thedrifter
01-24-05, 07:11 AM
Reflections During A Traffic Jam
January 14, 2005
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by Burt Prelutsky
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Some people, I understand, spend a good deal of time thinking in the shower. Lucky them! They get to do their heavy mental lifting while in a womb of warm water. I, on the other hand, get to do mine while stuck in late afternoon traffic on the San Diego Freeway.
The other day, I was right around Sunset Blvd. when it occurred to me that we have all heard that nobody ever forgets how to ride a bicycle. But how on earth would we know that? After the age of 15, who, aside from Lance Armstrong, ever rides a bike again?
As I started the long, tedious drive up the hill towards Mulholland, I found myself wondering why Chris Matthews was still on TV. This was the lunkhead who, in speaking about the enemy in Fallouja, said, “They’re not bad guys. They just have a disagreement with us, and they’re fighting for their country.” When I heard him say it, I thought perhaps I was hallucinating. He was, after all, talking about the barbarians who sever the heads of innocent men and women while screaming “God is great” in Arabic, and who, at the time, were murdering our Marines.
If Matthews had been spouting such abominable tripe sixty years ago, we’d have been calling him Tokyo Chris.
When I finally arrived at Mulholland and looked down towards the San Fernando Valley, I saw what looked like the world’s largest parking lot. Clearly, going down was not going to be any easier than coming up. Maybe because the fellow parked in the next lane looked like a successful middle-aged black, I wanted to ask him if he resented it when the race-baiters refer to people like Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice, as oreos.
That got me to pondering if blacks and my fellow Jews insist on voting Democratic in such large numbers because that is an easy way to validate their racial identities. If they ever run into Jesse Jackson or Barbra Streisand, they can look them right in the eye without blinking.
As I began the slow descent into the Valley, I wondered if Dennis Prager wasn’t right when he suggested that many blacks and Jews suffer from a paralysis of memory. No matter how many decades ago insults and injuries were inflicted, and no matter that it was not they themselves who were abused, they behave as if it happened this morning. Slavery ended 140 years ago; Jim Crow laws and lynchings ended before most blacks living today were even born. In the same way, far too many Jews carry on as if the Cossacks are right on their heels and Hitler, nearly 60 years dead, is waiting right around the corner.
Such people like to fall back on Santayana’s much over-used line, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And what? You think if you remember history, it won’t repeat itself? Don’t kid yourself. There aren’t that many variations. There’s peace and there’s war, there’s prosperity and there’s starvation, there’s being born and there’s dying. For every thing, there’s a season. That’s life, no matter what Santayana would have you believe.
About the time I finally reached Ventura Blvd., I decided that the main reason for granting a professor tenure is a lousy one. Essentially, it is intended to protect him from being fired by the university administrators because they disapprove of his politics. The question that comes to mind is, why should they know his politics any more than I know the politics of my mechanic or the lady who checks out my groceries? There is no more reason why a college student should ever know his professor’s political beliefs than he should know the prof’s sexual orientation or his religion. If the guy can’t teach political history or economics or English literature without proselytizing, he doesn’t belong at the dais in a lecture hall, he belongs on a soap box in the park.
As I slogged my way past Burbank Blvd., I found myself aggravated anew at what I had heard Michael Medved proclaim on his show earlier in the day. He devoted an entire hour to denouncing state lotteries. He started out by citing a handful of anecdotes about people who had won millions of dollars and then, through stupidity, avarice or plain bad luck, wound up broke and miserable. He claimed it was because they hadn’t worked hard for their money and therefore hadn’t earned it. He felt lotteries were intrinsically evil, and, worst of all, that they preyed on poor people.
