My Shortcomings

My Shortcomings

Because I tend to be so judgmental in my writings and, if truth be told, in my daily life, doesn’t mean I’m blind to my own shortcomings. And I’m not just referring to my shortage of hair and height. For openers, I am not the most patient of men, but keep in mind I am quite old and don’t have a lot of time to squander on all those videos, trips down Nostalgia Lane and other people’s articles, some of you insist on sending me.

But I also own up to a lack of a visual sense. Whereas my wife can tell you what everyone at a party or even in a movie was wearing, I’d probably only notice if they weren’t wearing anything. The operative word is “probably.”

One day, after we’d been living in our house for five or six years, I walked into the kitchen and noticed a shelf connected to the wall that had several little knick-knacks perched on it. I asked my wife when she’d put it up. She claimed it happened the day we moved in, but she couldn’t provide photographic evidence, which I found highly suspicious at the time. But as I haven’t caught her in any other lies, I finally had to accept it as the truth.

Perhaps I am at my most judgmental when it comes to movies. In fact, I can be as rigid as Salem’s Cotton Mather or the Spanish chief inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada, when it comes to movies. Not every movie, you understand, only those that I feel have immoral or amoral underpinnings that seem to go unnoticed by others.

For example, it bothered me that in “MASK,” the gruesome-looking kid portrayed by Eric Stoltz, towards whom we were supposed to be sympathetic, cheated his very nice cousin out of his valuable baseball cards and didn’t set his cap for a sweet, but homely, girl; instead, he honed in on young Laura Dern, the best-looking blonde in town.

In “Tootsie,” we were supposed to be pulling for Dustin Hoffman, who pretended to be a woman so he could get an acting job. As a woman, he became the confidant of Jessica Lange, and then used the secrets she shared in his attempt to seduce her.

The worst, though, was “The Elephant Man.” Twice in the movie, John Merrick is rescued from a life as a sideshow freak by the intervention of a young boy who is the ward of a brutal villain. But not even when Merrick had become the pet of the English royals, mainly, it seems, because he poured a nice cup of tea and could mumble the Lord’s Prayer, did he raise a finger to rescue the boy, whom he knew would be savagely beaten for his efforts on Merrick’s behalf.

All of these are old movies by now, but what I recall from the days when I would rail against them was that people who had seen and liked the movies would admit they hadn’t even noticed the things I referred to, but now that I had pointed them out, it didn’t change their attitude. They still liked the movies.

There is a conflict in Chicago pitting black mobs against Mayor Rahm Emanuel. There’s no way to root for either side, but when the riffraff aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement prevented Chicago’s holiday shoppers from getting into stores, it’s hard not to wish that the brutish behavior of Bull Connors 50 years ago hadn’t taken the use of fire hoses off the table.

Proving that white mobs can be every bit as nincompoopish as black mobs, the Freedom from Religion gang are raising a stink over some police departments having “In God We Trust” stickers on their patrol cars, insisting it’s illegal under the 1st Amendment. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the self-righteous atheists, including those employed at the ACLU, would one day get around to actually reading the 1st Amendment?

Proving that New Yorkers are not willing to sit idly by while those in the Second City steal their thunder, the New York City Commission on Human Rights will now be allowed to levy hefty fines on landlords, employers and businesses, if they use “improper” pronouns when referring to those freaks who claim to have a gender other than the one provided by Mother Nature. Leave it to liberals, who not only believe they can control the weather, but assume they have the authority to countermand biology.

In New York, someone who tries to deny the transgendered the use of a sexually-designated bathroom or attempts to enforce gender-specific dress codes can even face jail time.

Frankly, though, I don’t feel too sorry for Manhattanites. After all, they could have voted for someone sane. But instead, they overwhelmingly elected Bill De Blasio (born William Wilhelm, Jr.), a communist who honeymooned in Cuba with his previously lesbian bride.

Although I hold Ted Cruz in reasonably high regard, I didn’t rush to his defense when he took on the Washington Post and its editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes for depicting him as an organ grinder and his two young daughters as a couple of monkeys.

Frankly, I was caught by surprise when so many people claimed to be offended by the cartoon. For one thing, Cruz brought it on himself by using his five and seven-year-old daughters in a political ad that had him and the older girl reading from storybooks titled “How ObamaCare Stole Christmas,” “Rudolph the Underemployed Reindeer” and “The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails.”

For another thing, a lot of people call their kids “little monkeys” as an endearment. It’s not as if Ms. Telnaes pictured the little girls as skunks, rats or warthogs.

What didn’t really surprise me was that Sen. Cruz immediately sent out requests for campaign contributions, referencing the cartoon as a come-on. So it was a crime against humanity for the Washington Post to run the darn thing, but it was perfectly okay for the girls' father to give it even wider circulation.

Finally, I once saw Carol Matthau at a movie preview. Mrs. Matthau, who had been married to William Saroyan prior to marrying Walter Matthau, caught my eye because she was wearing white makeup, which was apparently her thing. I don’t mean whitish, either. I mean white like vanilla ice cream, white like a clown’s face, white like snow.

Anyway, a friend of mine, 101-year-old actor Norman Lloyd, was once attending a party at the home of movie executive Jennings Lang when the Matthau’s arrived. Lang’s four-year-old son took one look at Mrs. Matthau and asked her if she had ever been dead.

But to be fair, Carol Matthau was more than just another spooky face. She once observed, and quite correctly I should add, that “The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.”


Burt Prelutsky

Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber