Troglodytes and angels

In my high school years, I and some of my friends were interested in broadcasting as a career. Those were the days when rock-and-roll ruled – Elvis topped the charts, Rickie Nelson wowed the girls, the Everly Brothers pioneered the space between rhythm-and-blues and classic country-and-western.

And then there was the simply unclassifiable – stuff that particularly appealed to the  male teenaged mind. Pieces like a little ditty by one “Napoleon XIV”. Seems his lost love drove him over the edge…so he sang – or chanted, really – to a relentless ba-doom, ba-doom, ba-doom beat…

They're coming to take me away, ha-haaa.
They're coming to take me away, ho ho…
To the funny farm, where life is beautiful all the time….

Ba-doom…ba-doom…ba-doom…

This hit by Jerry Samuels in 1966 from Warner Brothers Records made it all the way to the top ten for several weeks.

Radio was what several of us high-school mates wanted to do …specifically spinning the “top-ten” of the day.

Trouble was, life caught up with us. Each of us went off to college and the military, and ended up someplace else.

Except… one of us actually got a real job in radio. And he did it while a student at a local university. But it was not exactly like life with the Troglodytes. It was with a small-town Christian station.

And this was not some nice normal mainstream Christian station. It was a strident fire-and-brimstone, rural evangelical, steroid-stoked, holy-roller station.

And my friend’s first job was as the early-morning guy, the one who “ran the board,” as they say. His was the soul that stood between the woebegone world with its troglodytes, loons and blasphemers, and the pristine well-ironed and starched psyches of right-wing Christianity… and Pat Robertson was probably just barely out of law school then.

Six o’clock on Sunday mornings marked the start of D-Day every week for my friend. The station went on the air while mom and pop got their broods ready to go and once more be blessed, prayed-for, preached-at and who-knew what all else.

Meanwhile my man was ready at the switchboard. The local news and weather had been done. Next up was a stream of uplifting music. Then the switching started. All my friend had to do was a back-and-forth between the breaks in the music and the words of the pastor. The breaks had to be clean and without a second’s dead-time. Not one second.

The day came, though, when my friend came to work hung-over. He was a college student after all, and he was in a fraternity, too. And those kinds of Sundays happened, they did.

But his switching and clicking of buttons were flawless … almost, for he soon missed a fast break into the local pastor’s pitch for the day.

One … two … three … the seconds clicked off. The station went silent, a quiescence only broken by my friend’s frantic cry when he saw the mistake he had made.

“HOLY SH*T!” he said … and he realized his mike was live.

I expect you can imagine what happened next. He was out of there like a Saturn Five rocket had been hitched to his hind parts.

In our sometimes crazy youths, most of us bounce back quickly. My friend lost that job but that by no means was the end of the story.

He went on to another radio gig, followed by a successful tenure in television and a long and fruitful career in the public relations business.

And that – as Walter Cronkite always said – is the way it was.

Ba-doom … ba-doom … ba-doom …

A trip to the Monkey House

A great  Moment of Truth for this previously unreconstructed white Southern great-grandson of a Confederate veteran came on a bright summer day at the Monkey House of the Washington Zoo.

(Clarification – that would be the National Zoological Park, as opposed to Washington’s other zoo. Noam sayin?)

I and my offspring were observing those cute little primates swinging, leaping, scrounging, making faces, and slinging dookie at each other.

Amidst the mouth-making poop-fights,  I began to see how some could say we higher primates had perhaps inherited some of our show-offy little cousins’ DNA.

All you have to do is follow a couple of dozen “Friends” on Facebook to see the grown-up version of the Monkey House in action.

Or – even worse – read every email you actually get.

For example, I got one the other day that asserted President Barack Obama had said on Meet the Press in 2008 that he was going to turn the country into an Islamic caliphate.

The record shows he said no such thing. It was pure fabrication.

And that was a rehash of the same email that made the rounds seven years earlier which I had hoped would have been laughed out of existence by now. So why has it resurfaced now? Why has a seven-year-old- lie bubbled up through the slime again now?

I believe it has a lot to do with the undeniable fact that the President is now nearing the end of his second term in office and is enjoying some rather undeniable successes.

Not all of us agree on those successes. But they have happened, and a divided Congress has even  come together to make at least one of them real – something that would not have happened if the two parties had not found compromise. Common ground.

I write as we enjoy Fourth of July celebrations all across the fruited plain. And that has sparked some introspection on my part.

In the run-up to my celebration, I have been examining the history of how the United States negotiated  the fevered times between these times:

• The period from Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech in1775, and the following year when the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed ...
• And 1787 when we finally got ourselves a Constitution.

