photographers were permitted to set up shop right in the military camps during the Civil War.

Men, especially young men, congregate together in fraternities of violence. The chimps do it and so do we humans. Militaries have always exploited this. Ex-soldiers are continually writing that they don't fight for their country or out of any sense of patriotism but for the guys in their unit. They often claim that the relationships they form in their units are the strongest they've ever experienced. Likewise, gangbangers maintain that the gang is like a family, that its members are their brothers.

It all reminds me of a photo I saw recently. It was of this chimp in a zoo somewhere. He was some kind of genetic freak in that he had no body hair. It's one thing to watch footage of hairy chimpanzees running around in an African forest. To hell with what the geneticists say, those damn apes don't look all that much like us, but that hairless chimp. He was spooky.

6 Comments:

Anonymous barbara in decatur said...

Seems she was female and just died.

http://monkeydaynews.blogspot.com/2009/04/cinder-hairless-chimp-passes.html

It DOES make a person feel odd.

1:45 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Monkeys with pig flu. That be us.

W in PDX

11:52 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I tried to read some interesting posts here, but my eyes hurt after reading a paragraph or two. The small white font on top of a dark background creats a kind of blurish vision for me.

A monkey screams for change.

X in PDX

8:10 PM  
Blogger Chuck Oliveros said...

Point well taken about the white font on the black background. How about it now?

5:48 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you. It is so much easier to read. However, if it is up to me, I would use a bigger font, at least the size used in this comment page.

X in PDX

10:42 PM  
Blogger Chuck Oliveros said...

I'd change the text size, but I can't seem to figure out how to do it. I'm sure it's pretty obvious, but that I'm just missing it.

6:16 PM  

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