Shooting Down Safety

Two years ago when my first great nephew was born, my sister (his Grammy) told me about the rigamarole my niece and her husband went through to get their little bundle out of the hospital, including an inspection of the child safety seat. I laughed and drew her a verbal picture of what went down in our parents’ day. After forking over 150 bucks to the cashier (babies were cheaper by the pound then), my Dad slid into the driver’s seat of our seatbelt-less station wagon, my Mom took the passenger side (aka “The Death Seat”), cradling us in one arm like a potential human projectile while sporting a lit cigarette in her free hand. I imagine the words “I could really use a highball” were uttered more than once.

This came to mind when I ran across the latest Toyota ad in the current issue of “Vanity Fair.” Featuring a picture of a fresh-faced young mother holding her chubby toddler son, the headline reads, “Everyone deserves to be safe.”

Putting aside the irony of the recall-riddled Toyota running such malarkey, it strikes me that “safe” is beginning to rank right up there with “green” as the feel good words of our age. But the more I looked at the ad, the more I realized it was the word “safe” coupled with “deserve” that, perversely, was causing my unease.

As the vignette about my first homecoming demonstrates, we used to do a lot of things that are now considered not only unsafe but illegal. From tearing around town on our Stingrays without bike helmets to hanging around the local saloon when our Dads felt the need for a beer, childhood’s past were, statistically, more fraught with pitfalls than today but, in my unscientific opinion, not nearly as much fun. In fact, it seems that the pendulum has swung so far to over-protection that immunologists are raising the alarm that children haven’t been exposed to enough of the run-of-the-mill germs that will build up their immune systems.

My musings about the high price we pay for being safe were brought into sharp relief by a non-fiction book entitled “War” that I finished reading a few days ago. Written by Sebastian Junger, author of “A Perfect Storm,” it chronicles the fifteen months he spent with a platoon stationed in a remote outpost in Afghanistan, the most combat-heavy spot in the whole country. If you’ve ever wondered why young American men would deliberately live in a God-forsaken shithole with no running water, no electricity, no cooked food and, worst of all, no women, while putting their asses directly in the line of fire, this book has the answers, and some you may not care to hear. This edited excerpt is one that really jumped out at me:

“War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know. War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else.”

And that includes being safe, whether it’s deserved or not.

Sacred Cowed

The town I live in has a tourist trap on the water known as “The Nautical Mile.” Among its bars, restaurants, souvenir shops and mini golf course, there’s a large gambling boat that cruises out to international waters so players can stuff their faces at the buffet table and lose their shirts at the craps table.

I was walking past it on a recent Sunday morning when I caught the unmistakable aroma of bacon and eggs wafting from its interior. Much like Proust’s madeleines, this sensory stimulus transported me back to the Sunday mornings of my youth, when 7am mass was followed by a trip to the bakery for a dozen Kaiser rolls and then home, where my Protestant-raised mother would be frying up heaping helpings of pork fat and cholesterol for us to feast on.

It’s the only really good memory I have of my Catholic-centric childhood. Not only was Sunday mass compulsory, I endured twelve years of parochial school education. Some people believe private schools are superior to public schools and I think, for the most part, they’re right. God knows the nuns ruled with an iron crucifix, keeping perfect order in classes that ranged in size from 40 to 50 kids. The lay teachers were no slackers, either, but along with the three R’s came the fourth, religion. Honestly, how many times can you discuss the Sermon on the Mount or the Beatitudes before you go mad? By the time I hit high school, I wanted to raise my hand and say, “I get it. I got it. I’m gone.” One day I did go, skipping out on mass at the age of 14, and never looked back.

In the intervening years, I’ve taken a very hard line about keeping The Church and The State at opposite ends of the dancehall. This being America, you think that would be understood, but with the rise, once again, of the Far Right and their never-ending nattering about “Christian values,” it seems that God and Uncle Sam are tangoing ever closer to a very unholy union.

One hallowed word that keeps popping up in two hotly contested political debates is “sacred.”

The opponents of gay marriage refer to the union between a man and woman as “sacred” and prohibited to couples of the same sex. The last time I looked, city hall was not a cathedral, synagogue or mosque. If a marriage ceremony is performed in one of these pious places it is, in fact, sacred. But a marriage license issued by the state is nothing more nor less than a legal contract. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t need lawyers to dissolve it. Since there’s no danger of hierophants from the three major religions condoning, no less performing, gay marriages anytime soon, the “anti” camp needs to come up with another word to make their case unless, of course, they want to equate a fishing license with a papal edict.

The other controversy that depends almightily on the word “sacred” is the building of a mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero. The opponents of this Islamic house of worship refer to the site of the former World Trade Center as “sacred ground” and make the argument that erecting a mosque so close to where thousands of innocents were slaughtered by a pack of Muslim mad dogs would desecrate their memory.

