MODERN WISDOM
NUMBER 303
OCTOBER 2023
Copyright 2023 Francis DiMenno
dimenno@gmail.com
http://www.dimenno.wordpress.com
1. AMBITION
PART TWENTY-TWO: IMPULSIVITY
Dear Bill,
Impulsivity, I find, is gravely underrated. It is a gamble, to be sure; but much of life is a gamble. But I have found that you will never lose your shirt if you bet on nature to take her natural course. (What I wouldn’t give for a doughnut! But the Doctor will not allow it, and there’s no way to smuggle one into the hospital. The Nurses by now are onto Penelope’s tricks. She never was any kind of a skilled prevaricator.)
Flocks of birds and flocks of people are birds of a father, so to speak. Surely you know of a man who stops stock still in the middle of the sidewalk and gawps up at a skyscraper. All too soon, an entire motley crowd of passersby begin to look up as well. The original man quietly withdraws himself from the crowd, and then he, with the aid of a confederate, proceeds to pick the pockets of the impromptu assemblage of skygazers. Ho ho ho.
Well, this story, or anecdote, or apocryphal tale, has great significance when it comes to accounting for the habits of the World Class Man. He is not the one who has HIS pockets picked. (They seldom carry cash around anyway, unless they plan to bestow princely largesse in the form of gratuities to edacious hotel employees with their beaks open like baby birds.) No–the worthwhile people always walk, if they deign to walk at all, with their eyes fixed straight ahead. And…they never walk alone.
I have never had any problem filling a blank rectangle of paper; at least, never before now. In the past, words have always come to me, unbidden, as if stored in my cranium like superheated steam, awaiting only their opportunity for release. (My choice of metaphor reveals what a mixed blessing I think the industrial revolution truly was. It provided us with myriads of truly revolutionary and labor-saving inventions. However, without it, there might have been no War of Northern Aggression (as my Grandfather quaintly called it), and no First World War, and, consequently, no Communist revolution or fascist ascendency, or Second World War. The Social Science boys very often speak of the law of unintended consequences. There is nothing to be done about these consequences; so the best action is to do nothing.
“Seeing then that these things cannot be spoken against, ye ought to be quiet, and to do nothing rashly.”–Acts 19:36.
I always intended to be good to my wife. I assumed, in the love-drugged naivete of my callow youth, that we would love each other forever. Instead, love gradually devolved into a fond familiarity, and, then, to a rather chilly mutual tolerance. Had we been childless, we might have been happier. But a child, as a matter of course, changes everything. I, personally, brought up under the convention that children should be seen and not heard, do not fully comprehend why this should be so. But there it is.
I cannot fathom why Eddie Jr. turned out the way he did. Perhaps his sturdy German nurse Gudrun was actually a secret anarchist, along the lines of Gavrilo Princip, and inculcated him with ridiculous notions such as ridding oneself of desire and the letting go of all ambition. Of such things I am, perhaps, not fully qualified to speak. (Although there is very little that I do not know, or at least know of.) Metaphysics is hardly my forte. I am more of a political philosopher. But I do know this much: according to the laws of nature, the old ways are the best ways, and when it comes right down to it, tradition is all we have. And there it is.
Even now, even after decades of marriage; even after decades of fierce and personal arguments, and mostly cold silences, I cannot imagine my life without Penelope, and would be made very upset at the very notion of her in the arms of another man. Call me old-fashioned. (Call me anything but late for dinner. Ho ho ho.) But there it is.
I recall an argument I had with my son on the occasion of his graduating (by the skin of his teeth) from the fourth form. When I told him that his choice of breakfast attire (some kind of military pajamas and a t-shirt with a vulgar logo) was inappropriate. “Your mother likes to see you fully dressed when you come down to breakfast.” “Penelope?” he said. (He had taken to addressing his mother by her first name, though he didn’t do so to me–“Try me, my little man,” I thought to myself, with no small satisfaction. “Just try me.”)
“You see? Penelope,” he said, “doesn’t care what I have on.” “No, I don’t,” she said, lighting a cigarette with a click and a whoosh of her gold-plated lighter, “though it would be nice if you got dressed.” “Like any normal person, ” I chimed in, though I realize in retrospect that this was a bridge too far. For although Eddie seethed in silent resentment of his lackadaisical mother, he often bore for me some sort of inexplicable open resentment bordering on contempt.
He saw his opening then, and he took it. “Are you saying then,” he said, with that crooked little smile and those haunted cow-eyes of his which so endeared us to him when he was a helpless babe, “That everyone should be normal–like you?”
