I Need Your Help to Solve All the World's Problems
I need your feedback about this essay. I wrote it for an upcoming Maynard Soloman collection, 6 Funny Detective Stories - Maynard Soloman Solves the World's Problems.
I plan on including this essay as part of a bonus feature for the collection. Tell me what you think. Too complicated? Not complicated enough? Stupid? Not stupid enough? Leave a comment below.
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The Philosophy of Maynard Soloman, Gal-Damn Detective
Let's set the record straight right now: Phone books need to go away.
Their time in history is over, but still they come every six months or so. The people who deliver them don't want them, either. That's why they dump them off at your door. They're too shiny and thick to just throw out (guilt) and recycling won't take them (absurd). You can't re-gift them, either, not even to little kids. Their sole purpose anymore seems to be perpetuating an anti-shoe agenda.
"There are simply too many shoes. How can we prevent people from buying more?" the phone book folks must say during board meetings. "Ah ha. We'll just keep printing these phone books. People will start a stack of them in their shoe closets next to the door. They'll have no choice but to not buy shoes."
It only follows that phone book companies must be made entirely of men. But I digress.
Don't get me wrong. I don't hate printed material. I still subscribe to the tattooed trees the Star Tribune cranks out of Minneapolis. It's just that phone books have turned into obligations forced upon other people who don't want them in the first place.
Which brings me to Maynard Soloman, gal-damn detective. I've been asked on a few occasions by readers about the underlying philosophy of the short story series. Are you trying to make a political point? Are you a liberal? A conservative? Or just an idiot with a keyboard?
(Hang with me, this will all make sense.)
Except for the last one, none of those are true. Maynard Soloman is my way of dissecting how humanity solves its problems. In 6 Funny Detective Stories, you'll find the Ol' Badger up against the War on Drugs, Social Security, illegal immigration, gay marriage and public transportation. (The existence of Santa Claus doesn't exactly count for the point I'm trying to make here.)
The underlying philosophy is this: Problems aren't fixed, they're replaced. This is the great folly of humanity, and it's the perfect foundation for a satire series.
Here's what I mean about replacing problems.
Problem: People use drugs to get high, which affects productivity in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Solution: Wage a War on Drugs to go after users and producers of drugs.
New Problem: Any gain in productivity is eaten up by the money it costs to wage the War on Drugs. Crowded prisons, expensive law enforcement operations, an overburdened court system and other socio-economic ills can be linked back to the very thing trying to cure these problems.
See what I mean?
Now, you don't have to think one way or the other about the War on Drugs to appreciate Maynard Soloman stories. I'm not using them to tell you what to think. What I'm asking you to consider is that when the string-pullers of the world set out to fix one problem, they create at least one more.
This isn't unique to our times. It's unique to our species. World War I was supposed to be the "War to End All Wars." What did humanity get in return? World War II. That gave us the Cold War, out of which the War on Terror was born. Conflicts don't end, they're replaced.
What's a guy to do?
Enter Maynard Soloman. He is the essence of the American individualist spirit. He's mobile, entrepreneurial and out for his own interests. He's a little guy up against the world's biggest problems, represented by the clients he takes in his detective business.
By the end of each story, within the microcosm of his own experiences, he manages to fix those big problems. He's not changing the system, though. That would have meant becoming the system, which would only have replaced the problem. He's changing people, one at a time. It's simpler and more effective to do it that way.
As I write this in mid-2012, it seems much of the world is trying to change the system. Massive social and political movements across the globe (the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the Tea Party, etc.) are looking to fix problems.
Although well-meaning, it's my cynical belief that if these movements are successful in a political sense, they'll wind up substituting in new problems. The Arab Spring will trade one kind of tyrannical government for another. The Occupiers will usher in new regulations that hurt the people they're trying to help. For all its talk of economic freedom, the Tea Party will perpetuate costly social policies, such as the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.
The real fruits of these movements will occur at the level of the individual. Their messages are the same as what's been sought after for eons: People want to live decent lives. If we can all respect that fact within each other, changes will begin at the bottom and work their way up.
Which brings me right back to phone books. One solution would be to become a phone book executive, to change the system from inside. Yet I have a feeling if I did, it'd be in the best interests of keeping my job to order another print run this coming year. At that point, my solution to the phone book problem would have perpetuated the problem I set out to solve.
It'd be far more effective if people, one at a time, just stopped paying any attention at all to phone books.
See what I mean? You can't change systems from the top down without introducing new problems. You can only change people, work from the bottom up.
Maybe it's better just to lie low. Buy a Winnebago without a home address, like Maynard. Solve the world's problems one person at a time.
If you ask me, it's the only way we will.
Actually, don't ask me. The above only refers to the philosophy underneath the stories. If I was king of the world, I'd fix everything by instituting a strict diet of booze, blindfolds and bazookas, then see what happens.
