So, it's been a while...

For the most part, I chalk up (down?) to the Amish my recalcitrance to emote electronically. I mean, when you're riding around like a lump of flour (a sack would be too well-defined for my freneticisms) strapped to a saddle for a while, the ol' laptop starts to lose its gnarliness.

Those of you who haven't heard me discourse about the Amish, well, it's just too bad. I wrote something about it the other day, but I can't find a common thread to really make it all work together, so it's currently just sort of a laundry list of my thoughts on being unelectrified. Hey! Maybe that's a good title. I'm always on the lookout for those things.

Here's another title: Leggo my Lego!

My wife dragged me to Wal-Mart the other day, so I thought that, as long as we were supporting slavery anyway, I'd take a look at the Legos. I was distressed, to say the least. In fact, having mulled it over for at least fifteen minutes, I'd be fairly comfortable asserting that Legos are directly responsible for the growing idiocy of our children (I say this loosely, and mostly for rhetorical effect; I in no way intend to slight the next generation, of whom many discrete individuals are undoubtedly already much more fair than my own sick, pale, moon [or whatever Romeo is talking about in the bushes beneath the balcony]).

Call me crazy, but I have been operating for 23 years under the (apparently fallacious) conceit that Legos were actually building blocks. When I was a littler kid than I am now, we had a big box of the primary-colored, brick-like blocks, and we supplemented it at Christmas and birthdays with the three-dollar sets of "a Lego man driving a very small car." We would salivate over the $100 pirate ship sets that we could see in the flyer that the Lego company in the sky somehow managed to cram into the tight constraints of our Lego man auto fiend racer's box, and we would tell each other stories about what we would do if we were ever rich enough to buy the 6-cannon pirate ship (sail it to Venezuela, I think, was the most common dream). Then we would use our 3.5 zillion blocks and one steering wheel and one Lego man, and we would construct multi-level space ships and smash them against each other to test whose was built more sturdily.

So that's what I was looking for in the Lego aisle--something repurposable, something unique enough to provide direction, but bland enough to be torn down and reconstructed into something else. But it turns out that Legos nowadays are actually made for a bunch of brainless dweebs who do nothing except watch horrible sequels to action movies. The only Lego sets in the toy aisle looked like miniature movie sets from Spiderman 3, Batman Forever, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Star Wars. Worse yet, all the sets were constructed of approximately two and a half large, plastic-modeled pieces. Whereas a pirate ship when I was a kid would take four days, a seventeen-page instruction booklet, and forty-five hundred tiny plastic pieces to put together, the pirate ship of today looks like it's one solid piece with an attachable mast.

How this makes kids dumb is obvious. For one thing, they don't have to figure out the complicated directions, nor are they walked through the realization that an end product is the summation of a process via an accomplishment of constitutive steps. In the good old days, it took three days before you could play with a Lego set; nowadays, you don't need that kind of patience.

And, maybe more importantly, the fact that they're all sold out to corporate interests means that it's really hard to use Legos to create story-lines that have not already been conceived by some puerile brain in Hollywood. There are only so many things you can do with Spiderman or Jack Sparrow or the Batmobile. As a result, the sell-off to the movie industry sets up kids to mindlessly reenact whatever they've seen on the silver screen, instead of taking "Lego man in a car" and creating worlds for him out of nothing, out of the kid's own imagination. It won't be any surprise to me if we experience a sudden dearth of architects and animators in thirty years.

Except for in my family, of course. I've kept all my old Legos in a box in my parents' basement, just to make sure that my posterity is super brainy and fun. I'm pretty sure that's all that it will take.