“Not at all, ” I said. “I have never maintained that uniformity of opinion is desirable. But there are certain conventions, certain standards of correct behavior, which every decent person ought to observe. Unless you’d rather live in Cuba, or Russia, or some other dungheap.”
“Edgar, please,” said Penelope, lowering her fork, “when you two have these arguments at the breakfast table, the food just curdles there in my stomach.”
“It’s OK, Penelope,” said Eddie Jr., the hero boy. “I’ll go and get dressed.”
“You might as well stay,” I barked. “The damage has been done. You’ve upset your poor mother and–“
But then I forgot what I was going to say and so I merely added, “I hope you’re satisfied.”
I looked at Eddie and I thought I saw beneath his dark and fevered brows some evil thoughts brewing. So I waited for him to say what was on his mind. But he said nothing; he simply continued shovelling eggs and bacon into his capacious maw.
When he was quite young, I would go into his bedroom and gently shake him and whisper, “Wakey, wakey, eggs and cakey.”
Eddie finally saw fit to speak, stopping to let out a delicate burp. “What’s so bad about the Cubans anyway,” he said, through a mouthful of food.
“Keep your mouth closed when you’re chewing, Eddie,” said Penelope.
Eddie knew very well that any reference to Cuba in any but the most unfavorable light was bound to set me off, but I refused to be goaded. Instead, I rather diffidently suggested that he hie himself onto a slow boat and pay a visit to the Worker’s Paradise to see for himself.
“They’ve got universal health care,” he said, rather antagonistically.
“Whoopie! Free aspirin for everybody! Ho ho ho!”
“If they don’t have enough real medicine, it’s because of you and your friends.”
I was instantly on the alert. “Pray tell me, Eddie,” I said deliberately, “what ‘friends’ are these?’ Penelope shot him a warning glance. Eddie backpedaled. “Oh, you know–public opinion,” he muttered.
I pressed my advantage. “You should get down on your knees and thank the Lord G-d (here I crossed myself) that you weren’t born in Cuba–where troublemakers like you are shot. That would teach you,” I added, rather gratuitously.
“What’s so bad about Castro, anyway? I mean, how is he worse than Batista? Batista was a dictator. He killed twenty thousand people.”
“And what do you think Castro is? The Good Humor Man? A jovial ice cream truck driver? He’s a ruthless tinpot despot and his Nietzschean ruthlessness makes him a truly dangerous man. Those chicken-hearted cookie pushers at State–” But then I stopped myself. I was arguing this point in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Penelope was shooting me a look of mild disgust, to which I had grown accustomed. “Well, then,” I said, with a jollity I did not feel, “we can agree to disagree.”
“Che Guevara,” said my son, upping the ante, “will someday be regarded as a Saint.”
I laughed in his face at the sheer absurdity of what he had said. “Oh Che can you see,” I quipped, and got up and turned my back to him. The very idea that those dirty Cubans and their dingy revolution would occupy one mere iota of his thoughts was a red-blooded outrage.
But he circled around and confronted me, with all the passion and vigor and fervor of an idealistic and empty-headed boy of fifteen-and-a-half. “You think I’m stupid and have nothing to say,” he mumbled. The thought had crossed my mind, I thought, but, like a mature adult, I contented myself by giving him a complacent smile. “Don’t you know,” he said, “that someday–someday young people will be in charge?” With that I had to give him, as people used to call it, the horse laugh. “‘Twas ever thus,” I remarked, rather sententiously, “and yet the old gray mare gets all the pretty young fillies. Why do you suppose that is? Frost, I think, said it best. ‘Provide, provide.’ Your so-called ‘revolution’ is a very old idea with a distinguished pedigree dating back to the Peasants Revolt of 1367. Didn’t you study your English history? And do you know what happened? What always happens? The revolution was betrayed and the ringleaders were executed. It would be merely silly, if he weren’t so malevolent, to exalt a mass murderer like Che Guevara. Oh, he was so romantic, riding around on that motor scooter of his! All he needed were the Hell’s Angel’s to stand in for the twelve apostles! Do I really need to remind you that whenever you get rid of the family, the church, and the old traditions, the result is always the same? Namely, state control. And it’s not the soft anarchy of the Woodstock crowd. No, it’s a lot more like your hard-nosed totalitarian chaos of Altamont. To put it in terms that even you can understand. Your problem is that you get all your philosophies from soft-headed rock stars and Hollywood impresarios, and writers like Kurt Vonnegut. What are they even teaching you at Stropmuth Manor? Do they tell you anything at all about Plato, or Aristotle, or Empedocles, or first principles? When the government can’t use the carrot of duty, honor and country, then they will use the stick of state coercion–and I pity the poor old mule. Are you going to be on the winning team? Or are you going to persist in chasing a romantic illusion of a world that never was and never will be, and side with the…with the…wreckers! There! I said it! A lot of you young people want to tear it all down–only, what are you going to put in its place? Kurt Vonnegut?”
