Month: June 2022

There’s a series of television advertisements funded by the US Marine Corps for recruiting purposes which have been running for awhile – for at least a few years, anyway. They involve a young man – always a man, despite changes in Marine Corps recruiting directives – moving through a post-modern urban landscape, and facing a series of dystopic illusions: emojis run wild, computer-generated versions of himself as a shill for popular material goods, being tempted by luxury goods spinning in a vacuum as is often done online. The young man, growing frustrated, accompanied by narration describing the soulless inadequacy of being alive in the modern world, resolves the situation by quite violently attacking the illusionary images, with the narrator shifting to a script of finding meaning, being called, and when the young man bursts through the illusions we see him diving, in full battle gear, into a military obstacle course, emerging from the swampy water and barbed wire as a determined, scarred, but no longer uncertain Marine.

Whenever the ad pops up – for some reason recently during “Jeopardy!”, the game show where every answer is in the form of a question, and for which I’m doing an online audition on Thursday – I’m struck by how deeply existential the ads are. I mean, they could have been storyboarded by Albert Camus: you are faced by the essential meaningless of a commercialised and dehumanised world, but you have a way out. Camus would have been more my speed and argued for taking that objective meaningless and transforming its energy into helping others and fighting existential injustice, but had he been hired by the US Marine Corps as an advertising artistic director, he would have easily done the exact same thing except use the abstract notion of “homeland threats” in place of “existential injustice” and voila, the ad I see every now and again would have come to life.

The counterpoint for the ad is a separate campaign – also oddly often shown during the nightly “Jeopardy!” viewing that I enjoy with my son, as his knowledge of the world is rapidly increasing and his ability to solve the answers keeps accelerating – that interestingly shows a slightly older young man, who crosses a road only to see an illusion of himself, who attacks him and the two of them engage in man-to-man combat until one – and we don’t really know which one – is defeated, at which point the camera pulls back and reveals the battle was all in his head, that the other people in the street with him are confused by what’s just occurred – which was an attack of post-traumatic stress triggered by his service in the military. The branch of the military isn’t stated – the point of the ad is to encourage veterans who are in emotional or mental distress to seek out the resources available to them.

Both ads – point and counterpoint, as it were – rely for their effect on the knowledge we all have, that the materialist world is essentially meaningless, that we all know that the world as presented to us normally by the advertisements that inevitably bookend the US Marine Corp recruiting spot and the veteran’s mental health spot is irredeemably horrid and corrupting. But as a story arc, the two ads taken together are really quite stunning: you, young man, can find meaning in becoming a warrior – because that is the message of the US Marine Corps, the tapping into the deep human vein of belief that war is one of the true and real callings of man – but in today’s world, once you do so, you’ll either die, or the likelihood is that calling to war will permanently scar you in a world which otherwise no longer sees any real glamour, or even valour, in putting on the kit and fighting the enemy.

My strong desire as a moral philosopher is for the ad buyers behind both of these ads get together over lunchtime cocktails and the superb butter-basted steaks at Wolfgang’s on 34th Street and Park (why Wolfgang’s? I want to encourage midday drinking among midtown executives, and the steaks will kill them off faster) and coordinate their ad buys so as often as possible, they are run during the same program, ideally National Football League and English Premier League and National Basketball Association games or even better, their endless pre-, post-, and between game commentary shows, the ones which mostly attract the young men because live sports is immediate, real, and thus totally different than the materialist hellscape we all normally live in but young men confront most directly.

I don’t want them to step over themselves – in fact, ideally, the meeting shouldn’t be at Wolfgang’s bar, but at one of the six-person semi-private booths the restaurant have under one of the old subway arches that make up the below-grade, almost ideally designed steakhouse. The other people there should be a couple of network guys – one from ABC, which also owns ESPN and has a close relationship with the NBA; one from NBC, which has the EPL US contract; and one from Fox, which has half the NFL broadcast rights but also has overlap with European and Asian athletics contracts – so that the two ad buyers (US Marine and PTSD veterans’ benefits guys, respectively) and make sure that there’s always an ad that falls between the two existential ads. The best effect would be to run the Marine ad, then run an ad for Applebee’s or one of the increasingly annoying ads for Lexus or BMW or maybe an ad for new network reality or singing competition show, and then run the PTSD ad. That cozy booth, smelling of high quality gin and even better steaks and maybe a bit of personalised existential anger of the type exuded by liberal arts graduates, who read Aristotle and Camus but ended up on Madison Avenue and as network advertising schedulers for lack of anything better to do and out of their screaming inadequacy when thinking about their earning power compared to that of their parents, could thus be a place where, through basic propaganda techniques, a generation of young people could realise that meaning can be found on a battlefield and through violence, but it comes with a cost that can never be fully paid in the form of crippling, endless emotional devastation.

