Monday, October 22, 2007
That's bogus!
Sometimes, if you listen with your non-parental ears, you catch your kids saying some insightful and important, if not downright, profound things. In this case, it’s 14-year-old Logan’s new favorite phrase, retort, complaint, commentary, epithet, challenge and insult: “That’s bogus!”
To my dad ears, that’s lazy diction at best and sass at worst. I hear it more than I figure is my fair share, usually when I’ve asked him to do a chore, caught him in a word-mincing half-truth, or just demanded 20 pushups as a consequence for disrespecting his mother.
But to my armchair philosopher ears (all men over 40 become philosophers of a sort, don’t we?), there’s something in his “That’s bogus!” that rings true. Although Logan frequently uses “bogus” when he means “unfair” and “displeasing,” it actually means “artificial, phony, fake, false." Bogus.
And as a terse cry of protest against the world he’s growing up in, “That’s bogus!” is especially apt. There is little in his world that is worthy of his trust – few people and even fewer institutions. This bogacity (no that’s not a word, but it should be) extends from the trivial to the sacred, touching most everything in between along the way.
The trivial: Last week, in his football game in another town, the home-field referee measured to see whether the home team had achieved a first down. The ball was placed near to our side of the field, and those of us on the sideline were only a few feet away and we could clearly see that the home team had fallen short by a few inches. The referee then took hold of the yard marker and pulled it backward, so that it touched the nose of the ball, and then signaled the that home team had, in fact, achieved a first down. Player and parents alike stood dumbfounded at the boldfaced dishonesty. We roared our disapproval, but we might better have shouted “That’s bogus!”
A friend of mine who is a referee for kids’ soccer in our area tells me that being dishonest is encouraged among players of high school age. “The kids get the clear message,” he told me: “If you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’.” That’s bogus.
The trivial: When the Coca Cola company wanted to increase sales of its soft drink, it spent thousands of dollars researching what one word had the most appeal among American adolescents. The word, the researchers found, was “real.” So Coca Cola became the “real thing” in one of the most ironic marketing pitches in the history of bogacity: a drink that has absolutely nothing to do with anything real is sold as the source of all that is real. That’s bogus and sad.
The profound: Think for a moment, how many politicians, priests or preachers do you feel you can trust? The kids know more than we’d like to assume about the liars, cheats and fakes of our grownup world. They hear enough of the news to get a good sense of the crisis of integrity we’re suffering in our churches, our government, our business and industry, our news media and social commentary, and our entertainment. (I’ll bet it takes you less than 60 seconds to name a bogus person, product, action or event in each of those categories.)
As a people, as a culture, as a nation, we are bathed in bogacity. You do it, I do it, we all do it – at least a little. Some of us do it a heck of a lot. We do it for a lot of reasons, too, but they all seem to boil down to one: to detach from our real selves and to create a “better” image of ourselves. Besides, honestly being ourselves puts us at risk for rejection and pain, and vulnerability isn’t cool in our culture. It’s considered week, immature, even worthy of ridicule. That’s bogus.
So we lie. We create a present a false image of ourselves that is always in control, always together and “all that.” It’s bogus.
Most of the anxiety we feel in our lives has to do with the poor fit between that image and who we really are, and the less they fit, the more danger we’re in. Damage is soon to follow in both our inner lives (emotional, psychological, physical) and our outer lives (friends, family, work). That’s bogus and dumb.
Maybe, for our sakes and theirs, we American dads and moms should come clean. Maybe we should not only "let" them see the real us, without the masks, maybe we should insist on it. For the love of Pete, some part of their world has to be genuine, and family life is the best choice, partly because it will have the most effect on their lives and partly because it’s really the only thing we can control.
Outside your arms, outside your door, the youthful protest is on the mark: Bogus!
Sometimes, if you listen with your non-parental ears, you catch your kids saying some insightful and important, if not downright, profound things. In this case, it’s 14-year-old Logan’s new favorite phrase, retort, complaint, commentary, epithet, challenge and insult: “That’s bogus!”
To my dad ears, that’s lazy diction at best and sass at worst. I hear it more than I figure is my fair share, usually when I’ve asked him to do a chore, caught him in a word-mincing half-truth, or just demanded 20 pushups as a consequence for disrespecting his mother.
But to my armchair philosopher ears (all men over 40 become philosophers of a sort, don’t we?), there’s something in his “That’s bogus!” that rings true. Although Logan frequently uses “bogus” when he means “unfair” and “displeasing,” it actually means “artificial, phony, fake, false." Bogus.
And as a terse cry of protest against the world he’s growing up in, “That’s bogus!” is especially apt. There is little in his world that is worthy of his trust – few people and even fewer institutions. This bogacity (no that’s not a word, but it should be) extends from the trivial to the sacred, touching most everything in between along the way.
The trivial: Last week, in his football game in another town, the home-field referee measured to see whether the home team had achieved a first down. The ball was placed near to our side of the field, and those of us on the sideline were only a few feet away and we could clearly see that the home team had fallen short by a few inches. The referee then took hold of the yard marker and pulled it backward, so that it touched the nose of the ball, and then signaled the that home team had, in fact, achieved a first down. Player and parents alike stood dumbfounded at the boldfaced dishonesty. We roared our disapproval, but we might better have shouted “That’s bogus!”
A friend of mine who is a referee for kids’ soccer in our area tells me that being dishonest is encouraged among players of high school age. “The kids get the clear message,” he told me: “If you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’.” That’s bogus.
The trivial: When the Coca Cola company wanted to increase sales of its soft drink, it spent thousands of dollars researching what one word had the most appeal among American adolescents. The word, the researchers found, was “real.” So Coca Cola became the “real thing” in one of the most ironic marketing pitches in the history of bogacity: a drink that has absolutely nothing to do with anything real is sold as the source of all that is real. That’s bogus and sad.
The profound: Think for a moment, how many politicians, priests or preachers do you feel you can trust? The kids know more than we’d like to assume about the liars, cheats and fakes of our grownup world. They hear enough of the news to get a good sense of the crisis of integrity we’re suffering in our churches, our government, our business and industry, our news media and social commentary, and our entertainment. (I’ll bet it takes you less than 60 seconds to name a bogus person, product, action or event in each of those categories.)
As a people, as a culture, as a nation, we are bathed in bogacity. You do it, I do it, we all do it – at least a little. Some of us do it a heck of a lot. We do it for a lot of reasons, too, but they all seem to boil down to one: to detach from our real selves and to create a “better” image of ourselves. Besides, honestly being ourselves puts us at risk for rejection and pain, and vulnerability isn’t cool in our culture. It’s considered week, immature, even worthy of ridicule. That’s bogus.
So we lie. We create a present a false image of ourselves that is always in control, always together and “all that.” It’s bogus.
Most of the anxiety we feel in our lives has to do with the poor fit between that image and who we really are, and the less they fit, the more danger we’re in. Damage is soon to follow in both our inner lives (emotional, psychological, physical) and our outer lives (friends, family, work). That’s bogus and dumb.
Maybe, for our sakes and theirs, we American dads and moms should come clean. Maybe we should not only "let" them see the real us, without the masks, maybe we should insist on it. For the love of Pete, some part of their world has to be genuine, and family life is the best choice, partly because it will have the most effect on their lives and partly because it’s really the only thing we can control.
Outside your arms, outside your door, the youthful protest is on the mark: Bogus!
Labels: Logan