“I’d like to see a world where people are decent, and kind to each other.”
“Like Altamont?” (Here I failed to suppress a slight sneer.)
“You keep harping on that. That was a mistake. The Hell’s Angels are fascists. But we learn from our famous mistakes. That you should never put fascists in charge of anything.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that these ‘fascists,’ as it pleases you to call them, are the only people the hippies could depend upon to keep order? ‘I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just.’ Take these hippies at their worth and make the whole world ‘fair’ and I think you will find that they still end up at the bottom of the heap. So they want to opt out of society, do they, and live off of the grid? So–let them. Let them reject two-hundred years of material progress and live like dirty animals in the deep forest. Nine months of that type of medicine, and they’ll be hollering for a cheeseburger and a Twinkie–if they haven’t died of dysentery from digging their outhouse too close to the water supply. And then, of course, they’ll also find out that during that nine months, while they were living like Red Indians in a flea-bitten yurt, that all the sensible young people have been using their time constructively, in climbing the corporate ladder towards the top of the greasy pole. It’s all very well to embrace gauzy-eyed visions of the Brotherhood of Man, but this is the real world, Sunny Jim, and sooner or later you’ll learn that you have to get with the program–and running around crying about the fate of an Argentine Stalinist isn’t going to win you any new friends among the Quality People. Not where you’re going.”
“And where is that?
“To a good Catholic College.”
“You care more about winning an argument,” he said quietly, “than you do about me.”
This stung me to the quick, but I retained my composure. “I’m just telling you, son, that you have got to climb down from that high horse of yours. You can’t live on Sugar Mountain forever.”
“What do you know? You were BORN forty years old!”
“Ho ho ho ho, young Master Wrollax, it might seem that way to you, but, once upon a time, I had the same sorts of opinions as you. Just consider this: It’s easy for lads like you to have such opinions, provided that there are men like me who are willing to defend your right to have them. It’s quite alright to have a difference of opinion with your elders. But you don’t have to be a doctrinaire radical about it.”
“No more half measures!” said Eddie Jr. “Civilization is hopelessly corrupt–and we have got to find another way.”
“It might seem that way to you, in all the accumulated wisdom of your fifteen years.” I tried, but failed, to suppress a snort, because I knew what he was going to say next. I’m no proposition player, but I would have bet any large sum–nor would I have been disappointed.
“Sixteen,” he said. “I’m nearly sixteen.”
“I know, dear boy, ” I said with a smile. “I was there at the creation!”
We both shared a larf over this one. But then Eddie said, “Seriously, though, Dad–can’t you see that things need to change?”
“Change?” I said. “Do you mean “change” which is quite outside of my own comfortable experience, and that of my family and friends? Oh, Eddie–sooner or later you’re going to learn that the old ways are the best ways.”
“You mean like racism?”
“There’d be no problem with racism in this country,” I said, “if the Negroes would only behave like good white people. Why, we had a clean, well-behaved Negro chap at college. He was on the football team. There isn’t anything that we wouldn’t have done for him. Why, we even smuggled him into our hotel room. In fact, I would say that he behaved whiter than many of the white people we see today. Neat, bright, articulate. It’s a real shame what happened to him.”
“What happened?”
“He broke his collarbone. Had to take a job as a janitor for a while. One of my classmates got him a job as a Junior Account Executive at an ad agency. Some of the Southern sponsors objected to him and they had to let him go. A beastly shame–he was one of the good ones. He teaches at a community college now–I think. We sort of lost touch.”
“Why don’t you call the alumni office, and track him down, and offer him a job?”
“Well, if he came to me, I might be tempted. Nowadays…. But don’t you see? He has his pride. He wouldn’t want the job if he thought it was a charity situation. Besides, who’s to say that he’s not perfectly happy where he is?”
“What was his name?”
“Oh! Er, well, you see, it’s been about twenty years since I’ve seen him last–I suppose–what was it?–Williams? Ernie Williams. Do you know how many Earnest Williamses there are? I’d never be able to track him down. Because I’m not sure that was even his name.”
“So you’re saying that you liked this guy?”
