trivia

Chris and I like to play bar trivia but we rarely do very well. It usually comes down to one round that is all about something neither of us knows anything about, like yoga poses or the television show Entourage. Every now and then we'll get a round about something most people don't know about, like the time we went from last place to second in one round about Irish literature. I whipped through that faster than Chris could even read the questions and the trivia guy announced to everybody that he'd never seen a team come back like that. Of course, all our progress was wiped out by the stupid Entourage round.

I've always wondered how there are some teams that get everything right. I suppose our weakness is that there are two of us and six of them, although back at Lou's we'd usually have three or four and we didn't do any better, except the time we came in second and had to split a $10 gift certificate among four people. I think because Lou's was Lou's and us was us they just gave us all beer anyway.

But what do the know everythings do to know everything? Do they watch endless episodes of Jeopardy! or read AP textbooks? Do they lay in bed at night memorizing the answers on the cards of Trivia Pursuit? I mean, it's one thing to be literate and to know culture and history, but to also know the only people to win two best video awards are Rihanna and whoever the guy was whom I'd never heard of? (At least most of us wrongly guessed Michael Jackson and Madonna. They are cultural icons.)

I can usually answer 80% of the questions myself, which is necessary because Chris isn't all that helpful sometimes. Like he'll know a song word for word but he can't tell you the title or the artist and that's what you need to answer. We're pretty good at the music rounds as long as you keep it pre-21st century. We can't stand most of the trite crap that passes for music these days. One of the trivia girls recently chided us for putting Katy Perry as the singer for Call Me Maybe. It's all the same crap, the same whiney chick who confuses screaming for singing. Children can be excused for liking garbage music, but grow up, adults.

I read the news and I can answer the current events questions but when it's pop culture hearsay Kardashian crap, I skip that. I continue to be floored that so many Americans can name all the Kardashians but they can't name a single justice on the Supreme Court, then come election time they bitch about politicians.  Free clue, folks: if you can't name all the SCOTUS justices you have zero right to complain about immigrants or weddings or anything American, really,which far too many of you do.

They gave us a sheet of yoga poses last night and told us to name them. Neither of us know or care anything about yoga but we had to fill in something. I thought one looked like a frog so I wrote "The frog" and then decided the theme would be animals, so I wrote in animal names for them all. The funny thing was that the theme was correct, and there was a frog, and I would have gotten some others right but I put snake instead of cobra and dolphin instead of fish and praying mantis instead of scorpion. What do I know? I thought I was completely making stuff up. The stupid thing is that I should have been thinking about animals in India and we would have gotten more correct.

But that's why it's called trivia. It's very trivial.

Words are sticks and stones

I don't like not knowing the names of flowers or the parts of a boat or what birds are called. They aren't "flowers;" they're dahlias and catmint and verbana and begonias. They aren't "birds;" they're finches and ravens and terns and wrens. Too often we think that knowing the names of things is for specialists. But really it's just an extension of literacy. If you are not trying to learn as much as you can you are choosing to be illiterate.

I can't imagine not knowing the names for important things: countries, world leaders, major waterways, historical events, the things that shape our world and our lives for better or worse. But that is how much of the world lives. Not knowing things, not being able to call something by its proper name. If you dont know the word for something, you can't possibly understand it, why it exists, how it functions, etc.

That's how propaganda can flourish. People with less than honorable intentions take advantage of your not knowing, and you don't even know that you don't know it.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, there was a Sarah Palin fan who infamously railed against the "bailouts." When she was told by the reporter that Palin herself had supported the bailouts, the woman refused to believe it and thought the reporter was lying.

I'd be willing to bet the woman doesnt even know what the term "bailout" means. She just repeated what she heard politicians say to fool uninformed voters. Most Republicans had spent millions of dollars trying to convince voters that Obama was "socialist." Funny how many of them supported the bailouts behind closed doors.

When you don't understand words, you don't understand concepts. I didn't know the name of the tickseed I bought for my garden, so I didn't know that when its leaves started to turn lighter that something was wrong, and I didn't check for aphids until it was too late. Now it's dead.

Words matter. They are the manifestation of our thoughts, the way we communicate with each other. They are part of why we are social creatures, and they are part of anti-social behavior like propaganda. They can break bones and mangle bodies.

Chris calls me a geography whiz for knowing the names of places, but that's just being cognizant of the world, being literate. You can't know the world if you don't know its people and places. Knowing is acknowledging the humanity there; not knowing says you believe everyone is not worth knowing, that they are somehow inferior to you, that they are terrorists and targets instead of human beings with families and friends and hopes and dreams.

I remember one incident when a guy who had never owned a passport and rarely left Indiana told me how I was wrong about what Beirut was like. That I had just finished telling him about my year in Lebanon did not matter to him; the narrative was already ingrained in him, and I was a terrorist sympathizer because I enjoyed the place, because all Arabs are terrorists.

Oh, the Narrative, that story you are told over and over again until you begin to believe it as truth. Ideologies are narratives. Religions are narratives. Patriotism and textbook histories are narratives. Now we have so many narratives no one is capable of thought. #Gamergate. #BlackLivesMatter. #loveislove. #2A #tcot #tlot #p2. Social media allows us to live in bubbles where we can block other narratives that aren't in line with our own. This only serves to reinforce our beliefs that we are right, because everyone in our bubble thinks the same way so we must be right.

But the narrative is never right. The narrative is a distortion of some truth or half-truth; the whole purpose of its existence is to tell someone else he's wrong. The narrative needs enemies to live, and if they aren't forthcoming, it creates them. The narrative manipulates the meaning of words until they are no longer used in the proper sense by those who follow the narrative. (Hence the use of the term "socialist" by conservatives to describe Obama, for example.)

The narrative instructs hatred for difference and focuses on a single event or person to paint entire groups and civilizations with the same brush.

Aren't you tired of the narrative? Aren't you tired of being afraid of things you don't understand, or words you don't know? Why not open up a dictionary and learn some words? Get a passport and see the world, because it's damn hard to cling to the narrative when you can see with your own eyes that the narrative is wrong.