Phthursday Musings: Robble Rubble Rabble Rebel

I want you to imagine for a moment Charlie Brown sitting in class, listening to his teacher:

But, his teacher is the Hamburglar:

Charlie Brown: Yes, sir, my dog ate my homework.

Hamburglar: ROBBLE ROBBLE ROBBLE

Now, I know what you’re thinking. It’s okay. You can think that.

My point is that there were some fateful events, at least one of which probably occurred in a boardroom straight out of Mad Men, where actual intelligent human beings decided precisely which nonsense words certain characters would say. And, somehow, these nonsense words became iconic.

The idea of creating something iconic, and in the process morphing language itself, is utterly fascinating.

A building is bombed, thoroughly destroyed, reduced to rubble. But rubble isn’t a word with a negative connotation, because Rubble is a chum, a sidekick. Not for much longer, mind you. In another generation, Barney Rubble will himself be, well, cultural rubble. The Hamburglar too. And so many more.

The astonishing things are the ones that last. My kid has no idea who Barney Rubble is, and I can’t imagine him ever coming around to care. He has no idea who the Hamburglar is, though I have to think he’d find that kind of funny, and like all of us, could he help but be utterly fascinated by Grimace? Ahh, but, he does know who Charlie Brown is. I think the next generation will know too. And that’s really kind of bonkers.

A friend of my dad’s had this system. He had one of those 200 disc CD changers. And he had the thing filled at all times. And when he got a new CD, and put it in to one of the 200 slots, and he took a CD out of one of the slots… he got rid of it. He had finite room. He abided.

You know what America in particular is really bad at? Abiding the concept of finite space. We want to hold on to everything. We resist new things, and sure it’s because newness scares us, but really I think it’s because we’re so trained to let stuff accumulate, and we really don’t have room for all of it. So, yeah, some stuff fades, but at any given point in time, there’s so much more stuff constantly being made, physical stuff but also cultural and intellectual stuff, we’re weighed down by it.

Think about how often superhero movies are rebooted. And, uhh, there’s a Sonic the Hedgehog 2 movie out right now. Nobody needed that. Don’t be surprised if some Hollywood studio comes up with the bright idea in the next few years to reboot The Flintstones. But, don’t be surprised if the kids don’t really care. Nor should they.

Mike Watt nailed it in 1995, with a little help from Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl:

It’s not reality

Just someone else’s sentimentality

It won’t work for you

… not that anything I say here is going to keep me from bombarding my poor child with my own cultural rubble for the next 40 years or so.

This, of course, is because I am a rabble-rouser. A troublemaker. But… good trouble, I’d like to think.

Now, I think across the pond, the phrase rabble-rouser is used a little bit differently. I think they actually use the word rabble in and of itself. Merriam-Webster actually offers as a synonym for rabble the word proletariat. When I think about rabble-rousing I think about the kid in the dugout getting the other kids to tell fart jokes, but I don’t usually think about the other kids as the proletariat.

The thing is, the kids in the dugout, rabble really is a great word to describe them a lot of the time. Its utility, I think, varies depending largely on how you think of populism. Some people use populist as a pejorative, but doing so as a matter of course, I have long thought, belies a fundamental elitism, a fear of people. If what people are riled up about isn’t what’s bothering you, but rather just that they’re riled up, that’s not good.

Of course, Powers That Be tend not to be, erm, consistent about such things. And when you look closely you find that the way we tend to talk about people belies deeper cultural biases.

Someone who participates in opposition to authority or dominance.

Does that definition describe a good person or a bad person?

Well… doesn’t that depend on the nature of the authority? And the nature of the opposition?

Maybe not. Because, generally speaking, the noun rebel has an overwhelmingly positive connotation, at least in America, if not globally.

Think of it. What’s the most successful and best known movie franchise? Star Wars. And what is at the heart of it all? The Rebellion against the Empire.

What is America, even? It’s something that came into being as the result of a rebellion, against a nominally out-of-touch monarch.

Ahh, but, you say, what about the Civil War? Well, to that, I say, exactly. In 1861 the word rebel was a pejorative. But as part of the Lost Cause narrative, didn’t that all change? Haven’t we undergone a century and a half of nonsense about there being some sort of romantic notion about that particular rebellion?

So much of what passes for political and social discourse today follow directly from Lost Cause style narrative. People are cheered for “rebelling against political correctness”, for example. People are celebrated for “rebelling against mask mandates”. Yes, these are proper uses of “rebel”, noun and verb both. But you see how there’s almost a celebration of rebellion as a thing unto itself? It’s the opposite of the populism problem. Except… it really isn’t. The same political grouping who applaud those who rebel against mask mandates would thoroughly condemn those who might rebel against, say, mass incarceration. Of course, they wouldn’t be termed rebels, would they? They’d be called thugs. Or, maybe in a different English speaking country, they’d be called rabble.

One of the things I like to spotlight, if not outright celebrate at times, is the inherent ambiguity of the human condition. I think a lot of our social structures struggle so mightily with ambiguity that it lays the ground work for the kind of rabble-rousing that might best be termed exploitation. Because some are so unable to accept the idea that good people can sometimes do bad things, it causes a breakdown of the clarity around what might be meant by good and bad. This is even though so many of the most celebrated characters in classical literature, in mythology, even in scripture, are morally complicated people. This is even though arguably the most celebrated characters of the past 20 years are anti-heros like Tony Sporano or Walter White.

We live in a time now where it serves the interests of certain powerful people to portray the dominant paradigm in a particular way, and to make it out that the people opposed to the dominant paradigm are perceived as rabble, who are encouraged to rebel against those norms and institutions. A lot of this legitimately follows follow from an American mode where a lot of people who are truly struggling see their ways of life having been reduced to rubble. Among other things, they find themselves chastised for simple things, like just wanting to sneak away with a hamburger. Robble robble.

The real world that we all inhabit is of course far less reductive than all of that. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t some veracity to some of the above. The point though is that how we talk about things, even all the way down to how we literally give voice to outright meaninglessness, is subject to all sorts of levers of manipulation. Some of that manipulation comes from corporate advertising. Some of that manipulation comes from political propaganda. And some of it just comes from the chaos of the human condition, because when you get right down to it, we’re all rabble, and we’re all rousable, and damn it, if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be human.

Robble robble indeed.