Well, as much as I like and admire Medved, in this instance I’m afraid he’s full of beans. First off, a lot of people who don’t ever win millions in a lottery wind up broke and miserable. At least these folks had the opportunity to be rich and happy, or at least rich and miserable, which beats the pants off being poor and miserable. And, for another thing, I happen to know far more about it than Michael does because not so long ago, I was very, very poor. Believe me, turning fifty when you’re a TV writer is a very bad career move. And the older I got, the poorer I got. I felt angry and frustrated and hopeless…except on the day of the lottery. That day, I felt anything was possible. All I needed was for the right six numbers to come up, and I could pay off my creditors and stop the dunning phone calls. Perhaps because Michael has never been really poor, he doesn’t understand that when you’re flat on your back, hope isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.
Well, I never won the lottery. But by a strange set of circumstances, I did get a staff job on a TV show. But it was the shot at winning the lottery that had sustained me week after lousy week, year after rotten year.
When Medved actually said on his program that if a poor person simply saved the money he wasted on the lottery and invested it, he could actually improve his lot in life, I had to laugh. I spent a dollar a week. At the end of the year, if I hadn’t played the lottery, I would have saved up $52. I suppose if I had invested it prudently, I’d probably have managed, with compound interest, to double, maybe even triple it in ten years. And, by god, in ten thousand years I’d have been sitting pretty!
By the time I inched my way past Sherman Way, I was thinking that if only hypocrisy could be converted into energy, we could stop being dependent on fossil fuels. What brought that thought to mind, aside from all the dinosaur bones our thousands of cars were devouring as we crept along at three miles-an-hour, was the memory of the last time I sent a query letter to Modern Maturity, as AARP’s monthly magazine used to be called. It happened a few years ago when I noticed that the score for a new movie had been composed by the great Elmer Bernstein. What made it significant, and I thought of special interest to the magazine and its millions of elderly readers, was the fact that Mr. Bernstein was then in his late 70s. Imagine my surprise when I got back a postcard from the editor informing me that they weren’t interested in having me profile the man who had written such unforgettable scores as “The Man With the Golden Arm,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Magnificent Seven,” because he was too old! It seems that the American Association of Retired Persons was aiming at a younger demographic. My final thoughts when at last I exited the freeway at Nordhoff were, one, why the heck don’t businesses stagger work hours, and, two, who was the chucklehead who first called it rush hour?
Burt Prelutsky
Ellie
January 14, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Burt Prelutsky
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some people, I understand, spend a good deal of time thinking in the shower. Lucky them! They get to do their heavy mental lifting while in a womb of warm water. I, on the other hand, get to do mine while stuck in late afternoon traffic on the San Diego Freeway.
The other day, I was right around Sunset Blvd. when it occurred to me that we have all heard that nobody ever forgets how to ride a bicycle. But how on earth would we know that? After the age of 15, who, aside from Lance Armstrong, ever rides a bike again?
As I started the long, tedious drive up the hill towards Mulholland, I found myself wondering why Chris Matthews was still on TV. This was the lunkhead who, in speaking about the enemy in Fallouja, said, “They’re not bad guys. They just have a disagreement with us, and they’re fighting for their country.” When I heard him say it, I thought perhaps I was hallucinating. He was, after all, talking about the barbarians who sever the heads of innocent men and women while screaming “God is great” in Arabic, and who, at the time, were murdering our Marines.
If Matthews had been spouting such abominable tripe sixty years ago, we’d have been calling him Tokyo Chris.
When I finally arrived at Mulholland and looked down towards the San Fernando Valley, I saw what looked like the world’s largest parking lot. Clearly, going down was not going to be any easier than coming up. Maybe because the fellow parked in the next lane looked like a successful middle-aged black, I wanted to ask him if he resented it when the race-baiters refer to people like Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice, as oreos.
That got me to pondering if blacks and my fellow Jews insist on voting Democratic in such large numbers because that is an easy way to validate their racial identities. If they ever run into Jesse Jackson or Barbra Streisand, they can look them right in the eye without blinking.
As I began the slow descent into the Valley, I wondered if Dennis Prager wasn’t right when he suggested that many blacks and Jews suffer from a paralysis of memory. No matter how many decades ago insults and injuries were inflicted, and no matter that it was not they themselves who were abused, they behave as if it happened this morning. Slavery ended 140 years ago; Jim Crow laws and lynchings ended before most blacks living today were even born. In the same way, far too many Jews carry on as if the Cossacks are right on their heels and Hitler, nearly 60 years dead, is waiting right around the corner.
