THE SOUND OF …

Okay I’ve got a confession to make …
… hold on, wait for it!
They say life imitates art. And in my case this is certainly true.
So, I’ve got a confession to make.
I don’t know how it came about. Maybe it was because it was ‘in vogue’ when I was a kid. Whatever, I can’t quite grasp the time when it gripped me. But …
… it’s coming …
My favourite film is ‘The Sound of Music.’

Now stop laughing.

It’s a great film. It has everything. It has romance (and music). It has adventure (and music). It has comedy (and music). And it has – what is it? – oh yes, music. But more than this, like old von Trapp, I was in the forces. And eventually I met my Maria.
Her name’s Yvonne. Now, she didn’t look like a Maria type when I met her – she was from the big city. But eventually it turned out that she was exceptionally spiritual by nature. So okay, life’s beginning to imitate art already.
We’ve been married 30 years now, and also like ‘The Sound of Music’, we’ve made a few escapes. Infact, we’ve moved around so much that life just gets dizzy. But in the last few years we’ve settled down in a nice place in the country, close to where I was born.

It’s a little house.

We don’t need a big one anymore. But this country living seems to be agreeing with her – apart from the regular shopping jaunts to the nearby city of course. And even in this, life seems to imitate art.
You see, her favourite programme ever was ‘The Waltons.’ And as I said …
… life imitates art.
So what happens when ‘The Sound of Music’ meets ‘The Waltons’? I suppose you’ve got to work out what they have in common.
You’ll never guess how many kids we had.

© Anthony North, August 2007

Have you clicked Diary of a Writer on Blogroll? Meet me, up close and personal.
Click Tony On, on Blogroll, for my current affairs blog.
If you like fiction, click Fiction Page on Blogroll for my short stories.
Check out the pages. Find my Links on Eye On the World.

THE SPECIALIST

Technology is moving us away from innovation to dogma; from the general to the specific. Indeed, our education system is being geared to produce specialists for every area of life, as if we are machines for this and that.
It seems to be a bi-product of the individual, driven by a technology geared to allow supposed individuality to thrive.

INDIVIDUALITY

Today, the individual is king. Forget community – forget, even, a sense of social togetherness – for individuality is the new creed, and even history is becoming only the history of the person. It is as if the entire software of the human race is being rebooted.
The fallout from the individual’s march into western consciousness is, of course, all around us. But the knowledge of infestations of crime, psychological illness and greed has done little to take away the drug of being the only thing of importance in the universe.
We need to stop more than simple social anarchy to stop the individual from destroying everything. But maybe his rise into our supposed intellect can be chipped away just a little, bringing the individual to heel and allowing, once more, such niceties as kindness, inclusion and socially acceptable behaviour.

INTELLECT

You see the individual’s march into intellect all around you, but don’t even notice. Wherever you go, it’s there, advising you, supposedly helping you, ripping you off. Once, you’d go to a bank and see a clerk or a manager. Now you’ll see managers for every possible need.
Once you’d go to a hospital and there would be nurses, some technicians, and a dozen or so specialist types of doctor. Now, there are more than a dozen or so specialist types of nurse, and the doctor specialisations run into the hundreds.
Is our intellect becoming more complicated, or are we all being suckered here, with people being designed to ape the specialist as if cogs and pulleys of the machine?

IMPORTANCE

Individuality demands importance, and nothing gives more importance than a fancy title. And in order to have oodles of fancy titles, even more fancy training courses must be had.
But I really think it is time we began asking: do all these specialisations give us value for money, or are they part of the mechanisation of the human?
Let’s go back to the clerk doing a myriad of tasks in his pre-computerisation office. With little training, he learnt by experience, and uppermost in his intellectual arsenal was commonsense.
Today, a clerk has a single purpose. With computerisation demanding rigidity, there is no room for commonsense, for you cannot beat the system. Hence, repetition and a mindless attitude replaces the clerk of old. The clerk of today is inferior. But he is known as a specialist.

COMMON SENSE

Throughout intellectual life, specialists have become inferior to the general worker who used to do his tasks by the dozen. The idea that their work is more specialised because of our increasing knowledge is hogwash.
Individuality through technology has become too important, and leaves us with costly specialists who cannot do the job as well as in the past.
It is time we realised the con and brought back commonsense and the real worker who could turn his hand to everything; replace the specialist cogs of the machine with the commonsense and humanity of the real person.

© Anthony North, August 2007

Have you clicked Diary of a Writer on Blogroll? Meet me, up close and personal.
Click Tony On, on Blogroll, for my current affairs blog.
If you like fiction, click Fiction Page on Blogroll for my short stories.
Check out the pages. Find my Links on Eye On the World.