Dysfunctional disfunction

Harry Drabik

Don’t know about you, but I enjoy tinkering, especially when it involves recycling a piece of junk to a useful purpose.

My trove holds lots of scrap in need of an extended or new life.

God, it is fun putting a discard to use!

At my other house I made woodshed latches from broken broom handles and scrap wood. Yes, it was very likely much easier to go buy a latch. But what was the joy in that?

I quickly admit that keeping garbage can become a very bad habit. Hoarders deserve their reputations. But if you save to use and then use it’s no longer hoarding. I call it creative recycling, but best to not let the collection outstrip potential needs.
It’s enough to save one or two broomsticks. Twenty would be 18 too many.

While puttering around this topic I’m reminded how often it’s necessary to tweak a product straight off the shelf. It must be cost-saving ambitions that cause significant numbers of new products to be a near failure right off the blocks. The item will appear OK, but, well, when you go to actually use it you discover the flaw hidden in some shortcut of manufacture or packing. Drives me crazy!

I wonder. Are the ones making and selling things that won’t work properly part of the same clan behind the NEW menus we have to hear about making a call.
I was comforted hearing a vehicle service group was concerned for my viral health.

But I doubt there was much health risk on the phone or valid reason to hold me online until one machine passed me to another.

The improvers behind those improvements should have statues erected to their self-praising ways so there’d be a monument I approved of toppling over.

Seems to me too many programmers working cozily from home have had too much time on hands to do other than make empty improvements. Yes please send me an e-mail to confirm my non-working e-mail. They have done something and they are happy. That what they’ve done is useless matters only in its usefulness in asking for a raise in a firm where appearance counts.

As pins get bowled down by contemporary-issue bowlers the dysfunctional function comes into fuller and more lively bloom.

I wonder who said Gone With The Wind was more than fictional drama that needed taking down? I’d have to suppose that if Gone is a disgrace then so is MASH as a historically accurate portrayal of the Korean conflict.

Then we have Star Wars and Star Trek as horrible flops in the area of astronomy. And note this Wylie E is not a coyote supremacist in skits that are not about the Grand (in Minnesota the Pretty Nice) Canyon.

Among functions perfected are those (you’re likely to know one or two) who have done nothing but yet seem to know everything. This is often a sign they will seek public office in order to better share their amazing abilities. Isn’t it curious how useless people succeed in office?

There has to be a lesson in that somewhere.

As for the rest of us, among us are those who wish to impose a better society for the betterment of all; or at least that’s what’s said. I cheer the idealism and effort, truly I do.

Doing better is laudable. The impediment to societal; perfection, however, seems to be people with their imperfections making a mess of grand plans.

Imperfection got us kicked from Eden’s Garden, didn’t it, so we’ve been at it a long time. Perfection plans in the 20th and 21st centuries has run along lines of social awakening to achieve universal peace. Getting woke up precedes the fields of killing which seemingly aren’t as meaningful unless you’re wide awake to appreciate them.

Once awakened appreciation begins for the versions of purges or cleansings needed because too damn many of us just aren’t perfect enough.

As a quip puts it, “The killing will continue until morale improves.” You can find examples from Bosnia to Cambodia and beyond.

Successful perfection has so far escaped us, but humanity may have come close a time or two. Remember the Shakers? They had a good plan, perfect you might say. But try to find a Shaker these days. Just try, too peaceful, I suspect, to stand up to the purveyors of other forms of perfection.

Is there a difference between functions dis and mal?

Take the last two Presidents. Trump misfires so often (talking before thinking) it seems natural. How to characterize that; is it mal or dis? Too complex for me.
The one before Trump is easier and in my view the malfunction winner. How you ask?

Remember the speech at the UN apologizing for the Inquisition (Spanish) and Crusades (European) both occurring long before there was a United States able to be held culpable.

At times dysfunction, malfunction, or mal intent are difficult to untangle, but it must have been very important to President Obama for him to make an apologetic speech before the UN. Inquisitions and crusades are bad, but wait. When a worthy apologist later decides what matters for the lives that matter then crusading inquisitions are seen in a more favorable light indeed.

The way of perfectionist plans (political or religious being much the same in outcome) is to begin with a view of paradise and then produce Hades as people fail to perform to perfection. Nothing much’s changed from Eden’s Garden has it?  

Lots of Churchill hatred lately. Would he be denounced if he hadn’t been effective stopping the national socialists and fascists?  

For example, who hates Jimmy Carter or can say what he accomplished in office?

The currently faithful eschew getting on their knees in favor of wearing masks. The more devout among them carry signs calling for others to repent their wicked ways.  

Current believers are also more progressive regarding punishment and consequences in the here and now instead of waiting for a reckoning in the hereafter.

I think I prefer the old way of waiting.