B9014-1 Smothering With Lies

            All of us, in our own way, are living out the encouragements of childhood.  And though we pretend to think that our lives today are directed by some cool, rational thought arising within us, more often than not our lives are driven by some anachronistic remnant of childhood still whiplashing us today with its sugary praise.  What began as a harmless compliment to a young person may, in time, grow to become an all-consuming passion for that person later in life.  The youngster who is praised lavishly for a mediocre drawing may spend the rest of his life as an artist trying to recapture that moment.  If adults are not completely honest with young people, then the lie may dance with its hapless recipient for a lifetime.  And sometimes only in the hollowness of old age does a person realize exactly how he has been beaten to death with the hard stick of falsehood wrapped in the soft cloth of kindness.
            I remember especially the time when I was forced to take my Paint-By-Number painting over to Rosie's.  My mother had gone goo-goo over my painting, even though I had tried to explain to her that the painting was a Paint-By-Number painting, for crying out loud, and that it wasn't original art.  But it made no difference to her.  It was beautiful.  It was art.  And her boy painted it.
            Rosie ran a tourist room business in her home next door (Frank’s Tourist Rooms) and one of her regular guests was a former commercial artist.  He had given up his art work because he couldn't make a living at it and he was working, instead, as a salesman.  And so, I had come as an intruder upon this man who, after a day of plying the salesman's role, wanted nothing more than to relax and to steep himself in the numbness of whiskey.  He had to dress himself when Rosie came knocking at his door and had to pretend to be interested in the "artwork" thrust under his nose.  He wasn't and I could see it at once.
            He tried to be kind, as adults filled with whiskey are wont to do, by saying that I had "stayed within the lines real nice" when I painted the oils on the numbered spaces.  He asked if I had mixed the colors myself - and he didn't mean merely to stir the paint in the plastic containers.  Rather, he wondered if I had squeezed the colors of paint onto the pallette and blended them together to get exactly the proper hue.  Of course I hadn't.  This was a Paint-By-Number painting and it had all the rigorous artistic content of a person who paints her own toenails: if you were able to get more paint on your tootsies than on the linoleum you were doing well.  But it was not art.
            I understood that and the artist/salesman understood that.  But the women, my mom and Rosie, insisted that he "encourage" me in my artistic pursuits.  And he lied to me in those soft and beguiling words by telling me that my scrawled and blotched Paint-By-Number painting was "very, very nice."  Yet, I understood that they made him do it.  I understood that he really didn't feel that way at all about my "art."  And I understood that, if I were wise, I should rise quickly above the silliness of blobbing paint into someone else's checkered polygons.  Instead, I should play marbles and break things like any normal eight year old and leave the world of art to those endowed by God with those very special talents.
            I guess I was lucky.  Some are taken in by that line and they spend the rest of their lives dabbling in an art that never transcends the complexity and rigors of Paint-By-Number technique.  Some are so wrapped in the smooth cocoon of falsehood that their wings never dry in the warm daylight of truth.  Always, they will flit from bud to bud, searching for the sweet nectar of praise.  And only in later life will they come to see the fundamental way in which they were so cruelly misled.  But I saw at once, with the crystal-clear prescience of an eight-year old, that I could never be what my mom and Rosie thought of me.  I was lucky.
            Often, we are not given to see the stout fence that surrounds and pinces our options in life.  We have been told the glib lie again and again that we can be anything we wish to be and that nothing stands between us and the farthest stars.  But then, if that were so, how can the broken rubble wall of restraint arise so abruptly from the smooth and undulating plain?  How is it that the protruding hedge mars the uncontested vista?  And why is it that the nimble runner sprains his ankle on the smallest, almost invisible cracks in the concrete sidewalk?  Could it be, perhaps, that God has been pleased to give each one of us a very special gift and one or two carefully selected paths to channel our energies into and not to broadcast them into the remotest corners of the universe like some profligate dandelion?  For when we "scatter," we surely wander in the labyrinth in search of the exit and often we walk into one blind alley after another and into many closed doors.

            Many times, when adults are dealing with youngsters, they are often too kind to tell the plain truth out of some staid sense of decorum and politeness.  They withhold vital information from those who are struggling to find themselves in the world, and they do that because they do not wish to hurt the feelings of those youngsters.  But, because they do not tell the truth, they inadvertently allow the youngster to box himself into a cul-de-sac.
            The cruelest, most dishonest thing a person can do to a youngster is to lie to him by putting the pretty label on something that is blatantly ugly.

C2001-1 Speaking Indistinctly

            Sometimes, when I watch television with the captioning feature turned on, I see a message that says, “Speaking Indistinctly,” as if Indistinctly were a separate language.  In the USA, Indistinctly appears to be a cognate of the Indo-European family of languages because words and phrases frequently appear from a tangled nest of incomprehension that are nearly identical with standard English words and phrases.  They are just harder to understand.  And those words always emanate from the mouths of particularly lazy speakers, like the slushy, half-slurred words of a common lush.
            I suspect that such lazy habits are born sitting in front of computer screens or television sets in a childhood or adolescence devoid of any real conversation and dialog.  The inanimate nature of those electronic devices does not allow for inquiry when incomprehension occurs.  Instead, the passive nature of those devices encourages a tolerance for indistinct and unintelligible speech.  Later, when actual conversations take place between individuals, those bad computer and television habits make it unnecessary to understand exactly what the other person is saying.  One need merely wait until the noise stops coming from the other person and it is time for one to speak oneself: sequential monologues, unrelated to each other, occurring more-or-less contemporaneously.
            It is, in my mind, another failure of the U.S. educational establishment that they cannot turn out graduates who can write and speak as if they had been the beneficiaries of a genuine education.  Many cannot spell or write coherent sentences.  Many cannot stand up in front of a group of people and speak well or even be understood by others.
            But slowly, ever so slowly, I am beginning to understand why this is so.  Our local newspaper  today showed youngsters in the local high school fashioning a wedding dress entirely from toilet paper.  I’m sure many hours of classroom time were expended in this fruitless pursuit, where none was required to spell accurately, or compose coherent sentences, or even to speak with enough clarity that others could understand them at all: your education dollars at work.