Where the Red Fern Grows?

I haven't read it in ages, but I remember "Where the Red Fern Grows" in the same vibe that "Stand By Me" is sad: when childhood friends die, it sometimes makes you remember how much deeper things felt then, when even moving away from friends felt like someone died.

Distance from the ideal, or: imperfection as blessing

I saw an eight or nine-year-old kid with a birthmark on his eye at my work yesterday.  Nothing too unusual.  I would have been strange, but I wanted to tell him that it was pretty cool.  Because it was.  And, at that age, it wouldn't hurt to hear it. 

I use the phrase 'it has character' a lot, usually to describe the odd and sometimes half-broken things that surround me, and have interesting stories, or undiscoverable mysteries.  What I'm really saying when I praise something as having character is that I find it interestin because it is imperfect. Why rivers are more interesting than irrigation canals, why a real leaf is more interesting than a model, and why reality is more interesting than a computer simulation.  

I wonder sometimes at the harm of comparing ourselves to an ideal. Where does it come from?  Religious often have a divine image to which they have to aspire.  Even evolutionary biologists work from a point that assumes a 'most reproductive' individual, and compares variation in a population to them implicitly (and those many who misinterpret it, with incredible foresight and smugness, often lay out exactly what they believe an individual needs to thrive and survive) 

If I were to design a personality test, I think one criteria would be: Do you measure distance from the ideal as a negative or as a positive.  Do you see your flaws as making you worse than a template, or better?  I guess you can figure that I fall into the latter. 

(Maybe that just illuminates their faith in expertise? also: What about distance from the mean?).

I think the greatest element of wish-fulfillment in modern cinema, or stories in general, is that of the villain.  There's a reason simple-minded military buffs remain fixated on world war 2, and probably will for a long time: it had a villain.  Modern civilization's layers obscure relationships.  We have made the last corners of the globe part of our society, and so are offered no 'other' to serve as the bogeyman of our stories.  Instead the forces we feel aligned against us result from the bureaucratic banality of business, the well-meaning ineptitudes of government, or the constrictions of a broken system with no shared vision of the future.  Where everyone is tainted by the thin threads holding our social web together- the multinational that kills for oil in Africa? Does my retirement fund, invest in an indexing fund, own shares in that company?  when our government acts the bully, kills civilians, colonizes, are we not complicit in this? Couldn't we have done more? Could it be me? Might I not care? We ask ourselves.  

We are all guilty.  We are all villains.  To have someone worse, someone explicitly evil.  There would be a compass point to which to align our lives.  There would be a story we would share.  Even if it is a fiction.