Social Contracts

I’m not sure it’s possible to hate my 1984 self any more than I do. I was a bona fide idiot and as such, voted for Ronald Reagan in my first presidential election.

I’m grateful I didn’t get a tattoo back then, because it would’ve easily been one of puffy, scruffy, yellow-sunglass-wearing Hank Williams Jr. Alternatively, I might have gotten a giant red, white, and blue rising-eagle tattooed across my back or “Proud to Be an American” stenciled across my collarbone. Poor reasoning such as this is grounds for why I advocate anyone thinking about getting a tattoo wait until they’re 40, because – hopefully – we all change as we age. Perhaps, we shouldn’t vote till we’re 40 either.

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“Your own history tells you. Your people are intelligent, and that’s good…But you’re also hierarchical…You’re bright enough to learn to live in your new world, but you’re so hierarchical you’ll destroy yourselves trying to dominate it and each other.”

Octavia Butler, Adulthood Rites, pp. 264-265

In its June 27, 1948 issue, The New Yorker Magazine included what was arguably one of its most controversial short stories to date and since. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” generated an avalanche of immediate feedback for the magazine, most of it negative (1). Hundreds of readers were horrified and confused enough to cancel their subscriptions. Jackson began receiving a steady stream of hate mail, and even her parents openly expressed dismay at the story.

“The Lottery,” for the uninitiated, depicts a small, contemporary New England village as it conducts its annual lottery to determine which villager will be stoned to death. While much has likely been written about Jackson’s possible motivations for writing the story, this analysis will be informed more by the reactions. Most 1948 readers of The New Yorker had to have been aware, as doubtless was Jackson, of the horrors of the Nazi-led Final Solution in Europe just a few years before, and of the mass slaughter of Allied carpet-bombings on German and Japanese cities that had culminated in the deployment of an unprecedented and potentially apocalyptic weapon of war. Why, then, did the situation of ritual human sacrifice in a mundane, modern, and culturally familiar setting discomfit so many presumably sophisticated readers? It is beneath that jarring cognitive dissonance that we must look, if only to find whether ritual human sacrifice is either as obsolete or as incongruous to our modern, liberal societies as we might wish to believe.

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A few weekends ago, I was invited to something called a “running dinner” for my good friend Monika’s 50^th birthday. Running dinners were all the rage in the early aughts here in Europe, and Monika’s been carrying the dinner candelabra ever since. I can imagine that even when she turns 80, it’ll probably be a running dinner with all her septuagenarian and octogenarian friends motating around town in their wheelchairs and walkers.

Running dinners are a strange hybrid of the games we thought we’d relegated to our childhood and young adult years: Imagine a scavenger hunt crossbred with a group blind date and then with musical chairs spliced in. The purpose? Perhaps an attempt to recapture that “zany-spontaneity-of-our-youth-albeit-with-more-expensive-wine-and-impressing-strangers-with-our-mad-creative-grownup-gourmet-cooking-skills”?

We all had to RSVP months in advance of the actual running-dinner birthday party to allow Monika ample time to compile our individual, running-dinner dance cards. Her mission? To organize 75 party guests into traveling “running pairs” – sets of two people who don’t know each other but who will be spending most of the evening together eating and drinking at “running dinner stations” dispersed from one end of town to the other. Remember those three-legged races where you were tied – in full preteen mortification – to some other random nine-year-old at summer camp and then the two of you had to perform the miracle of instantaneous mind-meld and motor-skill coordination if you wanted to tripod-hop your way to the finish line? Yeah…

I got assigned to a dude named Juergen – a friend from another part of Monika’s life whom I had never met who lived in Berlin and would be traveling in from out of town for the occasion. I discovered just a week in advance of the party that Monika had volunteered me together with Juergen to host two other running pairs at my apartment for the starter course and aperitivos/drinks. With my microscopic European apartment and kitchen and still working on my hostess skills so that I can be reincarnated as Martha Stewart in my next lifetime, the prep required to wine and dine six people was the same as for 20.  Based on a few emails and one short call ahead of the party to coordinate what we’d be doing for our course, I already had a bad feeling about Juergen – especially when he got miffy when I told him I needed him at my place two hours prior to the other guests arriving, so I wasn’t stuck doing 95 percent of the work myself.

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We care deeply about your rights as a member of our extended family, and we want to keep you informed about how we handle any sensitive data we may have about you. Below is an update to our family’s privacy policy, which goes into effect today.

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Language taken from various contracts I agreed to without first reading.

You must collect and use my personal data
You use my connections, preferences, interests, and activities
You log when I’m using and have last used your Products
Your partners provide information about my activities
Your automated systems analyze my content

You also collect the content I create
I grant you a worldwide, royalty-free intellectual property license
You may use my feedback or suggestions without obligation
I may not be able to retrieve my Content
You will not be liable for any loss or damage

I am entering into a binding contract
I agree to cooperate with you
I may not disassemble, decompile, decrypt, hack, emulate, exploit
My devices must meet the minimum system requirements
I use the Service at my own risk [Read more…]