Words Have Power

I can't over-emphasize the huge change television made in my life. I've already talked about it a little in earlier posts, My Early Humor(s) and Have You No Sense Of Decency, Sir? I'll talk about it now, and I'll talk about it more later.

My Father wasn't going to get a TV, ever. He grew up on radio and radio adventure shows, and loved them and talked about them all the time, but he considered TV to be entertainment for the mindless. It took time away from reading. Besides, by showing everything, "it doesn't exercise the imagination."

Then the Army-McCarthy Hearings started. The Army accused Senator Joseph McCarthy and his counsel Roy Cohn of inappropriate pressures to give preferential treatment to a friend of Cohn. McCarthy in his turn said that the Army's charges were a retaliation for his investigations of suspected Communists in the Army and the security risks they presented. A special Senate committee began meeting April 22, 1954, to sort the matter out, and the meetings were nationally broadcast live on ABC.

My Father, the Army Captain, was decidedly on the Army's side. My Father always needed to belong to something. Loyalty was the highest value. The Army was what he belonged to then.

It took a few weeks. My Father's buddies wore him down by telling him every day about seeing the hearings on their TVs. Finally he gave in.

Once he decided we had to have a TV to watch the hearings with, my Father became a member of a new class, the class of TV owners. It sparked a new loyalty: now, the television was one of the greatest inventions ever. He got us a 13-inch black and white Zenith with an iron stand. He became a loyal Zenith owner. "Zeniths are the best."

There was a struggle getting the antenna up. This involved many uses of words I wasn't allowed to say. An Army friend of my Father had to come and help. The two of them finally got the TV working and able to bring in the Boston channels on a weekend in late May or early June. My first memory of watching TV was witnessing a routine Sunday morning live televised mass from a Boston cathedral. I amused my Father by insisting that even though the picture was black and white, I could see the colors of the stained-glass windows.

There followed at least a week of watching the Senate hearings. I barely understood what was going on. In fact I could barely hear it half the time, because whenever McCarthy or anyone on his side was heard to say anything my Father loudly derided him. Of course, when the Army side was speaking we had to all be very quiet.

The hearings came to a head on Wednesday, June 9. I have heard that Joseph Welch, the counsel for the Army had rehearsed the line "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" already and was just looking for a good time to spring it. The time came when a possibly drunk McCarthy randomly attacked, by name, a member of Welch's law office. The full line was "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.... You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

It was an Army lawyer speaking, so we had been quiet. I heard the line, the applause, and saw the look on McCarthy's face. I was thrilled. It sent a chill up my spine, as I realized even amid my Father's cheers that the incident had implications for my own life.

Words have power.

My Early Humor(s)

As you all should know, the word humor comes from the ancient Greek word for bodily fluids. The ancient Greeks were polytheists. That is why they allowed that different people could have different bodily fluids, or that any one person might have several bodily fluids at once, and that all that was alright.

At first, the Greeks recognized seven basic kinds of humors, or bodily fluids, namely Sanguine (blood), Choleric (yellow bile), Phlegmatic (phlegm), Melancholic (black bile), Pissy (urine), Spunky (jizm), and Mammary (milk). But right from the start political correctness reared its ugly butt, and ruled that the last two were too gender-specific, and had to be replaced by Emissions. That was subsumed into Pissy, even though everyone but the Germans knew Pissy and Spunky were totally unrelated. Yes, they did too have Germans back then. The Greeks called them mounts.

Finally, Pissy was eliminated altogether by the post-Socratic theorists, who said Piss is yellow, Cholera is yellow -- so they're the same, see? Yeah, and like Bush is shitty, and my shit is shitty -- so Bush comes out of my ass, see? I'll talk more about theory, and theorists, and how much I love theory and theorists, later. Right now I'm talking about humor(s) (see title).
Here is a rare photo of my emotional state at age four. As you can see, my Father was still asserting that our family would never in a million years own a television, or wake up out of the Dark Ages, or stop beating me bloody and leaving me in ditches. My main humor at this age is the Phlegm humor. I am cold and moist, sluggish and pallid.

This is a snapshot of my emotional state just one year later. To the untrained eye there is virtually no change, except that I have now divided into a fat man and a weird black cat. But if you look very closely you will see that the Army-McCarthy Hearings have come and gone in the background , and my Father got a TV so he could scream at McCarthy in real-time. Having a TV and watching the Army-McCarthy Hearings changed my main humor to Sanguine. I became hot and moist, amorous, happy, generous, optimistic, and irresponsible. Still moist, but a hot moist. I sought out girls to play "house" with. These were generally imaginary girls, as the nearest house with a real girl in it was a mile away, at the time.

As I began school we moved closer to civilization and I encountered actual other humans and their spawn. Among these were religious bigots. I have since come to understand that Christian religious bigots fall neatly into two distinct classes, and that this is all you need to know about them. The two classes consist of 1) Puritans and their ilk, who don't want anyone to laugh, because amusement springs from the Devil, and 2) Evangelicals and their ilk, who expect everyone to have a big fuckin smiley face and laugh and be joyous because "Haven't you heard the Good News? Christ is here!" -- Halle-fuckin-lujah.

My attitude was and is the pagan attitude of I'll laugh when the Laugh God moves me to laugh and I won't laugh when the Laugh God wants a smoke break. Get your religions off my bodily fluids.

A study of my early humor(s) is not complete without a reference to the man pictured below, Percy Dovetonsils.

This man is wearing funny glasses to view the world. That does not mean he does not see the world. It means he sees the world through funny glasses, as opposed to rose-colored glasses, say. Metaphorically, he uses humor to see and understand reality, get it?

I want to end this post on that note, combined, or amalgamated, with this additional one, said by some guy played by Jack Nicholson, which I would like to place with the first note in a sack, so they can fight each other and roll around the floor for my entertainment: "People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch."