By John Mattingly
Someone told me the other day that I needed to get in touch with my inner child.
Nope.
I neither have – nor have I ever had – any interest in being a child, especially when I was one. At every age, I wanted to get older: old enough to walk, go outside, run, ride a bike, drive a car – not to mention drink a beer, serve my country, date a girl, get married, start a job, and eventually be old enough to know better.
My ambition to be an old man received encouragement when, as a teenager, I spent time with my grandfather, Waller, then a man in his late seventies. I admired the way he could denounce idiots with impunity, curse at the dinner table without reprimand, seize opportunity through ambiguity, and have his irrationality excused as irony. Waller didn’t get away with all this just because he was old. No, he got away with it because he had learned how to get in touch with what I recognized, even at that young age, as his Inner Old Man.
Waller had been a farmer with benefits. He managed the International Harvester Dealership, found time to edit and publish the local paper, The Gallatin Democrat, and served as president of the local bank in Shawneetown, Illinois, a small town on the Wabash River, several miles upriver from its fork with the Ohio River. Waller was a Renaissance Man who could cuss a clean hole through one-inch steel and held on to his nickels as if they were manhole covers.
Waller told me that, back in the day, a bunch of young speculators from Chicago came down to his bank and asked for a loan to build docks and a warehouse on Lake Michigan. He refused their application on the grounds that Chicago and Lake Michigan were too far from Shawneetown to ever amount to anything.
Waller thus inspired me to find my Inner Old Man, who most recently has come up with the following observations:
1. Gun control. Every time anyone – be they right- or left-wing politicians, talk show hosts, lobbyists, ministers, widows, pundits, gay people, parents of murdered children, NRA members – starts talking about gun control, they have to preface their opinion by saying, “I have a gun myself, and therefore …” Sometimes they even admit ownership of two, three, or more guns. The more guns they own, the more convoluted their opinion.
Inner Old Man says: There really is no policy on gun control that makes sense, or is satisfying to the full spectrum of interests, or is doable as legislation. Except, perhaps ,the politically boring enforcement of laws that already exist, which would mean actually doing something instead of talking about it endlessly.
We are a gun-loving, Christian-violent culture. Get used to it. Inner Old Man points out that (by several orders of magnitude) more people die in auto-related accidents than gun-related shootings, but nobody is hollering about new laws for transportation control.
2. Violence in the media. The violent content on TV, in video war and fight games, and the typical Hollywood blockbuster is staggering. So where did this tendency toward violence come from? Because we are a Christian nation, a nation that even states on its currency, In God We Trust, it’s obvious that our preference for violence comes from the King James version of the Holy Bible.
Inner Old Man suggests that everyone who believes the King James version of the Holy Bible is actually the word of god, should actually read it. The Holy Bible is full of God-directed infanticides that make Sandy Hook look pretty tame. For example, when certain foolish tribes harnessed His People as they were fleeing Egypt, God tells Saul, “Now go and smite Amalak, and utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not, but slay both men and women, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” Even the suckling babies had to die. The Old Testament is full of such mass slaughters of children. Necrometricists have put the total human death toll in the Holy Bible at over one hundred million.
Not including animals. The book of Leviticus is basically a prescription for how to kill herds of helpless goats and sheep and oxen for mere sacrifice, not to mention the species fatalities from the Big Flood.
Nor does God favor women. Maybe that’s why rape isn’t addressed in the Ten Commandments. In Deuteronomy 20 and 21, God instructs His People to smite all their enemies, slaughtering both males and females, livestock and children – but to save the virgins as spoils of victory. Understandably, the virgins are not going to be in the mood for love, given that their families have just been hacked to pieces by swords, axes, and harrows of iron. So God instructs the men of His People to shave the heads of the captured virgins, pluck out their fingernails, and lock them up for a month. When the virgins are soaked in tears, the men may then rape them.
Inner Old Man must say: the media has yet to come up with anything more violent and terrible than the God of the Holy Bible, the God in whom Christians trust. Trust in a violent being, and you will get violence in your being.
3. Birthers. Given that most of the birthers are also Christians, how about producing a birth certificate for Jesus Christ of Nazareth? As far as the records are concerned, Jesus could be either a creation of petty scribes bent on subduing the masses and picking their pockets with promises of eternal life, or just a clever con man who read the prophesy and put together a focus group that enabled him to fulfill it. Inner Old Man submits that Jesus never was born, yet has managed to live an epically moronic fairy tale for a couple thousand years.
PT Barnum would be envious.
4. Marijuana. While law enforcement is so focused on the horrid crimes of marijuana, especially in certain dense urban areas such as New York City, the crooks on Wall Street get a walk for taking our economy off the gang plank, and Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are on the lecture circuit. Inner Old Man states that the Wall Street Quants should be behind bars and B-C-R should be charged with war crimes.
5. Five page Christmas cards. When I get a lumpy card in early December, I toss it in the wood stove for heat, knowing there are a lot of BTUs in the human ego. Those early-arriving, fat, six-by-six cards are larded with pages of drivel. Seldom is there a simple photo of a family and a nice greeting. No, it’s usually a drab card with a big family newsletter about how they played golf in Ireland, or saw the Pope in Italy, or have two kids in the Ivy League, or plan to spend Christmas in their Hawaii time share. Inner Old Man prefers not to encourage these gargantuan exercises in boring self-worship.
6. Advertising and corporate growth. Even NPR has started sliding down a slippery slope toward more and more solicitations. Pledge drives were an accepted break in programming, but at this point, NPR can no longer boast of being commercial free, because now we have to listen to a lot of programming that is in fact soft-sell solicitations by NPR members. Inner Old Man does not want to hear nice people explaining how their NPR membership boosted their theater attendance, their restaurant table turns, or their dog-washing business.
This is a growing trend in advertising. Theaters, subscription satellite radio, and of course, the internet sites are constantly jamming us with ads. Inner Old Man does not want to help corporations grow beyond their current waistline, but encourage them instead to find their Inner Old Man, who is already fully grown.
7. Resignation of the pope. As a courtesy to a bunch of dottering old windbags, Inner Old Man hopes the cardinals will finally get it right with the smoke signals from the Sistine Chapel when they conclave to vote for a new pope. We have reason to believe they will get it right this time, because after the last pope change, the most active topic of conversation within the College of Cardinals for several months was how to control the smoke.
8. Politics in general. With all we now know about the universe and our planet, Inner Old Man is frankly surprised that politics is even relevant any more. We’ve reached a point in our evolution at which change is happening faster than adaptation, and politics is no longer effective at adaptation, which is its only conceivable role.
9. Getting old. I hear people talking about how getting old is no fun, or it’s not for the weak of heart, or that the only good thing about it is it beats the alternative.
Don’t you believe it. Inner Old Man is here to tell you, getting old is great. The younger you start, the better.
John Mattingly cultivates prose, among other things, and was most recently seen near Creede.
