Moojinorbit

[Drafted by hand in Rome and edited and posted upon return.]

There’s nothing like Europe—or pretty much anywhere outside the continental U.S.—to make me feel like a total ignoramus. Trust me, the doctorate is no reflection on my grasp of world history, or names and dates and geography in general. I can’t tell you how long it took me to remember for sure that the French Revolution, or at least its first (de)crowning moments, occurred in 1789–and that’s one of the most important dates to know as a teacher of political theory. Every time I teach Plato or Aristotle (the classics admittedly not being my forté) I have to look up the dates again—which one was 4th C. B.C. and which was 5th? (Answer: they crossed over a tad: Plato c. 427-327 B.C.; Aristotle c. 384-322. Yeah, I had to look that up again.) Some scholars may discount online cheat sheets, but I’d pretty much die without Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Brittanica; they’ve gotten me through more lectures than I care to admit.

So here we are, dwarfed by Rome and the beautiful treasures therein.
One glance at the city map and I feel defeated: “No way can we possibly cover, let alone absorb, this many mind-boggling sites in less than 36 hours!” I’m not exaggerating when I say that every twenty steps one is confronted with a looming monument of historical significance. It’s not just the abundance of man-made wonders; it’s how little I know about any of them, how unsure I am about what they really mean. Between our ultra-tight budget and lack of time, there is no way we can do the minimum required to manage Rome: half-day tours for each major site with knowledgeable guides. Left to my own devices, I feel like crawling under the hotel bed and wallowing in the shame of my meager education. Mental fledgling:

History? 1789 is small change. Try, oh, 753 B.C. when Romulus founded Rome. How ‘bout 125 A.D. when Christians under the emperor Hadrian rebuilt what had been a temple to the Roman gods for hundreds of years into the feat of ancient engineering that is the Pantheon. We gaped at I Fori Imperiali, the ruins of a sprawling civic space that Julius Caesar started in Christ’s lifetime and bigwigs like Agustus, Traiano, Nerva and fricking Mussolini added onto in the intervening twenty centuries.

Across the street was the Monumento a Vittorio Emanuel II the first monument to glorify Italy as a unified nation-state, finished in 1935.

Next to that was the Palazzo Venezia a medieval masterpiece that rulers from Pope Paul II to Napoleon to Mussolini used as a seat of power. For the first time, I realized that those monstruous Las Vegas fakes on the strip, such as Caesar’s Palace, are actually pretty close to or even smaller than scale. These tributes to masculinity, hegemony, and empire are huge. I was plenty overwhelmed even before we rounded the corner and confronted the Coliseum and surrounding ancient ruins. At that point I couldn’t do anything but cry. I find it so intense to stand amidst the relics of human activity that old.

Spanish steps (actually given to Rome by the French, which I found out when I borrowed a British teenager’s guidebook):

So much is lost on me. Augustus? Yeah, I think I’ve heard of that guy. Titus, was he that bully who always tortured Popeye? Didn’t Van Halen play at the Coliseum in the ‘80s? Oh no, that’s where real gladiators fought each other—or boars, bulls, tigers, etc.—til somebody keeled over, while high status Romans munched popcorn.

The Quirinale? Yeah, the king of Italy lived in its sprawling campus, and the Pope, until he started shackin’ up in the VATICAN (but I’d’ve failed a pop quiz on any of that). The Vatican, you know, that little place that houses St. Peter’s Basilica, where Michelangelo’s Pietá—a sculpture he completed at the ripe old age of 23—greets you when you walk in? The Basilica makes every stunning cathedral I’ve ever seen look like a ghetto storefront church.

In fact, Rome makes you (or at least me) wonder what the hell you’re doing on this planet anyway. Are you designing an open dome like the one in the Panethon that will last some two millennia without the use of reinforced concrete, despite the fact that rain can enter any time it wants?

Or are you just human filler (see April post), like the human bones used to fortify walls in Delos (or like these idiotic tourists)?

If you had a past life in Renaissance Italy, were you carting loads of marble dust on your spine, or were you assisting God and Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, or hanging out with Raphael in Florence? (‘Cuz, no offense, but I don’t think any of us were the artists themselves.) My point is, after cluelessly stumbling by all these masterpieces, I’d feel lucky if I’d been a cat sprawling somewhere near one of the bridges over the Tevere river. Judging by the dumb look on my sunburned face and the fact that, like half a million others today I tossed a coin over my shoulder into the Trevi Fountain for luck, I’d say there’s no doubt that even on my best days my life’s achievements amount to the insignificant products of human filler.

The question Rome boldly asks us, over and over, is: What will your legacy be?

Humbling in the extreme.

Maybe it was feeling like an intellectual midget that made me eat as much pizza, pasta and gelato as I could—which I have to concede was comforting. “When in Rome,” as they say. Yeah, I’ll be returning to South Beach Diet when I get home.

Oh, and one little other happy observation. The fuel economy vehicles in Europe, and especially Italy, make the Toyota Prius look like an SUV. And they’re totally cool looking. This gives me home that someday my countrypeople might actually abandon their global warming pods.

I don’t know what else to say. I’m not worthy.

What do you think of when you hear “filler”? I think of homogeneous stuffing. Stuff that goes inside other stuff, just to fill it. For example, fig goo in Fig Newtons; cream in cream puffs; that fluffy, synthetic material in stuffed animals; lawn grass; cement; commercials; the dialogues in soap operas; Kevin Costner movies.

And then there’s Human Filler. Yeah, I’m finally getting it down in the blog.

Warning: the following ideas lend themselves to fascist implementation. Keep tabs on your inner Mussolini.

