A Narcissist’s Dream

14 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Beauty, Bigotry, Christopher Lasch, Donald Trump, Drumpf, John Oliver, Kim K., Kim Kardashian, Last Week Tonight, Mob, Mob Violence, Narcissism, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, NPD, Obsessive Individualism, Racism, Rev. Al Sharpton, Self-Love

Spinning coin (can’t make heads or tails of it), March 12, 2016. (http://bestanimations.com).

We’re a nation of narcissists, this is true. Christopher Lasch wrote as much in his bestseller The Culture of Narcissism in 1979. But he was only examining American culture between the end of World War II and the 1970s, the “Me Decade.” Lasch wasn’t looking at obsessive individualism as a unique and historical American trait, one with roots as far back as Jamestown and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860). He was looking at how the American obsession with self had evolved into “self-love” and a constant need for either attention or navel-gazing, as evidenced by the rise of pop psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.

Too bad Lasch isn’t around in 2016 to see how far down the rabbit hole America has gone. Between Kim Kardashian-West (at least for the moment) and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, it is obvious that we have a national crisis of narcissism on our hands. The two of them are the same side of a two-headed coin. One has traded on their family and beauty in exchange for millions of fans and tens of millions of dollars. The other has built an empire based on his father’s fortune and his brand of self-love. Both have taken advantage of White privilege and class privilege to drive their constant need for fame and attention. And since game knows game, they have both earned themselves an audience of millions who themselves are obsessed with themselves. Or at least, with seeing themselves as successful by living vicariously through the likes of Kim K and The Donald.

The New Material Girl

Kardashian “broke the Internet” again this past week, this time with a tweet that included a “naked” picture of her posing in front of a full-length mirror. I say “naked” only because she redacted her breast and privates, so that while she was naked when taking the picture, it’s not really a naked picture. Obviously Kardashian can do whatever she wants. Anyone with an objective eye can see that Kardashian has as much beauty as genetics and plastic surgery can muster. Anyone who objects to her taking photos of herself in the nude on moralistic grounds is either a prude or a hypocrite, given the number of people who pay attention to her and her brand.

Donald Trump posing with Kim Kardashian at Celebrity Apprentice event, New York, 2010. (Mathew Imaging/WireImage via http://eonline.com).

Kardashian is a narcissist, and those millions of folks who follow her on Twitter, watch her shows on E!, buy her products and/or jack off to her are narcissists as well. Not because she has maintained a slamming body despite pregnancy, reaching her mid-thirties, or her five-three frame. Kardashian is a narcissist because she embodies most of the clinical symptoms it. According to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V), narcissistic personality disorder (under the code 301.81) is “a persistent manner of grandiosity, a continuous desire for admiration, along with a lack of empathy.” In order to determine if a patient may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a psychiatrist must determine if that patient meets at least any five (5) of the nine (9) standards below:

1. A grandiose logic of self-importance (✓)
2. A fixation with fantasies of unlimited success, control, brilliance, beauty, or idyllic love (definitely ✓)
3. A credence that he or she is extraordinary and exceptional and can only be understood by, or should connect with, other extraordinary or important people or institutions (see her collection of friends, lovers: ✓)
4. A desire for unwarranted admiration (✓)
5. A sense of entitlement (✓)
6. Interpersonally oppressive behavior
7. No form of empathy
8. Resentment of others or a conviction that others are resentful of him or her
9. A display of egotistical and conceited behaviors or attitudes (✓)
(American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

It would be hard to know for sure where Kardashian would stand on 6., 7., and 8. without some serious time on a couch or knowing her beyond her public displays of all things herself. Still, it was easy enough to get to six standards without the need for a PhD in psychology or a psychiatric license.

