“What if this,” Melvin Udall said, “is as good as it gets?” And in the heat of a building passion, Ronny Cammareri memorably delivered, “We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit.”
Melvin was addressing a waiting room chock full of psychiatric patients, which is funny on a couple levels. For one, the fact the room was crowded and there were no empty seats remaining is a sight gag. For two, his question begs another question of whether his statement was limited to a rhetorical comment, or whether he sincerely expected an answer to this mystery of life from a member of a room full of mental patients. But he must have known the answer he’d get from a room full of people in treatment for some sort of mental problem they had not been able to resolve themselves. Those people must have had hope that this wasn’t as good as it gets, that it could get better. Without hope they wouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Ronny makes his speech in the important context of trying to talk a beautiful woman into his bed, a conversation most adults have experienced to some degree, either as protagonist or antagonist. It is a moment of supreme importance to a man and a woman, one in which the totality of human philosophy, recorded experience, and garnered wisdom may be marshaled to persuade the issue and push it toward an accord. Ronny’s case is self-serving, perhaps even self-deprecating, but he’s also probably correct to a large degree. And underneath it all, he has hope too.
Both Melvin and Ronny acknowledge the imperfection of man. Neither one expects to escape that fact of human life. They must content themselves with a step in the right direction, in Ronny’s case, a really huge and important step with a woman, while Melvin’s challenges come in smaller bits, like putting one foot in front of the other without stepping on a sidewalk crack. Both want to get through it somehow.
June, 2012, did not end well for the cause of hope in my head. This last week of the month was jammed full of iconic political downfalls, both nationally and locally, delivered against a scene of devastating natural catastrophes all over America. The unconstrained visions of H.L. Mencken’s prototypical Boobus americanus came unleashed last week as the Court staged its own versions of holiday fireworks fueled by the Constitution as combustible element. The imperial Senate and the regal President applauded these dismemberments of laws with gloved hands and golf claps, while their inner children did triumphant handstands for their latest power accretions.
Similarly, our unconstrained loose-headed locals wore dust patches into the tundras of their fragile switch grass in a prolonged dance of self-congratulatory puffing on their new-prairie plain-times swai-wrapped organs. Large dead animals can take months to macerate out in the field and you want to stay upwind of them while they do. So too, the phony campaign issues a minority of we-the-rubes gorged on will take some time to fade from sense memory. But fade they will, lest their ghosts remain to inhabit the chambers these posers-supreme plan on ruling.
I have to admit, last week’s local and national setbacks to sanity have damaged my hope. Coming at this time of natural mayhem and wreckage, one has to wonder if someone up there might be giving us a clue.
And to the undervote* of Boobus americanus setting up to run things in Elbert County, the next time a politician or pundit asks you a question for which there is no reasonable answer, or presents you an interpretation for which there is no reasonable support, stop for a few moments and think. Don’t just fish it down your gullet because it came to you on the hook of a properly punctuated sentence. The ability to ask a question is no guarantee that the question is reasonable.
For example last Sunday Chris Wallace asked, “How would you provide universal coverage?” While the question presents a tantalizing prospect, there is no real answer because the domain of the answer is mythical, unconstrained by reality. The respondent should have said, “What makes you think universal coverage is possible?” rather than implicitly affirming that the question had merit by trying to answer it. Elbert County’s recent road to political perdition was paved with the same sort of unconstrained intentions, and you lapped it up.
The Founding Fathers knew of man’s imperfection, they knew the mayhem that comes from unconstrained realities. Their conceptions of limited government came after all else had failed in history. Today the left would expunge that history from our consciousness, and along with it the exceptional America it led to, with no more thought than it takes to snuff out a candle.
If you proles don’t begin to raise your standards, if you don’t start making these power brokers prove the crap they presumptively feed us, I might lose what’s left of my hope for you.
*2000 of 6600 mailed-out ballots is not a mandate.
B_Imperial