The time has come for something to be said about the beards.
I first noticed the millennial lads sporting beards as a sort of avant-garde fashion statement. Or so it appeared. Then later I thought: This is a fad and will soon enough pass. But there was a time when I thought the same about Starbucks and its bitter coffee. And yet the beards continued to multiply, spreading like a contagion to anyone under forty. Today the trend seems more prevalent than ever. It's an epidemic of pogonotrophy. So what are we to make of it?
Let's start with a few simple questions. Is it laziness? I don't think so; some of these things must be a bear to groom (pardon the pun). But for the ungroomed which we sometimes see, maybe it is just that, laziness. Is it peer pressure? Surely, there must be some of that as well. Deteriorating societal standards of personal presentation? Oh yeah, that too.
But I have a darker question: Are these guys hiding an extreme lack of self-confidence behind a mask of facial hair? Wait...what? Surely that is reading way too much into a mere fashion statement, right? Besides: All of them? Really? But just for fun, let's push the question to the end: Are these beards emblematic of a growing lack of confidence in the West? Or at least for an ever-increasing number of its male participants? And what does that mean for our future? Over the top? Read on.
I suppose younger men have it tough. I mean current academic and other bien pensant attitudes towards masculinity are rather unsympathetic, and sometimes even hostile. I have read that a beard is the last acceptable method for a man to demonstrate his masculinity. Have these young men been so emasculated by academia and political correctness that they feel like they have to grow a Taliban-style beard to prove to themselves and to others that they are in fact male? That's a sad thought; pathetic if true. But when thinking about this trend, that is the word that most often comes to mind: Pathetic.
And I do question the new beard's effectiveness as a symbol of masculinity. A beard alone just cannot make an unmanly man look manly, much less be manly. Rather it just makes him look ridiculous. And fraudulent. The problem is that these are not rugged, outdoorsy men, working in the elements, growing beards as a matter of course. These are not lumberjacks, oilfield roughnecks, merchant seamen, or deep sea fishermen. Men with constant traces of dirt and grease under their fingernails. No, no, these are baristas and shoe salesmen and various liberal arts graduates who want to look like roughnecks. And of course, we all see through that.
Now no doubt these guys would argue: "Hey, I know that no one will confuse me with a lumberjack. But it's a look. An edgy fashionable look. And I'm an edgy fashionable sort of fellow." And there is no arguing with that. I mean Heidi Klum just married the Geico caveman.
And that is part of the problem, ladies. You are tolerating and perhaps even encouraging this absurd pretense. Stop it. Tell the men in your life just how ridiculous they look.
Will that arrest declining confidence in the West? Absolutely not. But at least it's something.
Working Theory
What follows is a thought experiment based on the theory that if you do not charge cable customers for any channels that they do not want, they will in turn be willing and able to pay more for the channels they do want.
Step One
Make ESPN a premium channel. To make this explanation a bit easier, let's just say, it's $10 per month (for all the ESPN channels as a bundle). But I think it could easily be less.
No, this would not increase your monthly bill under this plan (keep reading).
Step Two
Offer a required Basic Tier with any five non-premium channels, selected by the customer, for $20 per month. This tier would also include all local and public-access channels.
Step Three
Offer each additional non-premium channel for $1.00 per month. Channels can be added and dropped online with, say, 30 days notice.
Examples
ESPN Customers
So the minimum cable bill would be $20 per month. If you are an ESPN junkie, and let's take the extreme case - you watch little else - then your bill would be $30 per month. And with that you get five extra channels, plus all the local stuff.
What about those folks who just love having 100 channels?
Well, not that they watch all of them, right? But let's say that's what you need; your bill would be $115 per month. That is before any premium channels including ESPN. If you need ESPN in addition, your bill would be $125. Plus you would get all the local stuff.
What about most of us?
Let's see, most of us like sports, so sure, we want ESPN. And we want all the local stuff. And we love CNN and Fox News and the Weather Channel, and a handful of other cable channels. So for this example, let's say we watch as many as 30 different non-premium cable channels from time to time.