Assertion #1:
There are human beings in the world who seem to centripitally pull to the homogeneous center, the land of normative, the vortex of sameness and therefore mediocrity. These will be here referred to as Human Filler.

Assertion #2:
There are more of these humans on earth than there are centrifugally oriented ones, who pull to the outside, the margins, to various realms of non-normative thinking, behaving, living, and, ideally, questioning. (The latter humans are typically camped as “minorities,” “elites,” or “freaks” of some sort.)

Assertion #3:
Admittedly, the boundaries of normative and nonnormative shift according to social and political context. A rebel in one setting may be a robot in another.

Assertion #4:
A defining characteristic of Human Filler is that if channels, funnels, tranquilizing devices, cages and such are designed cleverly enough, Human Filler will fill them voluntarily, no force or coercion required. This is partly because Human Filler by definition likes to be around other Human Filler and prefers to avoid the harder work of carving out unique paths. (Scholars such as C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, and Herbert Marcuse have brilliantly theorized this dynamic. My assertions are not particularly original, though the terminology and application is idiosyncratic.)

Assertion #5:
Most humans like to think they are not Human Filler, and some are indeed more original/rebellious/freaky than most, but precious few are never Human Filler. Being inadvertently bundled among the Human Filler is a product of the postmodern condition. This is an inescapable fact for all but the most determined social isolates—who may become so isolated that they are incapable of understanding Human Filler enough to challenge it if the time comes. (Thus, a reason to visit Or-Land-O.)

Examples of Human Filler Activity:
The masses of humans in London and Paris in 2005 who endured extreme urban congestion, parking nightmares, and attendant logistical hell to congregate in public squares merely to discover whether their nation would host the Olympics several years hence, then cheered or hissed in dramatic reaction to the announcement (which they might have simply watched on t.v. and which summarized decisions over which the Human Filler had no input or control) exemplify Human Filler Activity. But, of course, all states require Human Filler to attend such announcements, else who would be there to represent an audience/citizenry? (Aside: the fact of “citizenry” becoming reduced to “audience” is itself a sign of an advanced Human Filler society.)

Consider the possibility that the throngs waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square every New Year’s Eve, or who amble Zombielike along the sidewalks and through the moving casino walkways of Las Vegas and Atlantic City, who pack football and soccer stadiums around the world, likewise represent Human Filler Activity. Human Filler also tends to congregate in malls, in live television audiences, on public transportation (see, no one is exempt), in SUVs, midsize sedans, minivans, muscle cars, and compact cars. Also: video arcades, bowling alleys, and suburbs. Really, there are few public sites in postindustrial cultures—with the possible exception of the mythical “public square” where people allegedly once participated in democratic debate and decision-making—where Human Filler Activity is not.

Also, I don’t know because this is not the culture with which I am familiar, but sometimes big Islamic prayer rituals seem, at least from the outside, really Human Filler-y.

You know when you’re leaving a concert and people start groaning “Moo!”? That is Human Filler inadvertently making its noise, one of the rare instances in which Human Filler becomes aware of itself.

Assertion #6:
The United States is a factory of Human Filler, with certain geographical regions, such as the Midwest and “The Valley” in California, being especially high-output areas. To wit: the swarms of puffy pasty people wandering the halls of the Chicago O’Hare airport munching Doritos and looking for their gate.

Or Orlando, Florida: Land O’ Human Filler. There, not one, but a half dozen “theme parks” have been designed to attract Human Filler for to drain the savings they have acquired through tedious and difficult employment or, alternately, reduce the credit allowances on cards designed for Human Filler consumption. Disney World, Sea World, Universal Studios, Holy Land (the Christian theme park; Lord, how I wish I’d had time), Water World, Discovery Something-or-other-about-dolphins, and the new Aquatica, where scantily clad attendees can shoot rapidfire through clear tubes underwater past undoubtedly miserable sea mammals.

In Or-Land-O Human Filler, body size is no obstacle to thrill rides, no-holds-barred buffet dining, mall shopping, and sunbasteing. In fact, the larger the Human Filler bodies, the better. Everyone knows that skinny kids can’t do good cannonballs and thereby effectively drench people sitting beside hotel pools reading silly academic books. In Or-Land-O it is obvious that the American food industry is stuffing Human Filler with fatty filling. The plumper the flesh, muse our chefs of state, the juicier the roast.

In Or-Land-O Human Filler, airport architects didn’t mind designing excessively inefficient security line structures that would mean longer waits than almost any airport in the country; they know that Human Filler would be sufficiently numbed from theme park lines as not to ask questions. The longer Human Filler can be made to stand around, the clearer the resolution captured by invisible surveillance cameras.

Poor Human Filler carrying shopping bags, dragging strollers and suitcases through the jam-packed airport on a Thursday. Human Filler children lugging Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and the Little Mermaid stuffies, whining for their dead-eyed Human Filler parents to carry their extra. Parents instructing them to “sit down and play your Game Boy.”

This is Or-Land-O. Freeways running parallel to each other with only a couple of miles between them; displays of senseless transportation management and excess expenditure. High-end housing tracts stretching as far as the eye can see, broken only by artificial lakes, golf courses dug out of or created by filler, and, of course outlet malls, strip malls, and restaurant malls. Formerly wild places filled in wherever one looks with linear landscaping—grass and palm trees and flowering bushes trimmed into squares. Very X-Files, very Truman Show, very pastel. Very disturbing.

Call me harsh, call me anti-American, but Or-Land-O was total Human Filler overwhelm and only supported my miscreant theories.

Assertion #7:
Human Filler is the prelude to the Apocalypse.