“Well, we weren’t bosom pals or anything like that. He had his group, and I had mine. But what I’m trying to impress on you is the fact that skin pigmentation does not signify a blessed thing–in and of itself. There are no doubt some brilliant men out there who are as black as melted midnight, and a credit to their race. If all the other Negroes would only act more like them, then we wouldn’t be having these problems. I happen to think that I’m pretty liberal-minded about race–and I’m sure that all the good Negroes would agree.”
“But what if Negroes aren’t the problem? What if the problem is with white attitudes?”
“Well, you pay the piper and you get to call the tune. What if you and some of your chums were giving a party, and you had girls, and they were dancing to that ear-splitting noise that you seem to favor. And then some Negroes burst in and decided that you should listen to some of their jazz music?”
“Oh…I don’t know. I suppose we’d play a song or two.”
“Exactly! But you wouldn’t want them to take over, now, would you? Start chatting up the girls? Those big Juicy black bucks? Think about it for a minute. Anyway, that’s the whole problem with this race riot thing.Nobody is saying that they shouldn’t be allowed to vote. But they shouldn’t have any say in whom employers hire, or who landlords rent to, or who bankers lend money to. That right there is socialism, and socialism leads to communism, and there’s nothing worse than that. I actually know some people who have lived under communism, and they’ll all tell you the same thing. I think that the great fear the South has–the great fear all right-thinking people have–is that if the Black man refuses to act white, unlike every refugee who’s ever landed on these shores, then white people will be inspired to act more like Negroes, with their earsplitting jungle racket and their mumbled slang and their whole ghastly ghetto outlook on life. Can’t you see, Eddie, that most people just want to be left alone?”
“Well…I still think that things have got to change.”
“You say so now, but wait until you turn forty. Just wait. Black capitalism is the best hope the Negroes have in a white man’s world. Once they have something to lose, they’ll all stop acting like they’re still in the jungle. Parading around in funny clothes and funny hats isn’t going to get them anything–except maybe, a beating.”
“You’re a racist, Dad.”
“I’m a realist, son. Throughout history, as long as men have congregated in groups of more than two, there have been tribes. Whenever there are four people or more, they’ll tend to break up into two distinct groups. These are usually based on bloodlines and preference. We all like to ‘hang around’–is that the expression?–with the people we like. Surely you’ve noticed this at Stropmuth Manor. Haven’t you ever tried to ‘get in’ with a group that wouldn’t have you? No? Well, has anyone tried to ‘get in’ with your bunch? I’m sure they have.”
And then I remembered Ernie Williams, and how the football team had really treated him. How the star quarterback, a blond giant named Adolf (!) Evans had complained about “the animal smell of his sweat” stinking up the locker room. We sneaked him into our hotel room, sure, but that was more out of a spirit of boyhood mischief and derring-do than out of any earnest desire to desegregate the establishment. Even at that, Ernie ended up sleeping on the floor–or was it in the bathtub? I would, I confess, often stare at Ernie, who was a big fellow, about six foot three and weighing in at about 250 pounds, all muscle. We called him ‘Sledge,’ short for ‘Sledgehammer’–perhaps, subconsciously, we had John Henry in mind. (Hardly, it occurs to me, an admirable model for the Negro. He put his wife to work and tried, fatally, to win a competition with a machine–in a contest he was bound to lose.)
I would would clandestinely stare at ‘Sledge,” I’ll admit, fascinated by his pink gums, his dazzling white smile, his brown-yellow blubbery lips, his broad and slightly hooked nose and the way his big, flapping, but strangely delicate ears were lined by his close-cut but coarse and nappy hair. I suppose you might say that in some perverse way, I admired him. He was stronger and taller than me. He was certainly a better football player than I ever was; at six feet tall and 180 pounds I was fast, but I was certainly no powerhouse. The fact of the matter was, I wasn’t really all that interested in football. Perhaps the coach could tell, for he kept me on the bench for several weeks. I was almost, but not quite, the team “mascot,” cheering them on from the sidelines. Coach would usually put me in during the final few minutes of a game which we had already sewn up.
No; I only joined the football team as most of my friends were also involved with it. Certainly not to get close to Ernie Williams. Who, when off the field, pretty much kept to himself. He was what we called, in the parlance of the day, an “Ironbutt”–someone who would spend endless hours in study. I suppose that he well knew that if his grades fell below a certain point, he would lose his athletic scholarship, and with it, all hopes of further advancement. I must say that he didn’t strike me as having a sterling intellect. He would answer questions when called upon, but he would seldom, if ever, volunteer an opinion.
