A personality trait I had as a kid was that I couldn’t help but mention to everyone about “the elephant in the room.” As a kid, you overhear adults have their conversations and most were boring. But what was interesting, when I found adults gossiping awfully, they could also completely backtrack on just what they had said in the same sentence.
I then interjected my astonished answer, “He rolled over dump truck into the Blackstone River! He’s a DRUNK!”
Everyone in the room guffawed. I wasn’t the laughter of a kid saying something “cute.” It was the nervous laughter of being “caught.“ I exposed hypocrisy!
“Out of the mouth of babes” and all that!
My Uncle then said to me: “Ronnie, you’re smart, but you’re too smart for your own good.”
I didn’t understand that comment at 8 years of age. Being smart, I was told, was the best thing you could ever attain. Well, I eventually did learn what he meant. I learned not to spit out my opinion so quickly.
*****
A few years later my brother began bringing home a magazine called the National Lampoon. I opened it and in it they dumped on the church, government, parents, teachers and any fine institution. If someone or group was claiming the moral high ground, National Lampoon was sure to expose the bullshit.
One of their cartoonists was Shary Flenniken who created, what I thought, was a pretty funny strip of a girl and her talking dog who would carp on the day’s hypocrisy. It’s no longer in print but the internet is great for finding fossils of the past now.
This magazine, plus my upcoming biology classes in high school, helped to happily ruin any faith that may have germinated within me as a child. That sounds awfully cynical but I have to say this…it was realistic. I had very few illusions about people and believing “happy horseshit” wasn’t going to cut it for me.
Click for Larger
No comments:
Post a Comment