The Disaster Gene

I decided to take a trip to visit my father and grandparents this week to make up for the fact that I won’t be able to see them for a couple of years while we’re in Korea.  It was an absolutely amazing trip since they are such loving and entertaining people, but I learned something both important and simultaneously frightening:  I inherited the disaster gene.

What is the disaster gene, you ask?  It’s a highly mutated version of the power gene that leads certain people to reach great heights and become historical legends.  This is the stuff that  William the Conqueror and Charlemagne are made of.  According to some highly academic and very deep historical and genealogical research handed down to my family, we are in fact related to these two legends. According to this research, I am the 33^rd direct descendant of the former. Somewhere along the line, however, something went very, very wrong.

William the Conqueror

Charlemagne (Charles the Great)

Lisa the Ignoramus

It all started with the story of a young lady of noble birth in our family.  This young lady, I hypothesize, was the first to inherit the mutated version of the power gene.  You see, she had everything that she could ever need to become a woman of greatness:  wealth, opportunity, the right bloodline.  One day, however, she threw it all away in a twisted act of self-subterfuge.  She ran off with the blacksmith.  That’s right – she threw it all away.

This is where things started going seriously downhill for the family with a plethora of gallantly bad decisions that one by one led to our utter demise. 

I had heard old stories of our ancestors before, but didn’t fully develop this theory until listening to my 82-year-old grandfather yesterday.  He was telling me of his time as a soldier in Trieste, Italy in the 1950s.  Most of these stories consisted of him doing totally stupid, dangerous things “just because.”  Stupid act #1: The young buck snuck off base in uniform to a bar across the border full of huge, angry enemy Yugoslav soldiers, and nearly had to leave by sneaking out a back window in order to not get shanked.  Stupid act #2: He later gets into a diving competition with a Japanese-American soldier friend who is famous for his fighting and swimming skills, only to overshoot his capacities out of sheer stubbornness, ending up nearly drowned, and bleeding from every facial orifice.  The list goes on…. Seriously, this guy was asking for it nearly every day.

U.S. Soldiers in Trieste, Italy, 1950

While pondering these stories, it occurred to me that my father and I are exactly the same way. We’re crazy dumb when it comes to making seemingly simple decisions that end up determining what direction our lives will take.  For some reason, danger – sometimes even the prospect of death – taunt us, daring us to take completely ridiculous risks that no sane person would consider.  Most of this, I think, is (a) because we are foolishly without fear of most things that people are trained to be afraid of for very good reasons, and (b) because we are unbelievably and stupidly stubborn people.  These two things fog out all survival-promoting logic and reason.   It is only by the grace of God that we haven’t been wiped from the face of the Earth in an ironically grand gesture of Darwinian extinction.

So, now I’m happily hopping off to Korea, a land of strife which the news pundit recently declared the center of an impending World War III.  Awesome.

(Please tell me that you've seen "Team America."  If not, I command you to go rent and watch it now.)