What is worrisome about both Kardashian and Trump, though, is their endless legions of fans and supporters. Kardashian has been peddling herself as Whiteness personified, an entitled upper-class Beverly Hills daughter of O.J. Simpson friend and defense lawyer Robert Kardashian (of Armenian descent) and Kris Houghton-Kardashian-Jenner. Despite the ethnic contradictions, Kardashian’s success has been based in the idea of the glamorous life, the ability to be ostentatious, to rub shoulders, elbows, and other anatomical parts with the rich and famous and the up-and-comers. Between the sex tape with Ray J. that made its way to the Internet and the start of Keeping Up With The Kardashians (both in 2007), her brand of narcissistic Whiteness has been on display now for a full decade. There’s no way that someone whose only job prior to reality TV was as a stylist would be doing this well without the blind support of millions of Americans who have the narcissism, but lack the funds to fuel it.

Damien Meets The Donald

The same is true of GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. He would not be in the position to run against either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders were it not for his four decades in the public eye. Between his casinos, his business ventures (which include numerous failures and five Chapter 11 filings), his immense number of interviews, his three marriages and extramarital affairs, and his NBC TV show The Apprentice (2003-15), Trump’s name is legend. At least for 1990s rap artists and generations of Whites who have bought his books on entrepreneurship in the millions.

Trump, or to go back to the original (thank you, John Oliver), Drumpf, would fulfill all nine standards for narcissistic personality disorder. His constant expressions of misogyny, his equating of Mexicans with rape and criminality, his belief that all protesters need to “get a job,” his insistence that the world is divided between winners and “losers.” All while Trump believes that his very name equals success, no matter the amount of evidence that contradicts his inverted reality. On the 40-point-scale of the Narcissistic Personality Index, Drumpf would likely score between a 38 and a 40, a perfect or near-perfect score. A score, by the way, that no one other than a narcissist would be proud of.

Damien TV series poster, A&E, accessed March 13, 2016. (http://imdb.com).

Drumpf, though, is a snake-oil salesman who benefited from his father’s slum-lording ways, inheriting a company in 1971 and part of Fred Trump’s $200 million upon the latter’s death in 1999. If Bill Gates isn’t a self-made billionaire, then Drumpf was born two marathons ahead of Gates in the human race for wealth. Yet Trump has presented himself for years as the epitome of Horatio Alger, and to the detriment of millions of Whites who actually believe that Trump’s life is a rags-to-riches story. The bankruptcies don’t matter. The failures of Trump Shuttle, Trump University, Trump Entertainment Resorts, none of that has mattered. All that matters, apparently, is that Trump is a billionaire (no one really knows how much he’s worth; could be anywhere between $250 million and $3.9 billion), and that he promises to “Make America Great Again.”

Unlike Kardahshian, Trump openly attacks anyone who contradicts his narcissistic image of himself and his world. He has for years. The so-called Central Park Five wrongly convicted in the 1989 wilding gang rape case — Yusef Salaam Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, and Korey Wise — can attest to the impact of Trump’s money, one-page ad calling for the death penalty, and narcissism on their lives. Even after the courts overturned their convictions in 2002 and they finally settled their lawsuits against the city for $41 million in 2014, Trump still blamed the five for a crime that they obviously did not commit. “Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels,” Trump wrote in an op-ed for the New York Daily News in June 2014. Apparently, a narcissist who always sees people of color in the worst possible light can never be wrong.

Even with his so-called friends, Trump’s narcissism is beyond the pale. When supposed friend Rev. Al Sharpton disagreed with Trump’s law-and-order stance on Ferguson in 2014, Trump responded with a personal attack during an interview with Fox News. actually addressed their relationship during a Fox News hit last December. “Al’s a con man. He knows it. I know it. Don King knows it, his friend, who I go to with fights with — with Al. And they all know it,” Trump said. He added, Sharpton’s a “professional con man” who has “gotten away with murder.”

We Are The #1s

Should we ever wonder why Trump’s rallies are a who’s who of White supremacy and privilege attracting every form of bigotry, like a nuclear missile fully fueled and ready for launch? Should anyone be surprised that whenever Drumpf blows his dog whistles to his mobs about immigration, the US-Mexico border, yells at a protester, “get them outta here” like a drunk-ass White supremacist, calls President Barack Obama “a disaster,” his audience responds with angry delight? This isn’t just racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, or misogyny at work. No, this is also a collective obsession with the self, a self that yearns to be like Drumpf in interviews, and on stage at rallies, and in proclaiming the self to be richer, greater, more successful, and more right than every other self.

