“In 1936, Berlin hosted the summer Olympic games, which were opened by Hitler and choreographed to demonstrate Aryan superiority over all other races, achieving mixed results.”

-the Wikipedia page for Adolf Hitler

“Achieving mixed results”?!  That’s your best wording, Series of Anal-Retentive Wikipedia Authors?  I read that and I imagine a crowd reacting to an intensely racist performance by shrugging and saying things like “I really liked what Hitler had to say about Aryans” or, conversely, “I did not care for Hitler’s Aryan superiority display.”  All of it said with the same level of conviction as if they were walking out of a mediocre film.  “Bruce Almighty wasn’t all that good.  And Aryans!  Meh.”

Another thing I like about that sentence is the word “choreographed” is just two words away from “Hitler.”  Like he choreographed it himself, clapping along as his troupe of Aryan breakdancers rehearsed a routine that would win the big dance competition show off how great white people are.  “We must make them see how good we are at choreographed dance!  When we lay down a cardboard box and spin on our heads, they must know that in my brilliant dance propaganda metaphor, we are the breakdancers, and they are the cardboard box!”  And maybe Hitler’s wearing a little scarf or something.

This sentence makes an event that foreshadowed a terrible man’s ultimate intentions sound like a scene from Waiting for Guffman.

The other day I was chatting with my girlfriend about our mutual friends.  We noted that one of them can talk forever without any sort of feedback.  With her, phone calls are just bad monologues.  I wonder if she’d be better off with just an audio diary that goes “uh huh” and “wow!” depending on the inflection of her voice.  (I’m sure someone’s got the technology for that.  Whaddaya say, Science?)  But still, she’s a friend, and she’s very sweet, so there really isn’t a reason to cut off all communication, however unilateral it is at times.

My girlfriend and I also noticed that this person completely lacks an ability to empathize with other people.  And not in a particularly malicious way or anything.  She just… can’t see beyond her own point of view.  She won’t say thank you if you go out of your way to help her but she also won’t get mad if you don’t call her for a long time because she wasn’t really listening to you anyway.

Then we realized that the second most talkative person we know is also completely lacking empathy.  As in, we have the same one-sided conversations, the same give-but-never-receive relationships.  This person talks and talks and talks and shows no capacity to understand the feelings of other people.  Which brings me to this hypothesis:

Is it possible that empathy is the only thing stopping us, as a species, from shutting the fuck up?  That, as we’ve evolved from little monkeys, the only thing stopping us from gibbering on about bananas or the joy of picking bugs out of our own fur is the frontal lobe that separates us from lizards and fish? (those stupid, stupid fish)

Or maybe, evolutionarily speaking, the people who couldn’t evolve a sense of empathy simply got beaten to death with rocks for never shutting up.  And now that we’ve got advanced stuff like agriculture and courts of law and scarves that you wear in the summer for some reason that sort of thing is just unacceptable.

Children (particularly children around age four or five) support this theory, too, but they’d never get beaten up for talking too much because their eyes are big in proportion to their tiny bodies and our brains interpret that as fucking adorable so they get a pass (BUT JUST THIS ONCE).

Anyway, that’s what I’ve noticed.  Does that make sense to anyone else or what?

Guy 1: “It’d be nice if we could put our boogers into individual booger wrappers.”

Guy 2: “Yeah, but what if you could, like, write notes on the booger wrappers, too?”

Guy 1: “That’d be cool.”

(LATER)

Post-It Notes are invented!