Two Words You Should Never Say

This story was published in the Virginian Pilot last weekend and it wasn't until later that I learned from my sister that the two words my grandfather cautioned my mother never to say were "swell and lousy" not "swell and awful." Obviously, only one of us was paying attention. I have made the necessary correction 

 

Two words you should never say

 

I don’t remember what situations brought it on each time I heard my mother repeat her father’s advice but I do remember hearing it often.
 

      “‘There are two words you should never say,’ he’d say”, she said. “One is swell and the other is lousy.”

 

She’d see our puzzled expressions and did what she could to keep the ball rolling just as, I’m sure, her father did when she was a child hearing this advice for the first time—or tenth time or hundredth time.
 

“We never knew if one of the words was swell or just a swell word,” she’d say, “or likewise whether the other word was simply lousy or simply lousy.”
 

“So what were the words, mom?” we’d ask.
 

“One was swell and the other was lousy,” she’d say leaving us still in the dark.
 

So there you have it. Still in my formative years and one of my few accomplishments was either being on the short end of a decade’s old running gag or the recipient of a bit of wisdom as clear as the back of my back.

 

But as I grew older and had the opportunity to read correspondences between members of my mother’s family and particularly between my mother and her mother, I noticed a certain consistency in them. There were four elements almost always present in every letter.
 

The first was that every correspondence was completed on the inside of the envelope flap as there was always one more thing to say and after they had used up every inch of margin the flap was the only place left to write on.
 

The next were the initials JMJ at the top of the first page—before the greeting, before the date, and before the number designating the page. The initials obviously stood for Jesus, Mary and Joseph indicating that the letter and everything contained in it was dedicated to the Holy Family.

 

And then, sprinkled liberally throughout the letter were the two other ingredients—the words swell and lousy used to describe every last bit of news contained in the letter. I later would discover the same abundant use of the same two words in the wartime correspondence between my mom and dad when they were merely sweethearts dating by mail.
 

Clearly my grandfather was tired of hearing the words swell and lousy in every sentence and couldn’t understand why every single possible event that might occur had to exist at the extreme ends of the spectrum so easily identified by the words swell and lousy. I think he had a valid point.
 

You don’t hear the words swell and lousy much anymore. I’d like to think his effort paid off and he was responsible for society coming to its senses but as I have pointed out, his message was very confusing and I’m not sure anyone took him seriously. But it was a swell attempt on his part but the lousy news is people are still living on the extremes. Just as there is no longer a middle class there is also, it would seem, still no middle ground.

 

There are two new words used to describe virtually everything that happens in today’s world, two words that pull into its clutches every conceivable act, idea, personality or situation. Hardly anything is simply good or bad, nice or naughty, enjoyable or displeasing, pleasant or uncomfortable. Everything has to be really bad or unbelievably good.
 

It’s got to stop. We have to come to our senses and regain a little thing called perspective. We have to get back to the middle of the road and stay out of the dangerous ditches on both sides—ditches where we don’t belong and where no good can come.
 

In an age where thousands and tens of thousands comments are sought and provided for every imaginable occurrence appearing or being reported anywhere in the universe there must be some criteria for accurately assessing the value of each one. There has to be more than just two choices. It’s a dirty job but someone has to do it. Someone has to say enough is enough.

 

If someone were to ask me for advice—and hardly anyone ever does—but if they did, if they wanted to know what I think would make the world a better place, this is what I would tell them.

There are two words you should never say. One is awesome and the other is stupid—and just to be clear, the words are awesome and stupid.

 

Anyone hearing these words should be appalled—really appalled.

 

Only Hoop-dee-doo Songs

All of the events in this piece appeared in Hell on Earth, a love story but showed up only as contributing parts of the ongoing story. This piece looks back on that story and one event in particular that was casually mentioned in passing. At the time this event only served to move the story forward—it was an important piece but not the most important piece because in Hell on Earth, a renegade angel is portrayed as the big mover and shaker. That was then. Looking back at the events in the novel from today’s vantage point I am able to recognize some of the more key situations—situations about which one could say… 

 

From That Moment On…

 

Girl Singer, Rosemary Clooney once sang:

“From this moment on, you for me, dear, only two for tea, dear… from this happy day, no more blue songs, only hoop-dee-doo songs...”

She was expressing the historically long running sentiment that not only can things change on a dime but that we’ll know it when it happens.