Donald Trump greets supporters after a rally, Mobile, Alabama, August 27, 2015. (Mark Wallheiser/Getty via http://www.telegraph.co.uk/).

It isn’t the fault of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010) that Trump is on a glide path toward the GOP nomination this summer. Nor is it the fault of Obama, or Black Lives Matter, or even The Donald himself. No, it is the fault of millions of narcissistic Americans whose billionaire and celebrity worship has trumped all sense of reality.

As psychology professors Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell noted in their recent book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009), millions of Americans live in the “land of grandiose fantasy,” with potentially disastrous results (pp. 3-4), like the rise of Trump. Given that March Madness 2016 begins in earnest this week, would anyone really notice if Trump decided to make Kim K. his vice-presidential running mate? She turns thirty-five this October, after all.

The Fountain of Middle Age

27 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Aging, Back To School (1986), Beauty, Demographics, Family, Fountain of Middle Age, Fountains, Friends, Health, Philadelphia, Rodney Dangerfield, Self-Reflection, Youth

Alexander Stirling Calder’s “Swann Memorial Fountain,” Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA, August 18, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

By most measures, today marks my full transition from relative youth to middle age. Although, when I really think about it, didn’t I really hit middle age in December ’07, when I turned thirty-eight? The average life expectancy of an American male is about seventy-seven, right? And for Black males, it’s barely sixty-five. Given my family history, though, I won’t hit middle age for another two years. My maternal grandfather turned ninety-six three months ago, and my paternal grandfather lived until he was ninety-six. Even my father’s still moving along at seventy-five, despite his battle with alcoholism between the ages of twenty and fifty-eight.

I do feel things in my body and mind that until a few years ago were merely minor aches and pains. My right hip is misaligned with my left hip, likely from years of walking at warp speed, lots of basketball, and six years of my running regime. My L-5 vertebrae is a bit compressed, due to years of activity, including many years hunched over a keyboard trying to make myself into a writer, author and educator. My right knee has been a bother since I was twenty-four, but the issue has gotten worse in the past two years (maybe time for some HGH or microfracture surgery?). I now have white-coat syndrome (because most doctors and nurses get on my last nerve), and I’m mildly anemic. No, folks, forty-six isn’t the new thirty-six, even if I can still run forty yards in under five seconds, pop a three over my son’s outstretched hand or leg press 360 pounds.

Me via Photo Booth, December 17, 2015. (Donald Earl Collins).

But I still have good health and a mostly healthy body and mind. Since I turned twenty-seven, my weight has never been higher than 241 pounds (including clothes, wallet, phone, and keys) or lower than 212 (I weight 229 now). I can still memorize when inspired to do so, remember virtually anything important from my life from the age of four to the present, and could still probably win at Jeopardy if I ever got the call.

What’s more impressive, though, is whom remains in my life now that I’m no longer “young” anymore. My friends live all over the map, from the DC area to Pittsburgh to the Bay Area and New York, from Atlanta to Athens and from Seattle to Shanghai. I’ve made peace (mostly) with my family and my past, even if they aren’t always at peace with me. There’s my wife and son, of course, who are mostly likely the reason I’m still “young” relative to my age. Though I remain a Christian, I do not have the blind faith or evangelical -isms of my youth, and I’m at peace with that as well. I’m probably further to the left culturally and politically than I was at sixteen, twenty-six, or thirty-six. Because I’ve learned, sadly, that so much of what I was taught or fed growing up was either incorrect or a complete lie. But even with that sad disillusionment, I’ve come to accept the possibility of change for myself and the Sisyphean task that this nation and world always has been.

Me at 45 and 364.25 days, Pittsburgh, PA, December 26, 2015. (Donald Earl Collins).

