And that's the way it is . . .

February 25, 2014

"And that's the way it is . . ."

“But I could be wrong.” 

                         - Gaspar Stephens

My friend Gas thinks the five most underutilized words in the English language are those making up the phrase, “But I could be wrong.” I think he’s right, because − Lion, Roundhead, or Cavalier − we’re all looking at the world through a dark, dark glass. The Apostle says so. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

          Someone from Boston, New York, or Washington will try. Someone like A. N. Pierson-Eaton, daughter of an aide to several congressmen from blue states and a cellist, Ivy graduate, and staff writer/assistant editor for culture, politics, and religion at The New Slate Saloon online. Someone with the uncanny capacity to con an expert opinion on Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Henri, and the Ukraine one week, and Argentinian wines, five plays by Schiller, and the effect current Fed policy will have on the American middle class the next.

          Please forget that A. N. knows no one in the American middle class. She makes considerably more than you and I ; and this is not to mention her income from a family trust and the salary and bonuses of a spouse that works on Wall Street (albeit as a junior partner making only pennies per picosecond). Wait! She does. There’s the cashier at the bodega down the block, . . . what’s his name.

          Overlook that with reliable translations, trustworthy dictionaries, and a good reference grammar, I could quote Critique de la raison dialectique or Die Räuber as if I knew them by heart, who went to college west of the Mississippi River and was asked to leave a graduate program south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

          Also: never mind that as far as Argentina is concerned A. N. has never been outside the Buenos Aires airport, a taxi, the Alvear Palace Hotel (its bar and restaurant), and another taxi. It doesn’t really matter that the closest she’s been to Kiev is Warsaw on a boarding school May-term trip. She did write an Art 101 paper on John Sloan.

          None of this matters, because we are dealing not only with Washington, Boston, and New York City but with genuine intelligence, a lively imagination, also an astounding confidence that words really do stand for ideas, and ideas are better than experience. CNN, NPR, and those that matter in Aspen, Austin, and Los Altos are convinced.

          As for that crank in Keokuk that has his doubts (Gas, Jr. or one of his ilk), he’d vote for Ted Cruz if he lived in Kilgore.

But about any or all of this I could be wrong.

Note. In previous posts, I have ended with omega (W), “the end,” almost as if I knew what I’d been talking about. I don’t. I never do really. So  . . . from now on, depending on how confident I am, I’ll end with the next to the last letter of the Greek alphabet (Y), or the one before that (F), or . . . .

L

(bicbw)*

*Because I could be wrong.