As the semester wore on, Ernie Williams grew more and more reclusive. As far as I knew, he didn’t have any friends outside of the team, and even we only tolerated him as a comrade rather than as…how should I put it?…an equal. I am ashamed to say that most members of the team thought that he was academically inferior. And he was. But, to his credit, he made up for it with hard work. But to what end? I hear he got tangled up with some sort of Civil Rights nonsense, very likely Communistic. That alone, back in those days, would have put the kibosh on a promising career. But then, of course, there was the inescapable fact that he was black. And not a pleasing coffee-and-cream black, either. Sledge was so black that he was almost purple. And he was not a particularly well-featured boy. Perhaps in Africa he would have attracted the girls, but here in the US he was somewhat démodé.
Ernie sometimes complained of headaches and nausea after a game. And fatigue. Coach, who was firm but fair, always told him to walk it off. Which, admittedly, made very little sense. Because of his size, Ernie was never seriously injured during a game–at least, not that I know of–although he did end up at the bottom of more than one pile-up.
I don’t know why I natter on at such length about the unfortunate Mr. Williams (Note that I refer to him as “Mister”) unless it is merely to justify to myself that, on an individual level at least, I don’t have a racist bone in my body. Why, if good old Sledge were to show up today at the door of my house, if I were at home, I would call off the dogs and would be very glad to see him. Of course, Penelope might be less than pleased; but, in this instance at least, she wouldn’t be given much say in the matter.
I never did invite Ernie to my father’s house during Thanksgiving or Christmas or Spring break, even though I did have other members of the team in to stay over. I think that this omission came about because I was dead certain that my father wouldn’t approve, and might even chase Ernie away with a shotgun. My father was what you might call an unreconstructed rebel. He wasn’t unpleasantly obsessed with the topic of race, like many of his freudns were, but every now and then I would hear him talk of “arrogant Jigaboos” who “didn’t know their place.” I would never entrust the likes of Ernie Williams to the tender mercies–I use the term sarcastically–of good old Dad.
So Ernie Williams was very much on my mind when my son accused me of being a racist (presumably one cast in the “Archie Bunker” mode–after all, how many actual racists could the boy have actually encountered?)
I’m afraid that I wasn’t listening very carefully as Eddie then ran down the various cliques which dominated Stropmuth Manor at present. There were, of course, the “Jocks,” who were very gung ho and even shaved their heads in solidarity with the Coach, who had shaved his. And then there were the “Slags,” who were “douchebags” and who weren’t really interested in anything except getting “stoned,” I assumed, though Eddie very carefully avoided mentioning this. Everyone else was a “Grind,” which was the name given to those students who spent most of their time studying in order to capture the coveted prize of First in the Class.
“And which are you?” I asked him.
“I’m not really in with any of those groups,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m more of a grind, I suppose.”
“You ought to go out for the football team.”
“I’m already on the wrestling team. I can’t do both.”
“Wrestling? Hm. I don’t know what that will get you. Still–it’s good exercise.”
“That’s the understatement of the year, Dad.”
“Why? Is it hard?”
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done!”
Try surviving a tax audit, I thought to myself, but I cocked my head attentively.
“And there’s other kids out there who have been doing it for a long time, and they’re all much better than me.”
“You have been looking more brawny lately. Aren’t you afraid you’re going to get hurt?”
“Aw Dad, it’s not like the wrestling you see on TV.”
“I happen to be aware of that. High school and college wrestling are conducted in Graeco-Roman style–have I got that right?”
“I don’t know what they call it, but it’s hard.”
“Sometimes hard things are worth doing.”
“Our Coach used to be this fat slob who would tell stupid jokes all the time, but now we got this cool young guy from the Navy base. I’ve got twenty pound son him, and he can still pin me to the mat every time.”
“Well…in the service they train you to fight.”
“Anyway, Coach says that wrestling isn’t at all like boxing, where you get to dance around a lot and use fancy footwork, and where you have to be in some kind of shape. But in wrestling, you REALLY got to be in shape. You either got it, or you don’t.”
“Much like life, I suppose.”
Eddie blithely chatted about his wonderful coach, and his performance in various matches, and coach’s “special technique,” and people on the squad who got injured.
Like most parents, I had developed and honed to a fine edge the art of half-listening to a child as he chattered on gaily about inconsequential banalities. “Coach says his secret is raw eggs and Coca-Cola. But I dunno. Coke is too sweet, and raw eggs are yucky.”
“Don’t use the world ‘yucky’. People will think you’re a fag. Are you quite sure about this coach of yours? Sounds to me like he gets his kicks out of wrestling with teenage boys.”
“Coach is NOT a fag! He’s in the Navy!”
How naive he was! But I held my tongue and kept my own counsel.