Yet even the idea of middle age has changed in the minds of capitalists as the Baby Boomer generation has begun retirement and all of them have received their first AARP cards. Before 2000, the ad folks and entertainment folks had split up adults into the age demographics of 18-34, 35-44, 45-64, and 65 and up. Now, it’s 18-24, 25-54, and 55 and up. This privileges Baby Boomers (as usual) and props up Millennials (folks who used to be Gen Y). My middle age is not the same as Baby Boomers’ middle age. Even in demographic representations, money-grubbing capitalists give us Gen Xers little respect.

Rodney Dangerfield quipped this funny line in Back to School (1986):

Coach Turnbull: What’s a guy your age doing here with these kids?
Thornton (played by Dangerfield): I’m lookin’ for the fountain of middle age.

Maybe when I’m sixty-five (like Rodney Dangerfield was in this film), I’ll be looking for the Fountain of Middle Age, too. But my choice will be to stand in it for the next thirty or forty years!

Rachel Jeantel, A Real, True Beautiful Friend

28 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Politics, race, Youth

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Beauty, Black Twitter, Criminal Justice System, Cultural Stereotypes, Doc Holliday, Don West, Friendship, Friendships, George Zimmerman, Lazy Tongue Syndrome, Media Coverage, Rachel Jeantel, Racial Stereotypes, Racism, Stereotypes, Tombstone (1993), Trayvon Martin, Val Kilmer

Witness Rachel Jeantel continued her testimony, George Zimmerman trial, Sanford, FL, June 27, 2013. (Jacob Langston, AP/Orlando Sentinel; http://time.com).

There will be months’ worth of stuff written and said about Rachel Jeantel and her performance on the witness stand during the George Zimmerman trial. Everything from her dark skin and being overweight to her lazy tongue syndrome and reluctance to take the witness stand. Between Black Twitter on Wednesday critiquing her language, shyness, and style and blond-haired, bubble-headed Whites picking apart her testimony on Thursday, it’s a wonder that anyone sees Ms. Jeantel as a human being. She’s far more than the hero, villain or ghetto girl that folks in social media have and will portray her to be.

Ms. Jeantel is beautiful to me, skin-deep and otherwise. Yes, she’s not perfect, which is one of the things that makes her a beautiful person. The most important thing to remember about Jeantel, though, is that she’s a real person and a real friend. The truest friend any human being could ever hope to have. I should know. I’ve never had more than eight people in my life at any time that I could truly call friend, and none during my preteen and teenage years before college. Of those, about half have proven themselves to be fair-weather friends, unreachable when I’ve needed them the most.

Jeantel is the ultimate friend, for she has acted in Trayvon Martin’s best interests even after his death. A friendship that gave her the strength to tell the truth, to endure ridicule and scorn and hours of cross-examination from Don West. Jeantel gave voice to Martin from beyond the grave, knowing that she was in the right.

Jeantel makes me think of a scene from Tombstone (1993), the one with Val Kilmer playing Doc Holliday. Dying from the long-term effects of tuberculosis and living the life of an alcoholic gambler, Holliday continued to ride with Wyatt Earp to hunt down his youngest brother’s killers. When asked, “Why you doin’ this, Doc?,” Holliday said

“Because Wyatt Earp is my friend.”

In response, the other character said, “Friend? Hell, I got lots of friends.” To which Holliday replied, “…I don’t.”

Jeantel may well have lots of friends, but her friendship with Trayvon Martin is as real, true and beautiful as it gets. I hope that my close friends are even one-tenth as true to me after I’m dead as she was to Martin this week.

Monkey See, Baboon Do

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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8U, A.B. Davis Middle School, Baboon, Beauty, Bigotry, Humanities, Italian Club, Monkey, Racism, Stereotype Threat, Teenagers, Writing, Writing Scrapheap

Monkey See Monkey Do, May 22, 2013. (http://kidsunder7.com).

There are plenty of stories and vignettes that ended up on the Boy @ The Window scrap heap. Most because they weren’t relevant, some because a particular person or character really wasn’t a significant player in the book. In my final set of story revisions (not dialogue revisions) in ’09 and ’10, I operated under the “two or more rule.” If a person or character showed up fewer than two times in the book, I took them out, as they really weren’t as significant as I originally thought.