What would be missing from that group, of course, would be the positive side of things. I can actually easily imagine that booth coming together, and even them deciding amongst themselves to craft a season or two long subconscious campaign to install a sense of complete existential inadequacy among viewers of sports programs. What would be lacking would be the alternative – and oddly, that’s been the question humanity has been wrestling with for thousands of years. War seems oddly compelling until you think about the consequences – but being base economic creatures, as farmers or industrial workers or cube farm data analysts, is utterly without meaning. And the only other choice seems to be to either enter the bloodsport ring of trying to be of the ruling class – that is to say, to direct the warriors and skim the cream off the efforts of the economic creatures – or to create intellectual pipe dreams.

The positive ad I’d envision would suck – but then again, I’m not a Madison Avenue copy guy. What I’m trying to envision is the ad to convince young people – hell, convince people in general – that there is no way of life which is simple, no calling which will solve the existential crisis. The ad would show up randomly, not paired with anything, but would show another young man, walking across the street just like the other two, and instead of facing electronica nonsense, would see some litter, and he’d pick it up. Or he’d see a friend across the street, and he’d join her for a coffee. Or he’d see a pigeon rustling up into a tree, and he’d smile, and he’d move on. This being 2022, he’d check his phone, and realise his mom had called, or that he was on his way to see his cousin’s school play, or a text from his roommate reminding him it was his day to water the plants at the apartment but that also there was a great band playing across the street in the evening. Mundane basics but all of them beyond just himself, all of them connecting him to the real world in ways that have no materialist benefit behind them.

It’s the lack of that last category, I think, that’s at the heart of the existential crisis much of the world is facing today. We know there are historical ways to find meaning – the three classes of medieval society in the merchant, the warrior, and the priest; the more modern checkout of the public intellectual; the conflicted life of public service via activism or civil service or augmented volunteering – and of course we can retreat into a materialised domesticity and cultivate plants or cats or model railways. But none of those seem to really apply to the existential challenge of a world of material plenty – and the ancient world seems to fall down when asked about finding such meaning, whether east or west. After all, those who transcended the evils of the past were either of the upper classes (Buddha and his south Asian contemporaries), an endowed god (Christ and the saints), or underemployed intellectuals (Confucius, Mencius, Pu Yi, etc). They offered a message, but not really for the sad sack young men and women who have no or only limited family and wealth advantages, but also are never going to get a PhD. and milk it into a calling.

The ads I’ve described are of young men, which I think makes sense: young men in the past were given meaning by society, but societies have largely stopped doing so, so young men are caught most deeply in the meaning trap. And young women – and, for that matter, young queer men – at least have the meaning that can come from rebelling against past privilege, which young men in general can’t really claim. But everyone faces this eventually, even those who at least for a time are able to insert their perceived victimhood into the slot required for individual meaning.

I do look to the Mad Men to come up with the campaign, though. Today it should cross all platforms – not just live TV sporting events and commentary, but also funded Twitterati, TikTok influencers, and Instagram channels; also purchased messaging placement in Marvel and DC movie franchises; also even old school advertising media like bus sideboards and highway billboards, still some of the finest settings for distilling messages into memes of highest latency in our minds. But right now, the ads are just of the three most challenging types: the ad telling you to search for meaning in a meaningless world; the ad telling you that finding that meaning will come at a tragic cost; and the vast majority of other ads that just insidiously remind you that the materialist world is shallow, horrid, and reinforces your own sense of meaninglessness.

