I, Me, Mine

“It’s all about me.  It’s all about me.  I am the guy next to you on a plane with the big mouth and the pea-sized brain.  Speaking you see, incessantly, all about me.”

                                                                                          -It’s All About Me, Sean Morey

So a plane crashes at the San Francisco airport.  After the second-guessing of highly skilled pilots with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of flight time and training; after the horrible death of a teenage girl long after the wreckage was no longer a threat to her; and after the absolutely and unbelievably racist prank involving the pilot’s names was played on a local television station, it came out that an executive from Facebook released a statement, via an e-mail to USA Today, that she was nearly on that plane.  Oh wait, that actually happened in the first couple of hours.

            Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, a billionaire and recent author of the book Lean In (surprise, surprise) felt that the world at large needed to know how close we had come to losing her greatness on that morning.  I suppose I should mention how close I came to my life ending on the Titanic.  Considering my station in life, had I been on that ship I would have been traveling in steerage, where the loss of life was many times higher than those in the first class (Facebook Exec Class?).  Only the fact that I was born nearly 50 years after the sinking in a country other than the one where the ship was boarded saved my life.  Whew!

            Last week Justin Bieber, that flavor of the month whose month seems to be going on far too long, stuck it to the man by urinating into a mop bucket as he exited a New York night club through its kitchen.  And by “the man” I mean the janitor who had to clean up after him.  Bieber also sprayed a photo of Bill Clinton with cleaning fluid in that same kitchen and yelled, “Fuck you Bill Clinton.”  While I’m impressed that Bieber knows who Bill Clinton is, or at least can identify him by a photograph, I doubt he could come up with a reason the former President deserved a Fuck You from a teenage idol just one unsupervised evening away from an overdose.  Any why is it that Stevie Ray Vaughn steps onto a helicopter and is gone forever while the Justin Biebers of the world dodge early death and continue to vomit their dreck upon the world year after year?  I’m not suggesting that Bieber deserves to die but if God is listening and has plans to take another musician in a plane crash anyway…

            A couple of days ago a man named David John McCormick appeared in court in San Francisco on charges of communicating a false distress, failing to heave to, and assaulting a federal officer.  What McCormick did was radio the Coast Guard and say his friend had fallen overboard in the fog of San Francisco Bay, for some reason in an Australian accent even though he is not Australian.  When the Coast Guard found him on his sailboat and said they were coming aboard he said his boat is a “peace ship” and that he had “ordinance” on board, before he cut his anchor line and took off.  Showing an incredible amount of patience, the Coast Guard followed him for 6 hours before they boarded and arrested him.  Even more incredibly the boarding office who was struck three times by McCormick never hit him back but instead handcuffed him and after putting him in a life vest, took him into custody.  To put his into perspective, imagine calling 911 and when the cops, firemen, and emergency medical technicians show up (Coast Guard members act as all three sometimes) you slam the door in their faces, threaten them with “ordinance” and punch the cop.

            What do these three have in common?  They all are exhibiting classic behavior of Narcissism.  They individually believe that their own importance in the world outweighs those with real tragedies, those who work hard just to stay afloat, and those who have dedicated themselves to helping the first two when they need it most.  Narcissism gets its name from the Greek myth of Narcissus who was so enamored of his appearance that when an enemy showed him his own reflection in a pool of water, he promptly sat down, whereupon he stared at himself until he died.  Perhaps we could take up a collection to get these three some mirrors.