STUPIDISM — A MANIFESTO, by Matt Pine
Catch Pine live with THE2NDHAND editor Todd Dills, Joe Meno, Rob Funderburk, Fred Sasaki, Marc Baez and others at our Nerves of Steel event Oct. 4, 2011.
Did you hear the news yesterday? Did you read about the latest trends in financial crises? Did you hear the news the day before yesterday? Did you learn about children using technology more sexually? Or about the tense negotiations about the price of money?
Let’s be blunt. You spent five minutes, or thirty minutes, or perhaps only ten second learning about industrial nocturnal emissions, about short selling votes, or about das capital punishment. While doing dishes, you turned on NPR. When fortifying yourself for another hour of desk work, you skimmed the New York Times. Let’s ask the unasked question: why? What is different in the world today, because you heard the news yesterday? What has ever changed in the world because of your knowing more about it? Let me answer this for you. Nothing.
Certainly, you could argue, there’ve been small changes. The biggest one? The one you can immediately observe? Depression, yours. Distraction, you at work. Apprehension, constant — about large things that change too quickly, or about diffuse things that cannot be changed.
You are wasting the great cycles of your mind. Preoccupation with manufactured powerlessness has made you unhappy. But there’s a cure for this. And that cure is Stupidism.
Who is most happy? A person who, on hearing information, can act to rectify wrongs or prolong righteousness. And what’s the opposite of the news? Art. Therefore, the most meaningful art addresses a place that you can change immediately, with the powers of a feudal lord. Yes, my friends, consider restaurants. The specials are reported, and you make a choice. You have the powers of edict, be it food allergies or mere distaste for, perhaps, cilantro. It is as if by will alone that a pepper grinder becomes manifests and seasons your food. The dessert menu arrives like a late-breaking bulletin. You choose what you want. At the end of a meal, your thoughts have been about what you can control, and nothing else. This is Stupidism. This is happiness. Join me, and we will photograph our food, which has been subjected to advanced foaming technology, and we will photograph our lattes, which have been decorated with foam leaves, and we will eat and drink our foams. We will write great exegeses from the plate, memoirs of snacking. This is the highest art, because it is art of the tangible, art of the changeable, art of the stupidly present.
Stupidism doesn’t end at eating out. Another terrain of total domination is my sofa, and whether I’m seated or lying back. We will sketch, with charcoal on drafting paper, our physical inclinations. What station my television is set to, and what six or seven or perhaps twenty tabs are open on my web browser — these are entirely under my control. We will write sestinas about web surfing and compose sonnets of ass scratching. We will consider living rooms the same way transcendentalists looked upon nature. All we describe will be within our control. All art will make you think of yourself as more powerful.
We are in charge. We will be in total awe of ourselves so long as the little things comprise our art. Because nobody, not even the rain, says how I put things in my mouth or sit on my ass. Stupidism — we savor like champs.
NO ONE TAKES LUNCH ON THEIR LUNCH HOUR