Confucius, or Lao Tzu, or possibly Mao Tse Tung said that, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with one step,” which seems to also imply that the one step in question will be the next one and you will know it when you take it.

I overheard my father once pass on to a golfing buddy that old adage, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” which also sounds very Chinese but is generally attributed to Synanon founder Charles Dederich. I thought it sort of strange because my father was a strong believer in routine and not a proponent of the sweeping changes in one’s life that this saying might imply.

But whether it is a popular song lyric, an old Chinese saying or an alcoholic’s recovery program slogan I have strong doubts that anyone can ever precisely and with accuracy predict that a single event will be the event that changes everything. We’re just not that good at fortune telling and we’re not nearly as objective as we’d like to think.

Oh we’d like to be able to say if I do this or that, or move to here or there, or acquire some or choose none that the decision will be a significant one—a life changing one but to quote another song lyric, it ain’t necessarily so.

Another Approach to Immigration and Social Security

Ponzi Schemes,

Can’t live with them,
Can’t live without them

 In a lot of ways Charles Ponzi got a bad rap. In the first place he didn’t invent the Ponzi scheme, he only improved on it. Charles Dickens, albeit from book sales rather than venture sales was profiting from Ponzi schemes before they were even called Ponzi schemes.

What makes a Ponzi scheme criminal is one thing and one thing only—deceit.

Promising someone that they will realize a profit from an investment based on the investment’s value when in fact the profit was only coming from new money is where Ponzi and those who imitated him made their mistake. Telling them that their return will depend on getting more people to invest would have been the more honest approach.

That said, even today the stock market’s supposed reliance on real value rather than fabricated value is really dependent on more people putting more money into stocks they hope are worth it. When people pull their money out of the stock market it goes down; when they put money in it goes up. That my friend is all Charles Ponzi was ever selling the public. He just wasn’t telling them that.

Life is a Ponzi scheme in almost every instance. What makes everything all right is transparency. As long as people know what they’re getting into we tend to accept the consequences.

The Immigration Problem

      When I first met FooLing in Hell on Earth, a love story, I thought he was just another Chinese immigrant who had come to America to make his mark as a mystical holy man. I had no idea he was a renegade angel. That’s the way it has always been with immigration. There’s always more there than you initially realize if you just give it a chance.

 

      In discussing the current immigration problem the general consensus is that legal immigration—like we had in the good old days—is all right but that illegal immigration like we have today is a big problem.

Why can’t Hispanics immigrate to this country the right way—the way many of our parents and grandparents did when they arrived on steamers, signed in on Ellis Island, and then went to live with relatives in the heartland where they learned English and practiced trades. That was the right way to do it and if today’s immigrants only did it this way there would be no immigration problem because America is a nation that welcomes immigrants with open arms.

Except that there would still be an immigration problem because Americans—Americans who live in the greatest nation on earth—seem to possess an almost irrepressible urge to complain about almost everything. Blame it on our forefathers. They insisted that Americans be free from day one to assemble anywhere and everywhere and to pretty much say whatever we want.  In an environment where we can talk about anything in the world that strikes our fancy, most Americans when they get together chose to complain.

We do it in the barbershop and the grocery store, the doctor’s office and the workroom floor. We do it in traffic in the heat of rush hour and by our pools in the shade of the old oak tree. In China one can be jailed for voicing an opinion against the government. In this country if you’re not complaining about the government people think you’re not paying attention. And one of the things we chose to complain about the most is the “Immigration Problem.”

I was reading the March 1904 issue of Political Science Quarterly the other day. I’m finally getting caught up on a backlog of magazines I’ve been setting aside for way too long now and an article by R.P. Falkner, a rather prolific writer at the turn of the last century who has seemingly faded into obscurity, caught my eye. Entitled, “The Immigration Problem,” it dealt with—well obviously you know what it dealt with.

President or Guitarist--that is the question

Probably the hardest thing to do is decide what it is you want to do.

Millions of teenage boys and maybe an equal number of girls must decide at an early age if they want to become a guitarist. Guitarist isn’t something one becomes later in life. A much smaller number have to decide if they want to take a stab at being president and there is a little less urgency involved.

Being a guitarist probably has a lead in time of about six months to learn the basics and then you must determine if being a rock-n-roll guitarist is “for you.” If you decide it is, there will be an incubation period of about five to ten years for the general public to decided if they want to get on your bandwagon. Generally to be a successful guitarist in a rock-n-roll band you need only a few million fans or even less if they are hardcore.

