CSotD: Laughing While It’s Still Legal
Skip to comments
I’ve seen this Paul Noth cartoon before, but he’s run it on his current blog and it seems timely though I wish it didn’t. There’s also a social media comment that seems applicable: “Elect a clown, expect a circus,” though he’s wrong: We’re not the only ones who don’t find things so funny.
This Sipress piece seems more in line, as the president has, apparently in all seriousness, declared that it is illegal to criticize him. It’s a jaw-dropping expansion of his egocentric view of his place in the world, and what once provoked laughter now draws horror.
We’ll discuss the whole thing another day, but, for now, we should bear in mind that we need to laugh.
It doesn’t mean not to take the situation seriously. It means to retain your humanity even when the people around you seem to have lost theirs. And especially then.
It seems equally frightening and funny to be reminded of how quickly things have collapsed, but dark humor is a part of how people deal with repression and it’s a much better way to inspire resistance than despair.
After all, if things could fall apart in such a short time, they can be repaired in another decade.
First you have to laugh, as we did a half century ago, at the very notion of despair. If you have real despair, get help. If you think bad times mean you mustn’t laugh, get over yourself.
I got a laugh out of this one, because I read to my boys every night at bedtime and some other times as well and I’m sorry other families don’t have that routine, because it gave them not only literacy but curiosity and imagination as well.
But then I got a merrier laugh because I remembered the manila envelope that came home every week, one of those old-fashioned office envelopes with signature lines on the outside. We were expected to sign and return it after presumably reading the stuff inside.
And, as Anderson suggests, it was an example of futility, since the parents who complied would have kept up with things anyway.
Including not just signing the envelope but reading to their kids, having dinner together and generally paying attention to the short people running around their houses.
Another grim laugh here, because we took elder son to see Kramer vs Kramer at the age of seven, when his best friend’s parents broke up, but it became clear that so many of his friends’ parents were divorcing that it wasn’t a major crisis for him.
Until we broke up. But that seemed a normal childhood catastrophe.
There are plenty more: When kids grow up, they’ll say to you “Remember the time I wanted to … but you said …” and you’ve got no memory at all of what you did that left such a scar.
Anyway, I’ve since met a lot of adult children of intact families and their folks managed to do plenty of damage without having to buy a second house.
Not only did we sign and return the envelope every week, but I’d even run a forgotten lunch out to school as needed, which, in some families, is even more damaging that putting the toilet paper on the roller wrong way around.
The way to inflict scars on a struggling writer is not to point out how many books Stephen King wrote but to point out how many he’s sold, as if the key to writing a novel is to write what sells instead of what you feel the need to say.
I think Stephen King, like Robert Redford, is fortunate that the thing he wanted to do happened to also be a thing that a lot of people wanted him to do. That’s not selling out. It’s a fortunate confluence of talent and pure dumb luck.
Consider: It’s possible to be a terrific lover without being a prostitute, while, conversely, you can be a lousy lover and still make money as a prostitute.
Juxtaposition of the Day
As I’ve said before, I’m always suspicious of financial planners who style themselves as specialists in “wealth management,” since, like the folks in Mr. Boffo, my quest is not to manage my wealth but to stretch out my pittance.
You’d get a lot of customers if you hung out your shingle as a “Pittance Stretcher,” but, then again, how would they pay you? I suppose that why the pittance stretchers are retired bookkeepers volunteering down at the senior center.
I like the idea of “pay yourself first,” but it assumes you have sufficient income plus a little. If you have sufficient income and not a dime more, it’s hard to put any aside. And if you budget like Mamet, you’re likely to find that you have sufficient income but a dime less, and while saving 10 percent of your income mounts up over time, so does pissing it away.
Mamet may be following Alice Trillin’s Law of Compensatory Cash Flow, which her husband Calvin explained means that “any money not spent on a luxury you can’t afford is the equivalent of windfall income,” which you can then spend on something else.
But that’s relatively parsimonious, because we all know that you can spend it two or three times, not just once.
Bill Hinds and I are of the same age, which makes me wonder if he somehow forgot an experiment in the NFL when we were 39 and, for a very brief period, a visiting quarterback could request a time out if the home crowd noise made it hard to hear his pre-snap calls.
This is a case where you didn’t have to be there in order to guess how well that turned out. And, no, it didn’t even turn out that well. It was over before either of us turned 40.
Another memory: Then-GF and I drove over Independence Pass with her at the wheel and me on the video camera. I know people who couldn’t even watch the tape, never mind sitting in there in person.
Don’t look down: Keep your eye on the road and your foot on the gas.
Comments 8
Comments are closed.