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No, it's not your imagination: the buttons are flopping around on my pages. I'm getting all sorts of reader comments about where to put them, and frankly, there's just no good solution that aesthetically interesting. But I'll put Ceej to work on it post-haste.
For those of you who thought I'd never update my pages, I have updated the People page a bit, added a few people, changed the tense on a couple of entries (that's tense as in verb tense, not as in whether these people are making me crazy or not though that's not a bad idea: a rating system), and alphabetized the bunch because there were getting to be a lot of people.
My header today concerns something I read the other day. The writer was disparaging another person who claims to be a member of a faddish subculture akin to punkthe writer called this person "a hypocrite." This is, of course, incorrect: this person is a poseur; that is, she affects a lifestyle she does not truly follow.
Darin told me yesterday about a snippet he'd heard on the Rush Limbaugh show (when he took his car into the dealer, the only loaner car they had left had...an AM radio! ack! hello, it's 1996). A caller mentioned the idea of a "maximum wage" and said that it was ridiculous for movie actors to be making $20 million a picturethey should make a salary more akin to $100,000 a picture.
To which Limbaugh responded: "97,000 dollars."
That's hypocrisy.
(In the same vein: one Saturday I was on AOL and Tom Clancy wandered into the Writers room. Clancy is an incredibly successful noveling and one of the owners of the Baltimore Orioles. He started bitching and moaning about how the baseball players were going to ruin the game because of their "greed" and how they wanted so much money to play the game. Tom Clancy: hypocrite.)
When you espouse so-called virtues that you expect other people to follow but you don't follow them yourself, you're a hypocrite. If you make token gestures towards being a part of a group, you're a poseur.
Here's a handy guide:
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Sylvester Stallone
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poseur
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
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hypocrite
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Kathie Lee Gifford
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hypocrite
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Anybody who says they buy Girl Scout cookies "to support the troops"
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poseur
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Jimmy Swaggart (Jim Bakker, and their Elmer Gantryish ilk)
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hypocrite
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David Bowie
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poseur
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Madonna
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God only knows
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I haven't made up my mind yet as to whether I'm a writing poseur or not. All writers fear that they are writing poseurs. It's a fun profession that way. "Here, have a pen, some paper, and this handy cat o' nine tails. Works in either the left or the right hand."
By the way, if there's a set of values and virtues you not only profess and adhere to but attempt to get others to follow, you are a True Believer and I am at once impressed and scared.
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