Sheep with Parrot Heads

"We're a nation of sheep." I don't know who said this originally, and I'm not sure that the nation referred to is the U.S., but for the purposes of this post, I'm assuming that the nation is the U.S. That's because, in my opinion, the U.S. has been a nation of sheep pretty much throughout the second half of the 20th century. We have blindly followed shepherds like the multi-media, politicians, oil companies, sports figures, advertisers, and big business eager to do their bidding and not get lost. However, lately I've come to the realization that we are more than just sheep. We don't follow silently or with just a few bleats. Instead, we follow our shepherds and repeat their words ad nauseum without any regard to their meaning or veracity. I attribute this phenomenon, which I call being sheep with parrot heads, to the Information Age, but it's become truly awful in the 21st century. It's like a flu epidemic.

For example, today, I downloaded a research paper about a huge corporation (excuse me, I mean "global enterprise") and its policies for being environmentally friendly and trying to reduce greenhouse emissions and the first line was “'Can we leverage our experience as a responsible company to make money?'" Now, if you've been following this blog (and kudos to you for putting up with my sporadic posts if you have), you know by now that I absolutely hate this misuse of the word "leverage." Unfortunately, and to my growing horror, every single website I visit, every single brochure I read, every single technical manual I edit, every single proposal I review now "leverages" the term "leverage" at least twice. In other words, "leverage" is now misused "across" every form of published entity. That's right: "across" and not "in" or "by" every form of published entity.

I first saw this jargon in 1998 when I was working for a highly evil dot.com that I'm happy to inform you became a dot.bomb before it was trendy. I figure that some bigwig in the IT industry gave a speech and said something like "Our middleware helps you leverage your investment in mission-critical legacy systems, creating an end-to-end solution that you can use across your enterprise." I'm assuming that it had to be some unbelievably filthy rich speaker--maybe Bill Gates or Lou Gerstner--because the slathering devotion and pandering to that kind of language could only mean that it had to have been used by someone with gobs and gobs of money. It reminds me of when the "cool" people in high school (who also happened to be the rich people) started saying "luego" instead of "later" and "booking" instead of "hurrying" and we couldn't wait to repeat them. Shoot, that stupid slang ended up on the inside front and back covers of my yearbook my senior year. Well, the business world might as well be high school. Every marketing piece I read has become a form of torture, one that's far worse than watching all four parts of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet video. Even though the style council at my company has banned the use of all of these terms, they're so much a part of our thinking now that it seems no one can write a sentence without using one of them. I don't think the writers even notice what they're saying. They've got this great formula, so why not use it every time they write it?

Sheep with parrot heads are everywhere and not just in the business environment. Those of you that follow college basketball might remember the last 14 seconds of the final Duke-Carolina basketball game when Gerald Henderson broke Tyler Hansbrough's nose. As a diehard Carolina fan who thinks that Coach Kracktheirheadsopen and his players are slimier than a goldfish pond in a moderate drought, I'll never forget my feeling of horror when I saw Tyler go down. It was appalling to me that such a blatant attempt to injure an opponent was allowed to happen. As soon as it was over, I watched the postgame reports (when Carolina beats Duke, I try to watch and read everything I possibly can about the game, revelling in the sheer joy of besting the Evil Empire) and they showed Coach K's post-game interview. His comment on the incident was "Hey, when you have your star players in the game in the last 14 seconds, you have to expect this." I just about vomited up all the Guinness I'd been drinking when I heard that.

When I checked the basketball message boards and online media reports the next day, it was obvious that the sheep with parrot heads had been busy. Anyone who purported to love Duke or was "neutral" about the rivalry was out in cyberspace debating whether it was a show of poor sportsmanship on Roy Williams's part to have his first string players still in the game with 14 seconds to go and the lead. Never mind that this was Duke-Carolina, a game where the winner can't be declared until the final buzzer. The debate over whether it was poor sportsmanship on the part of Gerald Henderson to slap Tyler Hansborough to the ground and break his nose took second stage to a wild debate over when first string players should be taken off the court. And why was this? Because, apparently and for no reason that I can possibly imagine, the vast majority of college basketball fans and college basketball writers do not find Coach K. reptilian and or think he's the anti-Christ like I do. Instead, they view him as a shining example of all that is respectable in sports and so anything he says must be repeated in every medium imaginable. Any protest that his lame excuse for a player had basically coldcocked an opponent resulted in the accusation that the protestor was "Tarhole lover" and therefore unable to be objective.

This is just one incident of sports fan sheep with parrot heads; there are many others. The fans saying that the Patriots were completely innocent of any wrongdoing when they filmed the defensive signals of opposing teams, the sports writers kowtowing to Barry Bonds when everyone knows that it's easy to break a home run record when you've got 200 times the natural amount of testosterone pumping through your blood, and the cyclists that say that Floyd Landis was accused of doping because the French are sick of Americans winning the Tour de France are all examples. It's insane. And it goes on and on, until it eventually ends up on Wikipedia and children are using it in reports they write for school.

Of course, the worst cases of sheep with parrot heads are that weird 22-25% of people polled who approve of the job that George W. Bush is doing as president. They're easily found on AM talk radio chiming in their programmed "props" to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter or leaving comments on AOL message boards on stories that make the Bush administration look bad (which is simply a matter of reporting on the daily activities of Bush and his cronies). They'll babble at you that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq even though the comments you are reading are associated with an article about ice caps melting in the Arctic. Another good example is the e-mail that someone made up and is sending around that says that Barak Obama went to a radical Islam school in the Middle East and changed his name to Obama so that he could be more like Osama Bin Laden. Wayne, bless his sheeplike heart, came back from his barber's one day with a copy of that e-mail, which has been proven to be a complete fabrication--just like the Swift Boat propaganda.

I think what makes me worry most about this sheep with parrot heads phenomenon is when the originators of out and out lies, like the Swift Boaters, Ann Coulter, or Coach K, are praised for their power and ingenuity. "Swift Boat" is now even used as verb and it's something to be admired. Are we so twisted now that we can't think or speak for ourselves? Or is it now so important for us to worship something that we'll idolize some of the vilest examples of human beings and echo their every statement?"

Oh, well, what sheep (even when they have parrot heads) don't realize is that many times, they're being led to the slaughter house. In the cases of the truly twisted people who adore Duke or George W. Bush, maybe I'll volunteer to be the shepherd. Hmm.......