Come on, ad people – the expense accounts can surely support one more big splurge at Wolfgang’s, maybe even with a couple creatives joining the buyers and the schedulers. You can do it. Find the fourth way and advertise it the way America does so phenomenally, so freaking, so fucking well for the kinds of things that only encourage existential despair. I have faith in you. And I’m looking forward to watching “Jeopardy!” and having my head spin. Actually, everyone is.

So tomorrow (today? I’m not sure when I’ll finish this) is Father’s Day in the United States, a completely idiotic holiday which we refer to locally as a “Hallmark holiday”, which is to say that it has no real organic origin but was invented to sell greeting cards. Mother’s Day, for instance, is a maudlin holiday invented by Republican PR specialists to remember and honour the mothers of those killed in the Civil War (and, specifically, those killed for the Union side), and thus really is not a Hallmark holiday. Father’s Day, on the other hand, evolved over time to encourage middle class families to spend more on gin, cigars, neckties, and prime ribeye steaks in mid June, roughly a month after post-Civil War guilt inspired the same middle class families to buy excessive bouquets, an early start to summer vacations, and to risk it all on bets for the Kentucky Derby for mothers.

All this means is that, while there might be some legitimate reason for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is basically a special from the boys in marketing, realising cynically that fathers will take what they can get, and that retailers will reward PR guys with a piece of the vig of whatever they create. And given that both the retailers and the wholesalers of cigars, gin, neckties, and bad cologne, have surprisingly large profit margins, they are reliable supporters of a Sunday in June dedicated to the sale and distribution of their products, even if really it’s just a vaguely disguised guilt trip for mothers, who had their day in May, but now are being forced – in the way that only a deeply engaged patriarchical process can – to feel guilty that their role in giving birth to the cannon fodder of a constitutional war built around the elimination of human bondage entails. I mean, no real guilt should entail, but if you’re shilling prime ribeyes, Cuban cigars, and golf equipment, hell, just run with it.

All of this makes me feel like ignoring Father’s Day except for the fact that it’s the same weekend as the USGA Open Championship in golf, or the US Open. I’ll note the US Open and its position on the calendar predates the Hallmark cult of Father’s Day, so it’s now just kind of a quaint coincidence – the third Sunday in June is the last day of the US Open but it also just happens to celebrate fathers, especially middle to upper middle class fathers who play golf as a means of frantically meeting societal class expectations, mostly, and not because they actually enjoy the outdoors or punching a small hard ball around in the outdoors, because most of them hate doing so, and would rather watch other young adult males playing sports instead of demonstrating their own failure at being able to play sports any more, and while this is a run-on sentence, I think it’s an important one, because Father’s Day is in fact that most interesting of modern phenomenons, a socially agreed upon event which only references social norms which don’t, really, have to exist, and in fact are rooted in things no one wants to perpetuate. Thanksgiving – US or Canadian – involves a falsehood of First Nations / colonial mutual love which, while false, is perfectly wholesome; Father’s Day involves a falsehood of fatherly concern for various material and sporting things which are completely, entirely divorced from the wholesome love of men for their children, and indeed, which material and sporting things are non-wholesome, embarrassingly commercialised distractions from the wholesome love of men for their children.

Which brings me to my day today.

I want to start by apologising to my son. I’m pretty sure all he wanted to do today was do online computer stuff (and by referring to such stuff as “stuff” and not “shit,” I officially earn a George Carlin “family empathy” badge and a well-mixed Beefeater’s Gibson, double, neat) – something involving an online chat service called Discord and its ability to enable simultaneous play in a Minecraft realm (the prior sentence had no meaning 20 years ago, and in 20 years, I have no doubt our ability to parse its historical meaning will have been as lost to the species as our ability to parse the Mayan temple ruins of Yucatan). His good friend came over – another child of a divorce, said divorce being differently messy than what the boy has had to deal with but let’s face it, every divorce sucks to an involved child. His friend is having a rough patch with parental transfers, and moreover, one of his classmates in fifth grade was about to move to Florida with his family. The young man wanted to spend Father’s Day – today or tomorrow, again depending on when I finish writing this – with the friend about to move away, which would mean two things. First, obviously, it would mean not spending the day doing artificially constructed “Father’s Day Approved” activities, most likely a lot of bowling or forcing divorced Dad to make barbecue hot dogs or or forcing Dad to teach a stereotyped male activity like woodworking or five-card stud or gapping spark plugs. And second, it would mean spending Father’s Day night at his divorced mom’s house, instead of spending it at divorced dad’s house, thirty miles away and thus hard to manage while still giving his friend about to move to Florida a proper sending off.

