* In terms of your general approach to life, do you self-identify as
liberal, conservative, progressive or reactionary?
* Are you by temperament
nostalgic, averse to change,
homesick for something elusive that lies buried in the past?
* Do you find yourself staring at
old photographs for long periods of time or collecting
artifacts like some Byzantine scholar?
* When
old buildings are torn down in favor of generic ones, do you cry silent tears?
* Is
history a source of sustenance to you or the great nightmare from which you are trying to awaken?
* Do you find yourself connecting with "
kindred spirits" from the past? Do you appreciate how difficult life was for those who came before us?
* Is the
future a source of hope or worry to you?
* Do you feel out of place in the
present age?
* Do you believe in
progress - as defined by the relentless march of technology?
*Are
places important to you? Does a feeling of
rootlessness ever afflict your mood?
* Do you find yourself worrying about the
loss of particularity with regard to cities and towns across America?
* Would you travel for miles across state lines for a decent
slice of pie - be it fresh peach or blueberry?
* Are you comfortable with the notion of belonging to the
global village?
* Do
hipsters annoy you - in part because of their tyrannical enforcement of "cool" this and "cool" that?
* Does "
corporate culture" annoy you? What the heck is corporate culture?
* Do you find yourself in the minority on issues of major importance that other people seem to disregard as major issues?
* Does the
ubiquity of crime and violence feel like a daily defeat of the social contract?
* Do you long for
prison reform?
* When considering the
state of education, and, what are sometimes called "
life skills," does it bother you to think of how ill-prepared so many young people are to be parents - no one having instructed them in this art-form - and that this ongoing absence of parental support is somehow the missing link in a never-ending discussion?
* Do you find that people are missing the point when it comes to
substance abuse - that we fail to get at the root causes of it all (which has something to do with the fact that so many of us are going numb and getting intoxicated as part of a mysterious, passive, aggressive ritual of slowly-timed collective self-implosion - all this as foreign drug cartels rule over large portions of our major cities?
* Do you incline against
warfare and all its empty promises?
* Do you cringe when people are silenced, forced to crawl under a rock, forced to go away, impelled to lose their jobs and careers over a single ill-formed, ignorant, impolitic remark?
* Are you unnerved by the withering glance of
public opinion upon vulnerable, unsuspecting, semi-obtuse individuals who never got the memo?
* Do you find yourself wishing to resuscitate
actual books,
newspapers,
magazines and other traditional forms of print?
* Do you find it hard to keep up with the
celebs and their antics - which is no reason, mind you, to discontinue reading
People, Us and
In Touch magazine. (The experience becomes even more perplexing when you don't recognize a single famous person and cannot name any accomplishment for which they are known.)
* Has
sports become the new religion? Has
religion fallen prey to the business model?
* Does it seem like the present-age is defined by
hedonism and
complacency at the expense of
true spirituality?
* Do many of your peers (and perhaps even you or I on occasion) seem guided by hyper-romantic quests for
virtual worlds and
alternative reality spaces (such as blogs, yes) in which to escape from the dismal sordid industrial or post-industrial landscape that surrounds them/us?
* Do you long for
higher standards in the arts and sciences?
* Do you feel insecure when
actual experts speak on topics that they have devoted years to understanding - thereby showing the rest of us that we are by comparison ignorant and unschooled in such matters?
* Do you rebel against the same-old
mediocre books on the same-old best-seller lists?
* Do you find yourself "tuning out" of the "
daily buzz" in favor of some news item that no one else is talking about?
* Do you feel hopelessly
under-informed by major news-media outlets and downright apoplectic when it comes to the
cult of personality that has taken over among our celebrity pundits?
* Do you regard
Good Morning America as the lowest form of government-sanctioned mind control?
* Do you regard the
Today Show as the new form of bread and circuses?
* Are you bothered by the neglect of
classical music?
* Do you wish for, long for, pine for a
serious public discourse defined by increasing levels of gravitas i.e. men and women with long, sober faces talking in measured paragraphs - as opposed to having stand-up comedians and media spin-meisters define the narrative?
* Are you ready to take part in a
revolution in which no one gets physically injured, in which there is no violence, but in which everyone is forced to admit that they are half-wrong, half of the time? Is there such a danger in that?
* Do you find it amusing (and somewhat revelatory) that cats, frogs, rabbits, dolphins, owls, elephants and pill-bugs are so readily on your wavelength? Their silent wisdom speaks volumes - eh?
