Should the beatings continue until morale improves?

Hmmm... maybe not.



Once again, Rob Brezney has given me a profound thought. And my other Rob--RD--has me dreaming of J&R's marinated steak. Like, wow.



Evil is boring!



DEAR SLY OPTIMISTS, BENEVOLENT PRANKSTERS, AND DISCRIMINATING PRACTITIONERS OF BEAUTY, TRUTH, GOODNESS, AND LOVE,



I must confess that early in my career, I was proud of my well-crafted cynicism. Like most novelists, poets, journalists, filmmakers, lyricists, talk show hosts, and critics, I subscribed to the dogma that evil is interesting and good is boring.



You can imagine my dismay, then, when my muses began to nudge me in the direction of sly optimism. "It will ruin my image!" I complained to them from the depth of my worried meditations. "I refuse to write shiny happy propaganda! I will not turn into a dopey Pollyanna bereft of all critical thinking skills!"



But the muses were immune to my protests. Slowly and inexorably, they reconfigured my coyote angel rebel clown persona to serve a new master: PRONOIA. The opposite of paranoia, pronoia is defined as the sneaking suspicion that the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings. (Terence McKenna had a slightly different angle on it: "I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement, and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.")



To their credit, my muses managed to pull off this alchemical abracadabra without annihilating my native skepticism. If anything, it has become more robust, anchored as it is now in the thrilling quest for fascinating good news.



Dear readers, I invite you to invite your own muses to nudge you, too, in the direction of pronoia. In fact, I welcome you to join me in a supremely subversive quest: Let's infect everyone we know with an attraction to beauty, truth, goodness, and love.



I won't lie to you about our mission. Ignorance and inertia surround us. Cynicism is treated as a supreme sign of intelligence. Evil is regarded as inherently more interesting than good. Beautiful truths are dismissed and demeaned, while ugly truths are eagerly believed.



No, I won't lie to you about the work ahead of us. We will have to be cheerful rebels fighting against all odds. We will have to joyfully and exuberantly resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and attractively packaged by Very Self-Important People who act as if they know what they're doing.



We will have to buck every system and go against every grain -- even as we stay true to our vow to have a lot of fun. We will have to be relentlessly skeptical and sweetly innocent as we overthrow the sour, puckered hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.



But we will succeed; I guarantee it.



With rowdy blessings,



Rob



That's certainly different from my usual "doomsday" crap, ain't it?