My son’s friend has picked up long ago that divorces, either selfishly, or unconsciously, or simply implicitly, involves scorekeeping, a constant battle to determine on the part of each child which parent is “doing better” or “cares more for the divorced child”. In my experience, this scorekeeping is inevitable within the parents and children for a certain period, but can be overcome with good intentions and lots of conversation. The trouble is, the broader community of any divorce – the friends, the extended families, the new friends who come after the fact at school or work or day care or running for town council – that broader community just wants a celebrity meltdown story. And so the children and the parents – even when they try their damndest to get it right – are constantly navigating a social landscape which wants to assign winners and losers (“your dad is a much shittier parent than your mom” / “your mom is a much more loving parent than your dad”).

I’m going to pause here and point out that both parents of the boy’s friend seem to be acting in an exemplary fashion. Most people – and certainly most trollers of internet things – assume that divorced parents basically default to doing the Worst Possible Thing For Their Child. While I have to admit, in dealing with divorced parents, I’ve seen a decent amount of that, let me state (fully aware of the self-serving nature of what I’m about to say) that it’s not actually true. Parents do a lot of the Worst Possible Thing For Their Child, but interestingly, divorced parents do quite a bit less of it, because the very nature of their divorce – “Hey, I’ve done the Worst Possible Thing For Our Marriage!” – means they no longer have any credibility to be viewed as a reasonable practitioner of “I’m Focused On the Best Possible Thing For The Family I’ve Constructed”. Married parents get to do the Worst Possible Thing for Their Child because hell, they’re married parents – the law and society (except if there’s race or drug use involved) never peel back the curtain. But because divorced parents are already publicly viewed as being incompetent – by everyone except only occasionally their children, who desperately want to think of their parents as being Always Great, just like all kids, but at least divorced kids have that illusion shattered earlier – they can only beg their children to think of them as being halfway decent human beings. But in this case, of the boy’s parents, both of them are truly doing a great job.

What was tough was witnessing how hard the boy’s friend was trying to personally reconcile being both a good friend – to the boy who was moving to Florida in 48 hours and may possibly never be seen again, which to a fifth grader is a trauma equivalent to the unspeakable – while being a great son to a very human and flawed father, while knowing that the actions that would make him be a good friend would possibly be seen by both the father and the mother as a kind of favoritism – of rejecting divorced dad to stay an extra night with divorced mom. For reasons I don’t fully understand, the boy’s friend seems comfortable talking about these quandaries with us – or rather, around us; my son usually zones out, which I completely understand. His divorced parent experience is almost impossible to translate into his friend’s divorced parent experience, because as Tolstoy told us at the beginning of Anna Karenina, family tragedies are all unique; only family pleasantness is similar enough to be able to be translated, and thus also is similar enough to be of no interest to the novelist or, really, even to the individual trying to understand the human experience.

As I say, though, the boy’s friend opens up to us all the time about his challenges navigating his family situation, but pace Tolstoy, the boy and I can only make conversation. Today I talked to him about how the love your parents feel for you – if they’re good people, and I truly believe his parents are good people – has nothing to do with the time of day of the third Sunday in June – either a father demanding sole focus, or a mother lording over the fact that a son chooses her over the father, on a lame Hallmark holiday. The love exists outside of time, outside of space, because that’s what love is. So over the course of a Monopoly game (which I clearly was winning despite constant rule violations and cheating between the two boys to prevent the inevitable), and the course of a lunch at Subway, and the course of a long car ride, I ended up trying to explain my theory of love, which is a theory of total surrender, of where a parent lets a child being selfish because that’s what love is but also a child lets a parent be selfish because that’s what love is the other way, and both see that selfishness over time and atone for their human inability to demonstrate the perfection of love to one another but also pledge – not to the other, but to themselves in honour of the other, to try to be less imperfect, and in so doing, everyone creates the love required to love others even more.

