Two Ears, One Mouth
My rule has always been, If you have nothing nice to say about someone, be articulate. There are a lot of people out there in the public eye about whom one might be articulate. People who just haven’t a clue about decency, grace, integrity, humility, probity, intellect or some of those other family values learned hard at the Seton dinner table. The nice thing is one doesn’t have to put down these denizens of the mire, since so often they are the victims of their own mouths.
Indeed, most of them have a tendency to hang themselves, like radio talk show host Ken Hamlin, The self-referenced Black Avenger, who said of a welfare mother, "they should stir-fry her ovaries and feed them to her as her last meal on the dole." I had to pull off the road when I heard that.
Another radio talk show delinquency is the father-swaddled Michael Reagan, who spews such idiocy on a continuing basis, you have to wonder if he will survive Papa Ron’s demise. Reagan gets easily exercised over anything he thinks he can use to slander liberalism. Recently he was upset about Jesse Jackson fighting with Decatur, Illinois school board officials, over the expulsion of people who were fighting. Said Reagan, "I bet he doesn’t drink milk in the morning because it’s the wrong color." Doesn’t get any pithier than that.
Sometimes these odes to the odious get help in defining themselves. For instance, George W. Bush, the Republican presidential front-stumbler, apparently made a negative impression on one veteran Texas lobbyist, who saw Georgie Junior up close and personal and offered this assessment to an journalist. "He's the kind of kid from the rich family on your street who you played with because he owned the football. And he was all right until you started playin' and he got knocked around in the game and started cryin' and took his football and went home. And then that night his mom called your parents to complain about you."
And then there are those people who speak up, and without meaning to, put there finger on something to which they didn’t really need attention. I’m thinking of poor Al Gore who said that though he would have rather run for the Democratic nomination unopposed, he thought that the Bill Bradley candidacy had been a benefit. As one web wag put it, Yeah, Bradley’s been good for Gore like the New York Yankees were good for the Atlanta Braves." (The Yankees clobbered the Braves in the World Series, by the way.)
I never was afraid to speak up at public events, and often I was rather effective to stating my cause. I found that when I failed to resist the urge to go on, I would regret it before I sat down. One thing I learned over the years was the more I listened the better I sounded.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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