Such people like to fall back on Santayana’s much over-used line, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And what? You think if you remember history, it won’t repeat itself? Don’t kid yourself. There aren’t that many variations. There’s peace and there’s war, there’s prosperity and there’s starvation, there’s being born and there’s dying. For every thing, there’s a season. That’s life, no matter what Santayana would have you believe.
About the time I finally reached Ventura Blvd., I decided that the main reason for granting a professor tenure is a lousy one. Essentially, it is intended to protect him from being fired by the university administrators because they disapprove of his politics. The question that comes to mind is, why should they know his politics any more than I know the politics of my mechanic or the lady who checks out my groceries? There is no more reason why a college student should ever know his professor’s political beliefs than he should know the prof’s sexual orientation or his religion. If the guy can’t teach political history or economics or English literature without proselytizing, he doesn’t belong at the dais in a lecture hall, he belongs on a soap box in the park.
As I slogged my way past Burbank Blvd., I found myself aggravated anew at what I had heard Michael Medved proclaim on his show earlier in the day. He devoted an entire hour to denouncing state lotteries. He started out by citing a handful of anecdotes about people who had won millions of dollars and then, through stupidity, avarice or plain bad luck, wound up broke and miserable. He claimed it was because they hadn’t worked hard for their money and therefore hadn’t earned it. He felt lotteries were intrinsically evil, and, worst of all, that they preyed on poor people.
Well, as much as I like and admire Medved, in this instance I’m afraid he’s full of beans. First off, a lot of people who don’t ever win millions in a lottery wind up broke and miserable. At least these folks had the opportunity to be rich and happy, or at least rich and miserable, which beats the pants off being poor and miserable. And, for another thing, I happen to know far more about it than Michael does because not so long ago, I was very, very poor. Believe me, turning fifty when you’re a TV writer is a very bad career move. And the older I got, the poorer I got. I felt angry and frustrated and hopeless…except on the day of the lottery. That day, I felt anything was possible. All I needed was for the right six numbers to come up, and I could pay off my creditors and stop the dunning phone calls. Perhaps because Michael has never been really poor, he doesn’t understand that when you’re flat on your back, hope isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.
Well, I never won the lottery. But by a strange set of circumstances, I did get a staff job on a TV show. But it was the shot at winning the lottery that had sustained me week after lousy week, year after rotten year.
When Medved actually said on his program that if a poor person simply saved the money he wasted on the lottery and invested it, he could actually improve his lot in life, I had to laugh. I spent a dollar a week. At the end of the year, if I hadn’t played the lottery, I would have saved up $52. I suppose if I had invested it prudently, I’d probably have managed, with compound interest, to double, maybe even triple it in ten years. And, by god, in ten thousand years I’d have been sitting pretty!
By the time I inched my way past Sherman Way, I was thinking that if only hypocrisy could be converted into energy, we could stop being dependent on fossil fuels. What brought that thought to mind, aside from all the dinosaur bones our thousands of cars were devouring as we crept along at three miles-an-hour, was the memory of the last time I sent a query letter to Modern Maturity, as AARP’s monthly magazine used to be called. It happened a few years ago when I noticed that the score for a new movie had been composed by the great Elmer Bernstein. What made it significant, and I thought of special interest to the magazine and its millions of elderly readers, was the fact that Mr. Bernstein was then in his late 70s. Imagine my surprise when I got back a postcard from the editor informing me that they weren’t interested in having me profile the man who had written such unforgettable scores as “The Man With the Golden Arm,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Magnificent Seven,” because he was too old! It seems that the American Association of Retired Persons was aiming at a younger demographic. My final thoughts when at last I exited the freeway at Nordhoff were, one, why the heck don’t businesses stagger work hours, and, two, who was the chucklehead who first called it rush hour?
Burt Prelutsky
Ellie