Which isn’t really what you want to do with an eleven year old boy and one’s ten year old son when both are also drinking sugary drinks and while the dog is bouncing around and randomly setting off the seat warmer button.

Eventually I think I convinced the boy’s friend to simply talk to his parents about the quandry: not to tell his father that he wanted to skip out on the pathetic Hallmark third Sunday of June holiday but that he wanted to be a good friend, to tell his mom that he wasn’t choosing her over his day but that he was really choosing to be a great friend and was, actually, using his mom’s house as a convenient base of operations, and that he loved both mom and dad and just wanted their advice and counsel on what the right thing to do was. And he talked to his mom, who talked to his dad, and he’ll spend the day with the friend who is moving to Florida, and his dad will pick him up late after dinner, and the mom will be extra up front about timing and logistics.

My son zoned out on all of this.

Which is okay. I think it’s actually both rational on his part, and the right incentivising behaviour as well. Rational because really, the boy is 10 years old: listening and reflecting on a conversation his 11 year old friend seems to need to have with me, the boy’s dad, is a lot of emotional heavy lifting. The rational thing for him to do is to actually focus on the Van Hagar-era 80s rock coming from the car radio, from 100,000 watts of WBLM POWER! broadcast from the LA Basin (that’s Lewiston-Auburn for you hard rock newbies). He has to process his own divorced parent bullshit every minute of every day, and he and his friend talk about that a lot – but if his friend wants to download to me, one half of the boy’s divorced parent bullshit factory, it’s completely understandable that the boy himself would decide to not listen.

It’s incentivising behaviour, though, in the sense that if the boy’s friend engages me in “what should I do, Mr. Freilinger?” queries, my son probably is listening at least partially to figure out if I’m feeding his friend a line of fatherly bullshit that I clearly don’t deliver to my actual son. I do my best to be a good father, but of course, I suck at it – but when his friend asks for fatherly advice, my son has a chance to compare my intellectually and rhetorically refined fatherly bullshit delivered to his friend, to my actual delivery of parental behaviour in reality. So my son, by letting me dig my own rhetorical grave, is gaining ever more future intellectual ammunition to show me that, despite my best intentions, I was a crap father who didn’t live up to even my own expectations. And, therefore, depending on his maturity level at a given point in time, he deserves a Nintendo Switch, or he deserves getting me to bail him out of jail after he was busted selling eight-balls at the senior prom.

My goal, clearly, is that he won’t simply want material goods for fulfilment, and that he won’t realise that selling drugs to idiots is actually an effective way of making a living as long as you don’t get caught (or, for that matter, ending up too much of an idiot and just inspiring the next Scarface). My goal as a parent is that he’s a moral, good, wonderful individual, with the social skills and ambition and curiosity to make a living in a sustainable way on a planet which is not simply here to fulfil human whims. And oddly, I hope that’s the goal of his friend’s parents, but even if it’s not, my goal for his friend needs to be the same.

Hopefully, my son is holding me to account as a I talk to his friend, and my own self-reflection is making me better as a father than I would be if I weren’t asked to give fatherly advice to another. Hopefully, my advice is helping my son’s friend work his own way through a divorced parent situation which is harder than a “normal” family situation which doesn’t have to navigate the open wounds of post-divorce relationships. And hopefully, my son and his friend both are seeing me as doing my best as an adult – which isn’t to say I’m going it perfectly or even well, just that I’m doing my best, and that if they do their best in an unselfish way – knowing that they’ll still be jerks every now and again – they will be fathers in the future that are good and decent. Not perfect, not even “really good” – just good, just decent.

And tomorrow – it will be tomorrow; I’m going to finish writing this before midnight – it doesn’t matter if the boy is with me or with his mom, or if his friend is with his dad or his mom. If both boys are talking to their parents – and even better, if both have learned that it’s okay to trust good adults, and that they get good adults to help them navigate who aren’t just parents – then it will all be fine. It’ll be fine tomorrow: I have no idea what Monday will hold. But all I’m asking for is for two boys to enjoy a great Father’s Day, and for their parents to breathe more easily knowing that it’s happened.

Monday will be another day. We’ll face that on its own terms.