But I did begin to wonder about my son’s enthusiasm for wrestling with his chums on the squad, so one sunny winter day I made the two hour trip to Stropmuth Manor and spoke to his Coach, a short, whippet-thin bundle of dynamic energy named John Chauncey. (I idly wondered whether he was one of THE Chaunceys. I finally concluded that he might have been a poor relation.) In any event, I learned much from John Chauncey, or “Jack,” as he insisted I call him (all the while addressing me as “Mr. Wrollax,” or “Sir”–I liked the cut of that young man’s jib–I could see how my son had taken a shine to him).
Jack was no fag, I quickly concluded. In fact, in spite of his diminutive stature, he was all man–cocky, aggressive, and mulishly determined to get one over on the world by hook or by crook. How he had managed to end up coaching wrestling at a Boy’s School I didn’t venture to ask. But he helpfully volunteered the information. He said there was “nothing to do on the base,” and that training the teenagers, some of whom were “very promising athletes” (he didn’t mention Eddie as one of these) kept him “in top shape”. He got just a wee bit too familiar with me then, saying that he could teach me “some moves” if I liked. Before I had a chance to say anything, he demonstrated what he called “the sweep,” where, by reflex, one learns to grab both of an opponent’s arms, and use one’s leg to drop him to the mat. He told me that wrestling was also good for self-defense, and gave the younger boys, such as Eddie, a new-found confidence and “self-respect”. With which desired outcome I heartily approved.
“Confidentially, Mr. Wrollax,” said Jack, “Eddie doesn’t seem to LIKE wrestling very much. There’s a lot of training involved, and these boys have to really work at it to compete, even at the high school level. I’ve noticed that Eddie seems gun-shy about protecting his head. I’m not saying that he shouldn’t be careful–that’s what we wear helmets for–but he never takes any chances. I sometimes find him hanging back. It seems that he doesn’t like to mix it up so much with the other boys. I hope this news doesn’t upset you, Sir.”
“No,” I said slowly. “Not exactly. Eddie has always had a certain…diffidence about him. I suppose you could call it…prudence. What do you think, Jack?”
“Well…when it comes right down to it, Eddie just doesn’t seem to have what you might call the uh, the killer instinct. Now, you do need to keep your cool when you’re on the mat, because otherwise you CAN get hurt. But Eddie…it’s almost as if he’s just going along for the ride. I’ve never seen a boy quite like him.”
“How long have you been doing this for, Coach?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. I was Captain of my own high school squad, senior year, and for two years in college. And I’ve been coaching here for two seasons.”
Talking to this brisk, confident young man was a bracing experience, and, once I had established his bona fides, I had no problem with Eddie continuing to dabble in the sport.
I liked “Jack” Chauncey sdo much that I even gave him my card, and told him that, if needed, he could use me as a personal reference.
Lo and behold, years later, apparently he did. For now he’s a leading account executive, and manages a portfolio worth…millions!
2. SUPERMAN AS MESSIAH
I’m getting ahead of the curve here, but all too soon I suspect you will begin to see all sorts of enormous hype around the next Superman movie, with all sorts of bullshit about how he represents “God”.
Superman is not the messiah. Nor was he conceived as such. Such a notion would have been considered blasphemous in the milieu of the 1930s comic strip world.
In fact, it is well known by scholars that Siegel and Schuster based the character on the hero of Philip Wylie’s 1929 novel GLADIATOR.
In his original incarnation, in a 1933 story published in a science-fiction fanzine (“The Reign of the Superman” by Siegel and Schuster, writing under the pseudonym “Herbert S. Fine”), the titular Superman was a villain and resembled such early Superman nemeses as The Ultra-Humanite and Luthor more than he did the present-day character.
Besides, every true comics fan knows that Galactus is actually God.
3. MODERN WISDOM
Because my heart is pure I have the strength of Zen.
Woody Allen still designs his films as balms to stroke the egos of unusually precocious undergraduates.
The Dead were alternative once.
In matters of art, incompetent sincerity is nearly always to be preferred to smug but sterile competence.
4. THE ANTI-IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT
People have some pretty queer notions. Folks who want to spread tolerance are called ‘PC Police,’ while xenophobic, ethnocentric jarheads call themselves ‘Patriots’ and hand themselves a pat on the back. When are we going to restore civil discourse to our political discussions?
For instance, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the following masterpiece of logic and reason that has been making the rounds of the internet:
IMMIGRANTS, NOT AMERICANS, MUST ADAPT.
I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, we have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of Americans. However, the dust from the attacks had barely settled when the “politically correct” crowd began complaining about the possibility that our patriotism was offending others.
