By Ben Mullin
Insane Clown Posse, a grease-painted hip hop duo from Detroit, released a little ditty in September 2009 entitled “Miracles.”
The song”s lyrics, which have been parodied mercilessly on Saturday Night Live and the Internet, describe normal things in life ? such as rainbows, snow, rain and fog ? as magical mysteries.
By far the most ridiculed moment in the entire song comes about halfway through, when Joseph “Violent J” Bruce throws down the following lyric: “Water, fire, air and dirt ? magnets, how do they work?”
You can point and laugh at this oddly talkative clown all you want ? roughly 50 percent of the Internet has ? but it turns out his question isn”t an easy one. How do magnets work, anyway? And does it even matter?
On the surface, the question sounds stupid. I don”t have to crack open my compass to know that every magnet is charged in such a way that it generates a magnetic field, which attracts metallic objects. And the magnet”s charged because ? I don”t know. Something to do with electrons? The more I try to explain it, the harder it gets not to use the word “doohickey” and point at things.
This unwelcome revelation isn”t just limited to magnets, either. I just got my license, but I could not tell you exactly how a car works. The computer that I”m typing this column on uses semiconductors and microchips, which I don”t fully understand. I own a total of seven DVDs, which I assume were endowed with magical properties by Cinemator, the all-powerful god of home entertainment.
What bothers me is not that I don”t know the answers to these questions, but that I never bothered to ask them before. Because cars, computers and DVDs have been around since I was, I”ve accepted them as a kind of strange, interactive scenery ? significant only in operation, not explanation. My curiosity has been stunted by the obvious.
And even if I had bothered to ask before now how these things worked, it would have been a huge ordeal to satisfy that curiosity. It”s difficult to ask questions when you know answering them completely will take hours, if not days, of hard work. As technology becomes more and more advanced, curiosity becomes both necessary and exhausting.
In spite of the high definition world we live in, humanity may be going through another dark age. Except in this century, the problem isn”t that we can”t access information ? it”s that we don”t always have the motivation or inclination to process an overwhelming amount of difficult ideas. As the things we regularly interact with in our lives become increasingly complicated, we”re left feeling out of place in a world we all experience, but few can thoroughly explain.
Ben Mullin is a Lake County native and an English/journalism student attending California State University, Chico. He will spend his summer as a contributor to the Record-Bee.
