Jerks, stats, the Moon, baseball, and truth vs. fiction
1. “Mailer on the Moon” is about Norman
Mailer and Of a Fire on the Moon and the book is labelled as being
essential to understand Apollo 11’s journey.
Highly doubtful. Also it is marked as being essential for understanding
its legacy. Certainly not. Personally, it is reported, Mailer was in
anticlimax. His effort was for the self. Lots of needed money was offered to
write about Apollo 11. A gig. His ego less prominent but stamped on the account
he wrote as a lesser advertisement for himself, not as others did for the provision
of style but for a huge staging of personality, the dominant theme. Not events,
history, but himself as more important than all else. Numbing importance and being
bloated and tasteless – so the 60’s editors and readers expected and “enjoyed.”
He was paid well for his act – Believe It or Not.
Odor is reputed to be a
feature little desired by the WASPs of the NASA technocracy. But the most
publicly known members of various missions filled crew cabins repeatedly with
odorous offal. Deodorant might have
helped to prevent Of an Odor on the Moon. Norman linked odor and Time
and Death. Undeniably NASA’s leaders intended to conquer the Moon, odor or not,
and so reduce it by removing it from the unknown, that had our possibilities assigned to it, so
it would become less and smaller. The WASPS triumphant. But given the time and
place, the who and the what could not be otherwise. Fiction lacked acceptance
but Norman needed a fictional self he wrote of as everywhere and everytime such
that there could not be an alternative. He was It. No margin, no protection
from banality, and Truth took a holiday. The Moon had offered an unlimited
adventure. This fire on the moon ruined that. The lunar events were taken by
him for an effect on himself and his interaction with others.
Nevertheless, Norman was
granted status as a brilliant writer in
tune with what was underneath a surface of the obvious achievement of the
actions of Apollo 11’s supporters and participants but only by spewing that
conception of himself over what was underneath. A hopeless attempt to cover up
the encounter of reality, the one that was to come to be, with what might have
been. If it, the landing on the Moon, was to happen, there was only one way it
could happen and all those other ways, however entrancing, enthralling,
exciting, enlightening, exhilarating, enchanting , ebullient, ecstatic, elated,
electrifying, eximious, euphoric, enriching, eclectic, effluent, embellished,
extramundane, enthusiastic, exalting, eudemonic, enhancing, elevating,
empyreal, enabling, or emphatic they could be, they were gone.
Mailer had a sense of
this as we all could. Therefore, he was not unique in his realization but
rather in who he was, his personal elitist cult of me, myself, and I uber all
made him a jerk. And there would be more and more like him. Why read what a
jerk has written? He wanted to be read. They accommodated him.
2. Or if not read, then to be watched as
a baseball spectator who cannot know what makes one player better than another.
Those better players are an elite, as was Mailer and some are jerks or so it is
reported in “Building the Next Babe Ruth” wherein one can see what they do
physically for the assigned physical tasks of baseball, but not how they
mentally do it. Only they can realize how it is being accomplished while they
catch, hit, slide, throw, and run. That’s baseball. And that’s not baseball.
Baseball has long been statistically-ridden and managers have changed the
course of a game based on “stats.” But, of late, stats aren’t characterizing
what they will do but what they have done. So then a player’s worth, value is
brought under analysis. Some do well after the numbers come out, and they
become arrogant, or it intensifies whatever latent arrogance they had. So then
they are jerks. Certainly arrogance is one distinguishing characteristic of a
jerk, and Mailer qualifies. So why watch a jerk?
If you could
statistically train a Mailer such as in a writers workshop, what with stats on
sentence length, use of vocabulary, position of adjective and adverbs and
frequency of their use, plus topics and meaning – and you get a Mailer? Could
he always be a statistical outlier? His value, worth lies in his elitism and
his cult of the One? Then can you produce more than one baseball star? Yes, you
can, they are named in the article. They have differing names but having the
same outcome of a superiority in performance of tasks that are part of
baseball. This superiority is derived from stats. If more players could be statistically
altered, their value, worth would increase less. If more were like Mailer, and could
be produced to be like Mailer, his and their value, worth lessens.
3. With jerks as writers and jerks as
baseball players, can we feel comfortable in that we are in neither category?
If “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning” is not accepted by us, it is implied we
are all jerks. We have willingly, statistically speaking, since there are so
many of us, become enslaved to versions of truth. We have sought to escape from
boredom by accepting fictions instead of truths since the truth isn’t diverse
and diverting enough. But twist it and turn it and you get many differences
that are more entertaining. Mailer couldn’t do it straight, there had to be
fiction for entertainment. You can’t play ball as if you had a calculator
strapped to your head or so the fiction of it has been proclaimed. Baseball
remains less entertaining without stats. Winston of 1984 is quoted –
“Sanity is not statistical.” Oh but it is if our stat analysis of literature, stat
analysis of baseball and the stats that are synonymous with social media can be
accepted as extensions of the feverish desire for entertainment.
To be consistently entertained by
arrogant jerks or other elitists requires that statistically fiction
predominates over truth. Once fiction most often prevails, it is true.