I am not against immigration, nor do I hold a grudge against anyone who is seeking a better life by coming to America. Our population is almost entirely made up of descendants of immigrants. However, there are a few things that those who have recently come to our country, and apparently some born here, need to understand. This idea of America being a multicultural community has served only to dilute our sovereignty and our national identity. As Americans we have our own culture, our own society, our own language and our own lifestyle. This culture has been developed over centuries of struggles, trials, and victories by millions of men and women who have sought freedom.
We speak ENGLISH, not Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society, learn the language!
“In God We Trust” is our national motto. This is not some Christian, right wing, political slogan. We adopted this motto because Christian men and women on Christian principles founded this nation and this is clearly documented. It is certainly appropriate to display it on the walls of our schools. If God offends you, then I suggest you consider another part of the world as your new home because God is part of our culture. If Stars and Stripes offend you, or you don’t like Uncle Sam, then you should seriously consider a move to another part of this planet. We are happy with our culture and have no desire to change, and we really don’t care how you did things where you came from.
This is OUR COUNTRY, our land, and our lifestyle. Our First Amendment gives every citizen the right to express his opinion and we will allow you every opportunity to do so! But once you are done complaining, whining, and griping about our flag, our pledge, our national motto, or our way of life, I highly encourage you to take advantage of one other Great American Freedom:
THE RIGHT TO LEAVE.
It is Time for America to Speak up! If you agree — pass this along; if you don’t agree — delete it – You are in the WRONG Country! AMEN! I figure if we all keep passing this to our friends (and enemies) it will also, sooner or later get back to the complainers, lets all try, please!
PLEASE NOTE: As brilliant as is that impassioned plea to destroy all useless eaters, it was even better in 1938, in the original German:
JEWS, AND OTHER SUB-MEN, NOT ARYANS, MUST ADAPT.
I GROW WEARY of this Reich worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture. Since Germany was stabbed in the back by Jews during the Great War, we have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of Germans. However, the blood money from the reparations had barely been paid when the “enemies of our Reich” crowd began complaining about the possibility that our slogan “Deutchland Uber Alles” was offending others.
I am not against allowing sub-men to perform our manual labor; nor do I hold a grudge against any Jew or Gypsy or Homosexual who is now productively doing the needed labor of the Reich in a reeducation camp. Our population is almost entirely made up of descendants of Nordic tribes. However, there are a few things that those who have recently come to our Reich, and apparently some born here, need to understand. This idea of Germany being a multicultural community has served only to dilute our sovereignty and our national identity. As Germans we have our own culture, our own society, our own language and our own lifestyle. This culture has been developed over centuries of struggles, trials, and victories by millions of men and women who have sought One Greater Reich.
We speak GERMAN, not Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society, learn the language! And the Nazi salute! And do not criticize the Fuhrer!
“Deutchland Uber Alles” is our national motto. This is not some Pagan slogan. We adopted this motto because Nationalistic men and women on Nordic principles founded this nation and this is clearly documented. It is certainly appropriate to display the swastika on the walls of our schools. If Aryans offend you, then I suggest you consider another part of the world as your new home because Wotan is part of our culture. If Swastikas offend you, or you don’t like Frederick the Great, then you should seriously consider a move to another part of this planet. We are happy with our culture and have no desire to change, and we really don’t care how you did things where you came from.
This is OUR COUNTRY, our land, and our lifestyle. Our glorious Fuhrer gives every citizen the right to express the Fuhrer’s opinion and we will allow you every opportunity to do so! But once you are done complaining, whining, and griping about our Reich, our salute, our national motto, or our way of life, I highly encourage you to take advantage of one other Great German Freedom:
THE RIGHT TO LEAVE. IN A SEALED BOXCAR.
It is Time for GERMANY to Speak up! If you agree — pass this along; if you don’t agree — delete it – You are in the WRONG Country! AMEN! I figure if we all keep passing this to our friends (and enemies) it will also, sooner or later get back to the complainers, let’s all try, please!
And as for the Pope? Pah! As Stalin said–“How many divisions does he have?”
PLEASE NOTE: I apologize in advance if I offended anybody. I am not seeking to establish a moral equivalence between the Nazi regime and ours. I am merely exaggerating for satirical effect.
However, the current anti-immigration crowd DOES seem to have a visceral abhorrence to people who do not or can not or, in some cases, will not even bother to try to speak English. I understand that. It annoys me to hear people in a Doctor’s waiting room jabbering loudly in Portuguese or Urdu, as happened to me only three days ago. But it also had something to do with the rudeness of the people; not my inability to eavesdrop on their conversation. (To my mind, the woman who loudly spoke in English about how she believed “Space aliens dropped Adam and Eve here to start the white race” was even more offensive.)