I think we’re all missing the bigger picture. If Ground Zero is “sacred” (and I believe it is), then why did we condone the building of a corporate skyscraper on top of what is – essentially, horribly – a crematorium? What’s next, a W Hotel on the grounds of Auschwitz? A KFC next to the graves at Arlington?

Condemning a group of moderate Muslims for wanting to build a mosque while a Monument to Mammon slowly takes shape over the remains of the sacrificed is like pointing out the speck in your brother’s eye while ignoring the steel I-beam in your own.

It makes a mosque seem not just sacred, but downright small potatoes.

Product Displacement

Even though my wardrobe would give Tim Gunn the haute horrors, I do like to follow the vagaries of fashion, making note of what’s hip (minimalism), what’s hopeless (anything 80’s) and when the hell will this hideous style go away (Capri pants).

Words are a lot like fashion in that, to paraphrase Gunn’s “Project Runway” sidekick Heidi Klum, “One day they’re in, the next day they’re out.”

I remember when “ubiquitous” was, well, ubiquitous. “Resonate” hit a collective chord and then slowly faded away. “Synergy” was once a stock word with the Wall Street crowd as disparate companies tried to merge their misaligned missions. When AOL-Time Warner turned from a boon to a boondoggle, “synergy” became the Enron of English.

One word that seems in no danger of losing its allure anytime soon is “product.” Once reserved for things like glass cleaner and laundry detergent, “product” has become the little black dress of vocabulary – it’s safe to use on any occasion, but is completely lacking in color and nuance.

I first noticed this trend while watching “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” A forerunner to “Project Runway,” “Queer Eye” turned five gay men loose on one hapless hetero, making over his fashion, food, furniture, face and finesse. What should have been a great opportunity to educate their Trilby on such unfamiliar words as “bespoke,” “wasabi,” “étagère” or “toner,” instead became “product” pandemonium. Maybe they didn’t want to spook the straight guy, but I was a bit dismayed hearing these savvy Svengalis refer to everything from pasta to hair gel to fabric as “product.”

Because of its rote formula (how many times can you watch some poor bastard made uncomfortable by Carson Kressley’s quips), “Queer Eye” quit the air in 2007, but I believe they were the mavens who made “product” fashionable.

Normally, I would consider this fad just mildly distasteful, but when Hollywood studio executives, record label honchos and publishing CEOs start referring to movies, music and literature as “product,” I know we’re in desperate need of some major alteration. It’s bad enough to think of my daily meals as akin to floor wax, but the fine arts are one of the very few things (besides accessories) that set us apart from the other higher primates and should be shown the same reverence as the “Runway” panel does for a perfectly executed ensemble.

To quote the guru Gunn, choose the made-to-measure word for every object and “make it work.”

Pants on Fire

One of my favorite movie lines is drolly delivered by the perennially under appreciated Jeff Goldblum in The Big Chill:

“I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex.”

Of course, “rationalization” is just a self-forgiving euphemism for the far more damnable “lie.”

Why do we lie anyway? After all, we were warned at a very early age that our pants would spontaneously combust or our noses grow to Pinocchio-sized proportions if we did. If that didn’t scare us to straight talk, how about turning into an LSD-crazed arachnid and weaving the proverbial tangled web.

Fact is, we’re all hard-wired dissemblers who are literally fed a falsehood in the womb. The placenta is provided by the paternal side of the partnership so, in order to perform its function without being destroyed as a biological invader, it cloaks itself in maternal chemicals. There’s even an area in our brain that governs prevarication. It starts to develop around the age of three or four (“Timmy, who broke the vase?” “The dog did!”), growing by leaps and bounds thereafter (“Tim, who drove the getaway car?” “Dougie did!”).

It’s interesting to note that women are believed to be the first fibbers, simply because they were the first talkers, and that it’s impossible to be a successful politician without telling a few whoppers. What this says about female politicians, I’ll leave to you.

Even the Almighty wasn’t foolish enough to forbid shaggy dog stories. The commandment reads, “Ye shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” not “Ye shall cut the crap.” The Good Lord knew that rampant honesty would be fatal to society. How many marriages do you think would still be standing if every husband answered the question, “Does my butt look fat in these pants?” and every wife answered the question, “Were you just faking it?” with the gospel truth?

Spouses, parents, children, friends, employers, the electorate and every sucker who’s born every minute aside, our biggest untruths are practiced on ourselves, as the above-referenced bit of dialogue attests. From evading those few pounds we put on over the holidays by blaming the clothes dryer to denying the cheating ways of a loved one when the sext message is staring us straight in the face, we are the Sovereigns of Self-Deception.

Hell, we don’t even like to call a lie “a lie” because of its shameful implications. Think I’m pulling your leg? Re-read this article and count how many times I did just that.