Basic Tier: $20
25 Extra channels: $25
ESPN: $10
Total: $55
And I think 30 channels is a lot. I bet if you really think about it, you watch fewer than that. For non-sports-fanatics, such as myself, this is a $45 plan. And the truth is, I could probably get by with, say, 15 channels. That would be a $30 plan. 10 cable channels? $25 per month.
And there is room to be creative here. For example, buy the ESPN premium channel, get Lifetime and Hallmark for free (so take those two out of your selected five). Something for him, something for her.
Local-Only & Single Premium Packages
Finally I see no reason why the providers cannot continue to offer a local-only package, without any cable channels, for say, $10 per month. I also see no reason why the providers cannot offer premium channels without either the local package or basic tier. So that ESPN customer above, could pay just $10 per month for that one channel or bundle. Or ESPN plus local for $20 per month. When compared to the existing system, that is an incredible bargain for the sports fanatic. Same with HBO and other premium channels.
Goals
Of course we want to lower monthly bills for most customers. But we also want a plan acceptable to the providers. The networks would almost definitely need to give up the bundles they now foist on the providers (if you want X channel, you must also carry the Y and Z channels). For this plan to work, the providers would only pay networks based on the current subscriber count for each individual channel. And so under this scheme, some of the least watched cable channels would necessarily go out of business. But as currently constructed, we are subsidizing them anyway.
Excerpts and Observations
In regard to politics, I have always considered myself a member of a tiny minority. A minority of exactly one. For all of the political parties in the United States, the two dominant parties as well as the smaller ones, there are aspects of their respective platforms that simply preclude my membership. They all have some ideal or ideals that I cannot endorse and often find loathsome.
Further, I have found that political independents are not able to look to other independents for similar ideals or community. To borrow from Tolstoy, political party members are all alike; every political independent is independent in his own way. Every nonconformist is nonconformist in his own way.
So it is with this background that I come to Kevin Williamson's The Smallest Minority. By title alone, it seems, finally, someone has written a book for me. And perhaps for you, if you are a member of, as Williamson puts it, "the smallest minority - the only one who matters: the individual."
Williamson defines individual as, "one who can stand at least partly away from the demands of his tribe and class and try to see things as they are, and shout back over his shoulder what he sees." Yeah okay, sure. But I don't think that Williamson is an independent in my sense above. He says that he is not a Republican, but he seems to be a Christian conservative. He is certainly independent in the sense that he works in the overwhelmingly left-leaning media. But a more honest subtitle for this book might have been: Conservative Survival in the Age of the Left-Wing Digital Mob. Sure, I might still have picked it up, but no doubt he wanted to appeal to the broadest possible book-buying public.
So whether or not Williamson considers himself an independent, he certainly considers himself an independent thinker - It's right there in the subtitle. But then, doesn't everyone. There is this nugget: "People who dedicate their lives to finding idols before which they may abase themselves—the cult of inter-sectionality, identity politics, the Make America Great Again jihad, race and/or sex and other demographic features, nationalism, socialism, the Democratic party, the Republican party, organized homosexuality, the Bernie Sanders movement, animal rights, veganism, Crossfit, whatever —cannot abide the presence of those who decline to abase themselves before that idol or, short of that, any idol." As for religious types, Williamson adds, "True believers believe truly, and what they hold in common isn’t that which they believe but that they believe."
I have found this to absolutely true. Presbyterians may well understand and tolerate the Methodists, the Catholics, and even the Muslims, but they have an exceedingly hard time with the atheists. If you cannot be in our corner, at least be in some easily-discernible corner.
Williamson describes his subject as, "mob politics, on social media and in what passes for real life, which increasingly is patterned on social media—and its effects on our political discourse and our culture...We think in language. We signal in memes. Language is the instrument of discourse. Memes are the instrument of antidiscourse, i.e., communication designed and deployed to prevent the exchange of information and perspectives rather than to enable it, a weapon of mass intellectual destruction"...The function of discourse is to know other minds and to have them known to you; the function of antidiscourse is to lower the status of rivals and enemies."