But in the case of the Sonya story below, it was a tough cut. I wanted to craft a book in which people felt everything I went through while not feeling sorry for me. I think and hope that I did. Though this story contained many elements of what I wanted in the rest of the book, it didn’t quite fit. Still, it serves as a good reminder of how mean even someone as polite (but certainly not always nice) as I am today could be at thirteen.

—————————

“Sonya was major fodder for Alex in eighth grade. She had a short Afro, an ‘au naturale’ to be exact. She wasn’t nearly as polished in maintaining her looks as many of the other girls in 8U. Sonya wasn’t ugly by any stretch. But by her not attempting to beautify herself in any way, she stood out for some in our class. Why would’ve she needed to anyway? She was also well-spoken, intelligent and outgoing, at least at the beginning of the year. Unfortunately for Sonya, my Italian Club classmates Alex, et al. were around to call her all kinds of names, like ‘baboon,’ and ‘monkey.’ I felt sorry for her, but I was also angry with her too. It pissed me off to see her respond to these semi-racist barbs with a blank face or even a smile.

It pissed me off so much that I ended up calling Sonya one of those names by the end of the school year. One day in homeroom, par for the course, Alex and company picked with Sonya again, calling her a ‘baboon’ among other things. She just sat there with that silly ‘Oh well’ smile on her face, as if they were telling her that she should go into professional modeling. Under my breath, I called her ‘monkey,’ and not as a joke. I just couldn’t believe that she was going to sit there like some pre-Civil Rights era Black in the South and take their crap without any response.

Except that I had called Sonya a ‘monkey’ within earshot of her and Alex. She ran out of the room, apparently to the girls bathroom, where she cried for several minutes, I later learned from Allison. I immediately tried to apologize, which Sonya eventually accepted (after my eighth grade science teacher Ms. Mignone and Allison shamed me for what I said). What I said was unacceptable to me, and the rationale was too intellectual for my own good. For Sonya, it simply came down to her looks, not her disposition. I wished that it had never happened, given what I faced from some of my classmates on a semi-regular basis.”

———————————————————-

1990s R&B/hip-hop duo Zhané from their 1994 album cover Pronounced Jah-Nay, May 22, 2013. (http://centrictv.com).

1990s R&B/hip-hop duo Zhané, from 1994 album cover Pronounced Jah-Nay, May 22, 2013. (http://centrictv.com).

The Sonya story has many of those elements, exposing me good, bad and ugly in the process. It’s about race and teenage ignorance and intellect. It’s about stereotype threat on one obvious level and trying to fit in on an unconscious one. It’s about the person I needed to become in high school as well as how I got to be that quiet yet observant person. The story is significant, yet because I only dealt with Sonya for two paragraphs in a 345-page book (in print form), it didn’t make the final cut. Because there are other and more central characters and stories in which stereotype threat and the ugly side of my immaturity both come out, I didn’t include Sonya.

Luckily, I also have a blog, where even scrap-heap stories can find the light of a new day. So, for this week, the thirtieth anniversary of my calling Sonya a “monkey,” I apologize again. I was a baboon for saying it in the first place. And Sonya, I hope you are well!

Our Flat-Butt Society

08 Saturday May 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Beauty, Culture, Flat Butts, Pop Culture, Race

Flat-Butt Truck

Picture a world in which the only ingredient needed to achieve beauty was a flat butt. Imagine that this flat butt would guarantee more than an easier time in dating, marriage, and beauty pageants. A flat butt makes it easier to do well in school, to find comfortable fitting jeans, and to gain access to higher education, quality health care, better homes, and steady employment. Now imagine that those who have oblong butts, round butts, bubble butts, or some other combination of butt shapes have limited access to education, employment, medical care, housing, well-fitting clothes, and beauty pageants. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But, despite the numerous exceptions, we live in a flat-butt society.