For the young men or women who decide they want to be president the prep time is a little longer—more like 30 years to get yourself in position to throw your hat into the ring and to actually be elected president you will need at least 70-million votes—a number will likely grow to a hundred million for the teenager making a choice today.

What are the odds for success? Well there have been thousands, hundreds of thousands of guitarist—everyone from Eric Clapton to the kid playing across the street right now in his garage. We’ve only had 44 presidents and to even approach 100 our nation will have to have survived longer than the Roman Empire.

So if you’re one of those people that can go either way, guitarist is probably the way to go. And if you’re one of those kids that really, really, really want to be president, you would still be wise to give being guitarist a second look.

If answering the question, “What to do?” is the hardest thing to do I’d say the easiest question to answer is, “Did I make the right choice?”

I’ve seen president’s come and go and believe me they look happier coming than going. They come in with unbridled enthusiasm but go out like they were rode hard without a saddle. You can practically see the spur marks that have been dug into them.

A president is afforded every comfort of life imaginable—a rent-free mansion, two planes to take him anywhere he wants to go, a squadron of helicopters to get him to those planes and a fleet of limousines to get him to those helicopters if for some reason they can’t land on his roof.

His food is prepared by master chefs, he doesn’t have to talk to anyone he doesn’t want to talk to and anyone he does want to talk to is waiting outside his office the moment he wants to speak to them. He has a private theater, his own bowling alley, a pool, an exercise room and his own theme song.

Still, in spite of all this stuff, when he leaves office he has a look on his face that seems to cry out, find me a bed, get me a stiff drink and I don’t want to speak to anyone for a month—and then only if they’re calling to apologize. His hair has turned gray, his eye sockets sunken into swollen cheeks, his face wrinkled into a gerrymandered facsimile of the one that got him 58% of the women’s vote alone just a short four and no more than eight years earlier.

Whether he was a good president, a bad president or simply a run of the mill president, the most accurate way to describe a president leaving the White House for the last time is to say, he looks like shit.

Perhaps now would be a good time to explain what has brought on this comparison of president or guitarist, as a career choice.

I was watching the 2013 Rock-n-Roll induction ceremonies the other night and to be perfectly honest it was very much like watching the Country Music Awards or the Grammy’s or the People’s Choice. You see one music awards show, you’ve seen them all and if you’ve seen them all you’ve seen a few too many but there was one thing, common to all, that really got my attention.

It was the guitarists—men and women of all ages—and every one of them looked like the happiest people on the face of the earth. Now it’s pretty easy to understand why the young ones were happy. They were experiencing success for the first time in their lives. But more importantly, they were doing it while most of their former high school classmates were busying themselves going into deep college debt or else working as interns in professions they have already decided were the wrong choices.

But it was the older ones that caught my attention. And when I say older ones I mean guitarist, who were, on average, older than the last two and certainly the next president to drag himself out of the White House for his final ride home.

They were prancing up and down the stage like cheerleaders at a pep rally, strumming their solos as if they were show-n-tells being delivered to awestruck classmates. They were talking with each other, wide grins on their faces, like they were boys in the gym bragging about last night’s date. But they weren’t boys.

These were old men raising their guitars to the roof, dropping their heads to the floor and turning their backs to the audience for private jokes with the drummer as if to say, “Yeah, that’s right, I’m 68 years old and I’m still the meanest, baddest bad ass in the house. I’ve never worked a day in my life but I made more money last year than you’ve made in a lifetime. I’ve never punched a time clock but I’ve punched out riffs you couldn’t find on a ten-foot Fender guitar neck.

I’m not saying they didn’t look like they’d been doing some hard travelin'. I’m just saying they didn’t have that same beat up and hung out to dry look our most recent Commander-in-Chiefs have had when they reached the end of the road. In fact, they look like they never felt better. When they finish their last gig and walk off the stage they look as satisfied as they must have appeared when they walked onto the stage for their first gig.

A president’s time in office might be measured as such:

elected,

a crisis,

another crisis,

yet another crisis,

a crisis no one saw coming,

get me the hell home.

A guitarist career might be measured thusly:

   first gig with his first riff,
   another gig with another riff,
   yet another gig with yet another riff'
   an eternity of gigs with an eternity of riffs,
   and finally his last gig featuring his final riff, a really, good  riff.

Nothing else matters. Every guitarist working his very last gig knows he made the right choice. And he doesn't have to build a library to prove it.
   

Eating the News

Old man reading the news and probably getting hungry doing so.

Hell on Earth, a love story was all about Hank's need to get a job in the newspaper business. Except for the episode in the pizzeria there was no eating going on in the whole book. This might have been an oversight because getting the news and eating food are more closely linked together than you might imagine.

Eating the News

In the morning we wake up, pour ourselves a cup of coffee, fix a bowl of corn flakes, step outside to get the morning newspaper, and then sit down to eat and read the news.

In the evening we fix our dinner, turn on the television, and then sit down to eat and watch the news.

The midday news report comes to us at lunchtime—or is it the other way around?

For those in a hurry there are fast foods and news bulletins but I think we can all agree that fast isn’t necessarily filling.

You can get news round the clock, if you wish—twenty-four hours of news no waiting. Those people who listen, watch, and read the news all day actually believe they are getting new news or something called unfolding news but they are really getting old news newly packaged. People who absorb news round the clock are gluttons, the same as people who eat round the clock—only they’re not as round.

Healthy people shouldn’t want and definitely don’t need news all day.  They should only consume the appropriate recommended daily amount (RDA) of news and it probably shouldn’t be taken with meals.

The whole relationship between news and eating is mighty delicious—I mean, suspicious.

Like food, news has to be prepared and whatever is left over must be rehashed but it should never be cooked up.

Food is digested best if there is the right mix, the right company, the right mood and a little wine.  News must also be digested—chewed, mulled over and by all means don’t forget the liquor. Don’t go swimming right after eating food and definitely don’t try sleeping immediately after listening to news.

Speaking of the right mix—hard news should come to us softly, Walter Cronkite comes to mind and soft news should come to us hard, think Andy Rooney.

We don’t like our hard news, the meat and potatoes so to speak, following on the heels of other hard news or proceeding even harder news.  We like a salad of features thrown in here and there, perhaps a plate of human-interest stories, and maybe a dessert of humorous anecdote at the end.

Structure is important with television news.  There’s the hard news—the main dish and then there’s the weather and sports.  It kind of reminds you of the trays we had as kids—the ones with the main section on the bottom and the two smaller sections at the top, or vice versa, except who ever heard of the weather and sports coming before the main news.

Too much food, even if it is healthy food and food you enjoy can make you sick.  Too much news, even if it is pleasant news and fed to you by the news people you like can also make you sick. Why that is, is news to me but I think we all know the feeling.

What I do know is you can’t do anything about the news. News isn’t news until it happens and once it happens, it’s too late to change it. When you get the news, it’s already old news, dead meat like the food you eat. 

You can do something that will become tomorrow’s news, but it won’t actually BE the news until you actually do it—just like you can grow a cow as big as a horse but it won’t be a steak until it is slaughtered and once it is slaughtered there is nothing else you can do to it—except A-1 sauce. 

A-1 sauce is like background music but most people do not like their news put to music.

Maxim Litvinov said to Walter Lyman Brown in 1921,  “Food is a weapon.”

That was news to me.

“A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody’s hands,” said Claud Cockburn in 1956.

Now, that’s food for thought.

But why food and news together? And why does consuming either always leave you hungry for more while diets limiting intake are totally out of the question?

I don’t know but I do know this.

Practically everything you eat is bad for you while practically all the news makes you feel bad.  That’s the bad news.

But most people can't eat and concentrate at the same time and if you can't pay attention to the news it sure makes it easier to stomach. That's the good news.

We Can Work It Out, Try and See It My Way

I entered the Great American Think-Off again this year, the 2013 edition. The question posed was

“Which is more ethical: sticking to your principles or being willing to compromise?” My response didn't earn me a trip to Minnesota for the final debate but I enjoyed writing this piece and more importantly, researching it. My title indicates that I believe a willingness to compromise is necessary to put one's principles to the test.

Our government seems pretty dysfunctional at times and one of the biggest problem is everyone sticking to their guns. At the same time this is happening it seems everyone and his brother is quoting the founding fathers, usually in defense of refusing to compromise. Well, here's a picture of the founding fathers compromising, with rather obvious success. Of course there wasn't a 24-hour news cycle then and they still had to lock themselves behind closed doors but they hashed out their differences and got something done.



 

We can work it out, Try and see it my way

 



Principles are the fundamental truths, doctrines, or motivation forces, upon which others are based—building blocks upon which we structure our whole social order.

A good principle to build on might be: Anything that can be built can be built badly.