Bedhead Ideas

AN UNCHARACTERISTIC ATTEMPT AT BREVITY

I have no expertise on the subject of war, but I have known people who do; I have met many who can talk about war longer than I can listen.

I have to say, upfront, that I wonder how many war aficionados know as much about why a war was fought as they do about the cool equipment, and the dramatic battles, and the bang bang and boom boom and so forth. Perhaps most of them really do have this bifurcated knowledge mixing boom boom and backstory, but they don’t always make this clear to the casual observer. While I recall my son at a young age being obsessed with war, I never saw even circumstantial evidence that he was fascinated by the moral and sociological issues involved.

If you want to call this next bit cruelty on my part— I won’t quibble, but it still makes me laugh to recall how red my son’s face used to get when I would ask him a question about a soldier’s helmet, but I would call it a “war hat.”

I was going to write how the difference between a “real” war and a war of ideas was such and such, but it occurred to me that every real war— by which I mean every war where people are murdered and we assign a different word instead of murder because murder doesn’t sound heroic enough for somebody’s liking— every real war is still, at its core, a war of ideas.

We want to believe that these ideas are ideas we can admire, and you can probably find admirable examples from history. But I suspect that all too many of them are variations on “you’re not the boss of me.” One popular variation seems to be “in fact, I am very much the boss of you.”

And when it’s a “civil” war we’re talking about, the ideas that led to war are never far from the minds of the warriors, not for more than a minute. And I should clarify that I don’t really mean the actual ideas. I mean the ideas after the person carrying them around has washed and blown these ideas dry, and has continued to lather, rinse, and repeat them until an outsider hardly recognizes that they are the same ideas. That blow-dried and coiffed or even bewigged version of the idea is the one people carry around.

I don’t want to hear about the ideas after they’ve spent hours at the barber shop or nail hut or beauty salon. Give me, if you like, the bedhead ideas. Because any time you are not attracted to a person when they have bedhead, you’re not really attracted to them. And it’s the same with ideas.

I don’t want to hear about an idea after you’ve had a chance to make sure this idea makes you look good. If you need an idea to make you look good, and that’s a dealbreaker, I’ve got news for you. But I’ll keep it to myself, as a courtesy.

Whenever I’m trotting out one of the ideas I’m really attracted to, there’s almost always another person sitting across from me who is making a face because they don’t like my bedhead idea one bit.

I’m eager to get to the point of the essay, in case there is one, so let me give you a few examples, very quickly and breezily, and then we can move on.

THREE TOPICS WHERE MY BEDHEAD IDEAS ALWAYS PISS PEOPLE OFF:

1 Free speech

2 The nature of evil

3 My favorite Beatle

Okay, moving on now. Don’t keep looking back, we’re going to another topic, and you need to keep up because they can’t clean the room until we get the hell out. If you want to guess which topic of the three makes people the most angry, you can guess about that. But I’m going to keep moving.

My view of our President— while not quite scientific— can at least be said to predate his presidential run. It also predates his television program, and his recent affiliation with the GOP. Shockingly, my view of Trump was also formed earlier than his gut.

If my Trump opinion were to transport a lot of the other Trump opinions across state lines, for immoral purposes, my Trump opinion would essentially be consorting with jailbait.

When I first read about Donald John Trump, in the then-failing and now-failed Spy Magazine, he was a Democrat who wore expensive scarves, and the period where he would be hobnobbing with Hillary and Bill was at least five years in the future. Can one hobnob without wearing an expensive scarf? Officially, I believe it is possible, but privately I have my doubts.

When I hear it being claimed by somebody (usually Trump) that Trump has done something truly impressive, I’m always interested to know the details, and always disappointed when they are not forthcoming. With Trump, details never forthcome.

The details are promised, from time to time, and even bragged about. But they remain forever a mirage photographed through gauzy lenses; in Trump’s language, we’re told how to feel about things, but we don’t learn much about the things. We mostly just get battered like a Kansas windsock, and the memory that lingers is at best impressionistic. Our President speaks fluent American ballyhoo.

If a thing is coming, we are told that when it gets here, it will be a thing like you’ve never seen before. If it’s a thing that can be done, we are told that Trump is the best person at doing it that’s ever done it. Sometimes, he tells a story where a bunch of experts tell him that they’ve never seen anyone do something as well as he has done it, in their many decades in the field of dot dot dot. In these stories, he makes it sound like he didn’t even realize how good he was at the thing until they all lined up to praise him. (In this way, he has created an interesting paradox where the only time you hear about his humility is when he’s bragging about being great at something, and the humility is included like dressing on the side.)

Occasionally, a great man of the past (like Lincoln, or Gene Simmons) will give Trump pause, but eventually he figures the coast is clear, and he acknowledges that he is better than even that luminary.

But, since he is always the best and everything he achieves is always like you’ve never seen before, he’s eternally forced to be better even than himself, which can not be easy, even for him. I doubt Trump ever knows just exactly what he’s going to do to top himself, because he doesn’t seem to know even after he has done it.

This is where one of his pet tropes, his “that I can tell you” business, comes in. Whenever there’s an opportunity to reveal a plainly expressed walkthrough of a subject that has already generated a great deal of bragging, we get instead something other than a walkthrough. It’s not even quite an overview; it’s more of a silhouette with an ear-punishing soundtrack.

And he always has some insult directed at the designated villain of the scenario and that is always what he can tell you. The implication is that integrity and tradition and honor tie his hands, or he would tell us far more. In fact, in some cases, he tells us that it’s quite amazing what he does know but can not reveal. Other times, he brags that he will get in trouble for breaking a rule, but he’s going to say the thing anyway. In short, when he doesn’t tell us something, he brags that integrity is staying his hand. When he does tell us something, he often tells us while bragging that the rules do not apply to him.

America has a long history of strong claims on behalf of this or that item, and it also has a long history of quieter people who have tried to remember that grandiose claims usually require dull details. When Barnum-like language is employed, I’m apt to look around for clean and unambiguous language that can serve as ballast. Otherwise, I will keep my heart cold and my wallet pocketed.

I don’t have the space here, or the integrity— but mainly the space— to list the times I haven’t lived up to that standard. But I have never stopped paying lip service to it, lo these many years.

Others can feel free to take the man’s remarks on faith. And I am the first to say that faith leads to good things. I am also the first to say that faith leads to bad things. Faith, it seems, leads to many sorts of things.

I think of it this way. Faith— like guacamole—seems simple enough that it ought to be hard to screw it up. And— also like guacamole— you rarely find anyone owning up to it after it goes south. Who made this guacamole, we ask out loud, and then there’s a rush of air and we look over to see a hole in the wall shaped exactly like the now-decamped guacamolist.

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For some reason, the blue buttons aren’t available on my phone today, so I must exhort you the old fashioned way to please like, comment, and share. It really helps me when you do those things! I need all the help I can get, because most people seem to rush past my posts to get to the memoirists and Tolkien fans. I’ve taken the unusual step today of writing about things you can already read about everywhere else; I hope I’ve managed to do it in a manner so idiosyncratic that people will cancel their subscription not because of what I said, but because of the way I said it.