My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 3 #3, July 18, 1997

THINGS THAT MAKE ME GO "HUH?"

I try very hard to make sense of the world, but it can be a puzzling place. Everyday, I encounter something that makes me say, "Huh?"

I was having lunch in a nice little restaurant, when the TV over my head started showing pictures of a car rolling over and over until it crashed, and I thought, of course, it was a car race. Then there was another car rolling over and over until it smashed. When yet a third car rolled across the screen, I realized that there was no race, that in fact, the event itself was a sort of championship involving how many times you could make your car roll over before it disintegrated. The sound was off, so it was a little hard to deduce what the rules were, or what the prize was. (Fully paid major medical insurance?)

Huh? I can sort of understand racing or hang gliding or some of those other high risk sports, because while they are dangerous, they are also tests of your skill and control. This, on the other hand, seemed to be a test of how good your roll bars and padding are, and maybe of the thrill you got from coming as near extinction as possible.

I don't understand that. I do take some risks, on occasion, but not to experience life more fully. The only way to drive to Michigan to visit my family is through the horrendous and lawless traffic around Gary on Interstate 80. (Which I am about to do--if there is no July 25th column, you will know why. As the little girl said in her prayers, on the eve of moving to another state, "Goodbye, God, I'm going to Michigan.")

I am also mystified by many of the Republicans in Congress these days. I used to understand Republicans, back in the fifties, when they were the only people I knew. Even then they hated taxes, and they kept saying that volunteers should take care of the poor and the weak and elderly. And to do them justice, many of them were volunteers. They were pillars of the church and of the PTA , girl scout troop leaders and Junior Achievement counselors, leaders of fundraising drives to fight polio.

But now that it has become common for high schools to require students to do community service, and now that Clinton has endorsed volunteerism, the airwaves are filled with Republican cries of "Involuntary servitude!" Rush Limbaugh proclaimed it an outrage that virtuous hardworking people should be expected to help out people who were lazy and incompetent.

Huh? Social Darwinism, anybody?

And I am bemused by the Republicans' unwillingness to confirm any of Clinton's judicial appointments. They fear, of course, that Clinton will put in place a bunch of flaming liberal judges, but this does rather fly in the face of the evidence. So far Clinton has been as cautious in his appointments as an old lady walking on ice--the worst that Republicans could say of any of Clinton's choices so far is that, if it's possible for moderation to be a vice, this is theirs. Furthermore, as Democrats have repeatedly pointed out, all of his choices have been approved by the American Bar Association. To which the response has been that the bar association is, well, suspiciously liberal.

Run that past me again? Let us suppose for a moment, that this dangerously liberal American Bar Association was suddenly placed in charge of American life. Can you think of any significant way in which our lives would be different? Except that it would be against the law to tell lawyer jokes?

(Let me hasten to add I have more than a few reservations about Democrats in Congress, too. About things that are merely stupid, not incomprehensible.)

I also have difficulty understanding women's clothes. Why do we have no pockets in so many of our suits and dresses and slacks? I need my keys with me all the time, and I'd like a place to put them. I'd like a place to put the little notes I write myself, when I'm home, about what I should do at work, and, when I'm at work, what I need to do at home. I want pockets. I NEED pockets. But, I'm told, they spoil the line of the clothing.

O.K. I don't like it, but I could accept that as a reason. At least until they started putting FAKE pockets on our suit jackets, anyway. Yes, they are willing to give us pockets as long as we cannot use them. Now, isn't that special.

Here's another puzzler: Timothy McVeigh's attorney says that, if he did bomb the Federal Building (which he did not), he did it because he was upset about all those people who died at Waco.

How's that again? Did I miss something here? Like the sentence in which he explained how killing 168 people who had nothing to do with Waco would make things better? Repeat after me, Timothy, "two wrongs don't make a right." As the nice man said, "Everything I needed to know, I learned in kindergarten." Guess Tim was absent that day.

What you saw in McVeigh's case was the lawyerly habit of arguing in the alternative. With a straight face lawyers will argue all mitigating circumstances, even if they are mutually contradictory. The most interesting recent example was in one of the states' lawsuits against the tobacco companies to recover medical expenses from smoking-related illnesses. The tobacco companies' defense was as follows: a) there is no good evidence that smoking caused these diseases, and b) since smoking killed all these people early, we actually saved the state money on them because they didn't live long enough to collect pensions.

I repeat. Huh?

Then there's the fact that the United Jewish Appeal's annual banquet featured Henry Kissinger presenting the Humanitarian of the Year award to, would you believe, Rupert Murdoch. Excuse me? Rupert Murdoch, the man who's slugging it out with Ted Turner to see who gets to own every media outlet in the world? It appears to me they're harder up for humanitarians than Diogenes was for honest men.

The internet is full of huh-inducing moments, too. Magellan has a service called Voyeur which allows you to, in effect, listen in to other people's searches. You can't help noticing that an awful lot of people are looking for naughty pictures, and that most of them can't spell. (Would you not think there are certain inherent limits to the number of ways to misspell "naked"?)

Is there a possible doctoral dissertation here? Do men who spell correctly have no interest in naked women? Do men who know how to spell have better sex lives? Perhaps this could be a best-selling book--Men Who Can Spell and the Women Who Love Them?

Just looking at some of Yahoo's subject headings under sex makes me realize that I have lived a rich and full life and yet sex is still, apparently, a mystery to me. Society and Culture: Sexuality: Fetishes: Wet and Messy. Huh? Note, this is not just a site, this is an entire CATEGORY about which I know nothing. No, please don't explain it to me. I think I'd rather not know, thank you.

Every day as I check out what's new on Yahoo, I find bizarre things. I note that Yahoo lists Paranoid Monthly under the heading of General Interest Magazines--are they trying to tell us something?. And that there is a site for the European Fish Aging Network (What do you suppose it does?) I see that there is also a site called Suicide and Depression: the Pros and Cons, and while I am moderately curious about what the up-side might be, I move on. There is an organization called the Confederacy of British Forgers, which seemed to me startlingly upfront, until I found out that they were metal workers. And I note with some astonishment that the Flat Earth Society has a web site (no globe, as yet, mind you, but a web site). The topper, though, is probably the site for Cat Food: the Other White Meat.

Like I said. HUH?

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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