Reading anew the history of the period between 1775 and 1787 shows how it took honest compromise and the ability to keep compromising – and find common ground -- before the founders arrived at consensus. It was agonizing, but a republic with a constitution was the result.

Since then, history unequivocally proves that compromise has been the key to American exceptionalism. Any honest survey course in American history makes that clear.

But today? Do we still  have it in us to find common ground between factions?

Or does the Monkey House suddenly look eerily familiar?

 

A non-book-review book review

To write a “book review” of  The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert somehow seems presumptuous of me.

First, a “review,” as I understand reviews, would have me tell you a bit about the story. I do not want to do that.  For once, I picked the book up just because of the author and my love of her writing. I did not read anything about it beforehand.

The title was enough to pull me into it on its own. The title resonates. What was this “signature?” I found out…but not before something like Page 497 (of 500), and even then it’s something your book club can debate for a long time. I’m still thinking about it myself.

So, I’m glad I approached it that way, for to have nestled up to any spoilers would have been unthinkable. I did not want to know “what the book is about” beforehand. I’m glad I did that, because it made everything in it a wonder, and with wonders loaded it is.

Signature is really an epic, I’d say. It covers most of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, and it ranges from London to Philadelphia and more wondrous places than you might ever imagine. The story it presents is more richly researched than any I’ve read in a long time.

Her classy writing moved me forward like not many other books. Even at 500 pages, it presented no temptation to stop, as have others of that length. It never seems to drag, and it may not even be long enough. I would have liked for the goodies of plot and character development to never stop.

But that would have been impossible, for Gilbert’s characters are one-offs, singular, never-to-be born-anew as somebody else.

Simply stated, “there is no there there,” as Gertrude Stein once wrote.

Good management … and what happens when it’s not

Some of you may remember Bass’ iconic “Weejuns.” AKA the world’s greatest casual shoes. I had worn them for years, but then sadly my last pair – re-soled and re-heeled one time too many – had to be retired..

I was pleasantly surprised, however, to find that Bass still makes Weejuns. They call them something else, but they are the same, and the box they come in proudly displays the semiotic brand “Weejuns.” I was delighted … and even more so when I found out my favorite retail store was advertising them at a nice discount online.

Ca-ching. A deal was done. And they emailed me within minutes to say that I could pick up my new Weejuns the next day at their Short Pump Town Center store.

I did. But I did not try them on until later that night at home. I put the right one on. Perfect fit. I would not have expected anything less. Just like the old days.

But then … what was this? I have been buying and wearing shoes for more years than I’d care to think about. But this had never happened.

The left shoe would not fit. Not because it was a size smaller, but because it was simply another right-footed shoe. I had been delivered a box of perfectly packaged shoes but perfectly fitted for right feet only.

“Well, never in my born days,” as my Georgia-bred grandmother used to say …

The good news is that I took the box back to the store the next day, and the manager who helped me and I both got a big laugh out of my question: “I wonder what the dude who got the other box thinks about having two left-footed Weejuns?”

You know the rest. I was made whole. And cheerfully so…even with an additional 15 percent discount for my “trouble,” as the manager put it, of having to come back to the store.

No trouble at all, I replied. They just solidified an already good customer’s loyalty.

*

But about three hours later, this happened at the grocery store I usually go to. I go there because they were the unlikely heir to one to the best grocery chains I’ve even known.

I’d been seeing the signs for a while. First a well-respected manager left, his replacement virtually invisible even three years later.

But that management absence – or dereliction of duty – showed its true stripes tonight.

I was walking though the bakery area when I saw a woman slip on a wet floor and fall almost flat. And she did not fall lightly either, it could have been serious. I helped her to her feet and stayed with her to make sure she was going to be OK. She said she was. It had just been so unexpected, she said.

Indeed. There was a single flimsy yellow sign warning of a damp floor…but it was about four feet away from where she had slipped and fallen. Water – or something clear and wet –covered about 10 square feet of busy aisle space, the misplaced excuse-for-a-warning sign about as effective as Chicken Little announcing a tsunami.

Once all was OK with the lady who had fallen, I was incensed. No one from store management showed up. So I went to them. At their mis-named “service desk,” I told the four employees gathered there helping a single customer what had happened.

They were taken out of their game, one showing a bit of an attitude. She said, “but there was a warning sign there.”

My response was rather direct and forceful. I did not cuss .. but I sure as hell did think it.

I told the four of them to please get somebody over there to mop up the water in the aisle where customers were walking and quit standing around arguing with me.

I’ve seen this kind of attitude there before, but not to the point of ignoring the fact that a woman had fallen on their pristine floor.

FuelPerks be damned. They just lost a good customer.

And they want $15 an hour?