We assume that flatter is better because some dead person created it as our ideal vision of beauty centuries ago. But this dead person created this standard without the benefit of interacting with people with other kinds of butts. Today we find ourselves in two worlds: the make-believe world of flat butts, and the real world of multiple kinds of butts. Hundreds of years of conditioning have left most in our society with the impression that a flat butt is a good butt and that other butts—especially round and bubbly ones—are unhealthy and symbolize low intellectual stamina. We need to dig up this dead person and ask him a few questions about his flat-butt vision.

Take the symbols of beauty for our culture. Whether male or female, they usually have flat butts with big chests. Round, shapely butts equal obesity as far as most of us are concerned. The ideal flat butt is one that is firm and muscular, an extension of a firm and muscular back. It’s one that a rubber band would boomerang off of. Has anyone ever seen a Miss America or Mr. Universe with anything other than a flat, muscular butt? Between so-called supermodels like Heidi Klum and Gisele, Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, and the constant fawning over Hollywood actors, the women and especially men that are with them should feel extremely lucky. At least, that’s what we’re told by advertisers, journalists, reporters and commentators nearly every minute of every day.

There are of course exceptions to the flat-butt rule. These anomalies are often exotic and rarer than gold, but not the flat-butt norm. The popular press and hip-hop videos tend to cover these unusual people as ones who have exceptional derrieres. This only reinforces the idea that flat butts are normal and within everyone’s reach, and that anyone who doesn’t have a flat butt and isn’t exotic simply isn’t attractive. It’s no wonder that non-flat-bottomed men, women, and girls are spending millions for doctors to suck the fat out of their butts.

Another dead expert decided that a flat-butt person, as the international symbol of beauty, also was more athletic and intelligent. Because those with flat butts already were in the top positions of our society, it was self-evident that anyone without a flat butt lacked intellect or leadership ability. This expert assumed by scientific observation that people with non-flat butts couldn’t lead in science, society, or sports because their butts would get in the way. Over time, those with non-flat butts became leaders in the athletic field, but only in areas where intelligence seemed unnecessary. It’s likely that this deceased expert had a non-flat butt and spent much of his life obsessed with flattening it, wanting to become part of the flat-butt elite.

We can even see the penetration of our culture’s flat-butt philosophy in clothing and in our public spaces. Go to any clothing store in the country, and one will find it almost impossible to find trousers, slacks, jeans, pants, skirts, shorts, and underwear made for people with oblong, round, bubble, or mixed butts. The closest approximation to bottoms for the non-flat-bottomed male or female are ones made for the overweight, another population that fails to meet our society’s beauty standards.

We design our public spaces with flatness in mind. Take a look at the interior, exterior, and posterior of any public transit system in the country. A flat butt fits better in the molded seat of a bus or train than a round one. Public transit vehicles themselves have flat features, especially their rears. Public restrooms have toilet seats with flat butts in mind, as any non-flat-butted person can attest. And only someone with a flat butt would design slides in public parks for children with flat butts. Kids without flat butts tend to get stuck on these slides because the slides aren’t built with enough flexibility to accommodate other kinds of butts.

Sexual relations is one area in which the divide between flat butts and bubble butts (at least) has softened in recent years. It appears that some flat butt people are actually attracted to people with round, even jiggly butt cheeks. Yet this attraction only goes so far. Despite the mixing of flat and round and the recently discovered coolness of the non-flat, thinking in this area for most flat butts remains flat. For them, flat is phat-in beauty, culture, intelligence, and in some cases, athletics. The round, oblong, bubble, and mixed butts still have a long way to go.

What those with round butts need are pioneers to prove that like the world, the ideal for butts is variety and balance, not flat as the ideal. Proving this may require studies that show that a round butt provides long-term health benefits or has no genetic connection to intelligence. Chiropractors could show that those with non-flat butts have a greater chance of avoiding spinal degeneration than those with flat butts. Geneticists with round and flat butts may need to show that the round butt gene is the dominant one while flat-butt genes are recessive. Engineers can prove that rounding off buses and trains will make them more aerodynamic and energy-efficient, and deeper seat moldings will save millions in caring for our backs. Whatever the innovation or discovery, it’s up to the round butts of our nation to make this flat-butt society more round.