Captain’s Logos

Right now our culture is in pretty desperate need of some self-examination. Which is hard to do, because our culture is busy right now putting up halloween decorations, so I decided to go ahead and examine it for all of us.

And after minutes of intense scrutiny, I came to this conclusion about the culture at large. We are either the laziest culture in history, the stupidest culture in history, both, or the most brilliant culture in history.

Please allow me to explain.

If you go to Wendy's you will notice something. When you go to get your ketchup, you grab the little dixie pill cup, and you press down on the ketchup lever, and presto! the ketchup fills the little dixie pill cup to the brim. No more, no less. And I imagine the same exists in most fast food chains across our fair land.

aside: if the old addage is true that you are what you eat, then one need look no further than the fast food industry to see what a perilous predicament we are really in.

Now this is the height of civilization, you might be tempted to think. We, as a culture, have evolved to the point that we no longer need to trouble ourselves with the inconvenience of actually having to worry about overfilling our ketchup. It is all ready, right there for us, the only way we could screw this up is if we decide to: a. move pill cup out of ketchup path mid-ketchup descent, or b. apply second ketchup lever squeeze once pill cup is already filled to the brim with first lever squeeze causing ketchup to overflow. I'm sure these have both been done, but one cannot judge a culture by its lowest common denominator, so we must forge on.

"So what's the" - belch - "problem with that?" Culture at Large asked me as it was checking it's myspace account and scratching it's bald spot with a spork.

WELL THE PROBLEM IS you have to understand that for this event to occur, this seamless consummation between ketchup and pill cup, that sacrifices were made, jobs created, thousands, TENS of thousands of dollars were spent. Dixie Inc. had to form a committee called the 'ketchup pill cup committee' and they had to find out who was in charge of things over there at Ketchup Levers Manufacturers and propose this revolutionary idea. And then KLM had to make their committe, the 'Pill Cup Committe' (or PCC) and these committees had to meet on a bi-weekly basis, maybe even WEEKLY, to determine the optimal size for a pill cup of ketchup, and how large a lever would be needed to provide enough ketchup to fill said cup, and they had to bring in phycisists, astrophysicists, to create a prototype, and then beta testing, and then implementation. And then they had a party, catered by fast food conglomerates throughout the country, where this product was pitched by paid salesman, who earned commissions which were split fairly between contributing committees, and then this new product was installed in fast food restaurants across the country, and all this was done, all these hours of labor, months of planning, thousands and thousands of dollars were spent so that YOU, mr. consumer, didn't have to THINK ABOUT HOW MUCH MOTHERF*****G KETCHUP TO PUT ON YOUR TRAY.
So, that leads me to believe that we are:

A.) The laziest culture on the planet. Which somehow doesn't seem to add up, because after all, we worked very very hard to be that lazy, and working hard and being lazy are contradictory and thus cannot co-exist.

B.) The stupidest culture on the planet. Also a problem, because although the device is pointless and almost excruciatingly so, it does work perfectly, and we are the ones who made it work.

C.) Both. Potentially so, but still leaves the question, how come we don't hear cases, daily, of people either forgetting or forgoing the effort to breath anymore while watching daytime television?

D.) The most brilliant culture in history. This wins by default. Something still doesn't check out, but there's a 9/11 tribute concert on FoxHD featuring a touching duet of "I Can Only Imagine" with police radio footage in the background sung by Lil' Kim and Enrique Iglesias, and I need to grab something to eat beforehand so I gotta go.

Wendy's sounds nice.