The English Only clan professes to be annoyed by people who do not have a working knowledge of English. So am I. But it’s one thing to be annoyed and quite another to spew the same old tired Nativist line about how they should all go back to where they came from. I know enough history to know that Nativism is a not-so-distant early warning sign of fascism. I have a visceral hatred of fascism.
A philosopher, Santanyana, once said that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. Years later, some other fellow said, “Those who do remember history are also condemned to repeat it!”
Anyhow, in regards to the internet article, it never ceases to amaze me how willingly your typical stupid fucking know-nothing asshole is so eager to participate in his own degradation. Not only has this chump wallowed in and swallowed whole every bit of nativist propaganda that he’s been force-fed his entire life, he’s actually engaging in new contortions to enable himself to choke even more of it down. My point: More education–AND A LITTLE SENSITIVITY, NOT A WHOLE LOT–is the key. Learning a foreign language when one is an adult is not particularly easy for many. For instance: I spent six months trying to learn Chinese. I found it to be almost impossibly difficult. My point is this: Folks who make a minimal effort to try to learn about other cultures tend not to be quite so dogmatic in their insistence that everyone who comes to this country must IMMEDIATELY either conform or die. It’s usually the slack-jawed yokels and corn-pone fatties from the big stick country who are so obese they have to scrub their backs with a sponge on a twig who tend to be the most hidebound loudmouths regarding this matter. (Sorry–prejudice against Appalachian Americans is also a form of race–and class–hatred. But my granmaw was a coal miner’s daughter, so I get a pass.)
Learning something about our nation’s history might also help. Maybe there’s a good reason for Hispanics being disinclined to learn English. After all, we did steal big chunks of California and Texas from Mexico, didn’t we? And the Hispanics are reproducing faster than anybody else, aren’t they? And by most estimates, by 2050, whites will be a minority, won’t they?
I’m just playing the devil’s advocate here. Sure, it would be great if everybody learned English. But here’s another point: many people who were born speaking the language don’t speak it any too well, and functional literacy, from everything I’ve seen, is at an all time low. H.L. Mencken had some choice things to say about this, back in the 1920s:
“Here the business of getting a living … is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land—so easy, in fact, that an educated and forehanded man who fails at it must actually make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy . And here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage , so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows.”
What I find incredible though, is that people dignify the childish argument “MY grandparents had to learn English–nobody did them any favors–when are those brown people going to shape up?” and try to treat it as though it were a rational, philosophically sound and irrefutable argument regarding the way things are today. It is not. It is an argument based on fear, resentment, and insecurity.
My question is this: Why aren’t these same people complaining about the fact that the wealthy are being handed–that’s right, I said they’re being HANDED–enormous tax breaks purchased by means of an intrinsically corrupt campaign finance system? Why aren’t they politically savvy or even literate enough to notice that nearly half our discretionary spending goes to fund the military, which leaves less money to pay for education and public health initiatives?
Moral: We get the culture, and the leaders, we deserve.
5. TOWNIE NAMES
Mugsy
Sully
Murph
Oakie
T.J.
Dookie
Markie
Les
Johnny Boy
Matty
Tone
Chillie
~Dawg
Fast Eddy
Lefty
Porka
Lennie
Dirt
Hippie
~Zo
Stinky
Donut
Nee-zo
Obie
Lynchie
Chippa
Jackie
Woody
Whitey
Macca
Randy
Ricky
Brandy
Shane
JT
Josh
Woody
Mort
Jocko
Kevin
Fitzy
Moose
Bubba
Earl
Wade
Dix
Roundsie
Bones
Becks
Joey
Tiger
Bubba
Nicks
Jimbo
Petey
Freddy
Buddy
Earl
Guy
Rocco
Mahk
Necker
Whity
Quink
Mayor
Munka
Dodo
Bobo
Touchie
Beepo
Edso
Mully
Sugar
Romo
Striggy
Gusta
Wacko
Eddie
Bobby
Munchies
Swilly
Vinnie
Nick
Tony
Putcho
Scutch
Richie
Noodles
Stick
Donna
Chief
Ski
Stosh
Smitty
Jonesy
Rocky
Meat
Stiggs
Jeebs
Magoo
Breezy
Junebug
Skids
Trigger
Jimbo
Butchy
Mickey
Red
Mac
Dudso
Whacko
Mad Dog
Wildman
Googie
Bluto
Danny Boss
Ziggy
dimenno 