The word "unpretentious" has been buzzing around my psyche for a couple of days now, popping up with a statistically unlikely frequency in conversation, overheard tv dialogue, reading materials and the like.
I'm going to do away with the bulk of my normal rant on the completely asinine logic of striving to be "un-"anything. I attended a dinner once not so long ago which featured a talk by his (dubious) honor Justice Scalia, in which he extolled the virtues and wonders (I shit you not, without a hint of irony or apparent recollection of HUAC, Sen. Joseph McCarthy etc.) of the fact that we have the word "un-American" to describe all those things which he finds distasteful.
Suffice it to say, after his witty, if completely disheartening, talk, I remained convinced that if the best definition one can muster for their beliefs is one that exists solely in opposition to something else that someone else has bothered to actually do, think-up or create, one is generally a complete and generally unconvincing ass.
Which brings me back to Do. I suppose my starting point was this: have you ever heard someone derisively scoff at the pretentiousness of a person, act, thing, who was not themselves somehow "creative," or "artistic" or an "intellectual?" Isn't the act of extrovertedly seeking unpretentiousness the most pretentious act of all? Is it not the most effete of self serving distinction drawing to privilege one's own approach to music, art, lit, or behavior over that of others? Who could possibly be the more pretentious asshole than the person scoffing at how something has become too distasteful to them for its commercialism, pretention, or the like.
Not sure where I'm going with this, other than to wonder who is the bigger asshole: the asshole, or the asshole who derives pleasure from pointing out what an asshole the first asshole is. One of these days we're all going to have to get back to living a life that is not so navel-gazingly meta-reductionist analytical all the time. Something is to be said for seeking one's own simplicity, rather than seeking out examples in others that allow one to define oneself as "uncomplicated."
