Dare To Be Accountable
So, two years ago I’m driving down a country road with my friend John. A deer suddenly jumps in front of us and John goes “Look out!” It’s too late, and we hit the deer. I’m like, freaked out because nothing like this ever happened to me. John goes “Are you OK?” and I’m like “Yeah, I think so,” but it turns out I’m not OK because it really affects you, you know? You dream about it, you wake up in a cold sweat, you relive the incident. John’s totally OK, but I’m like freaked out, you know?
Unfortunately, most of the English-speaking world can understand the preceding dribble, for it is all too common. We have become accustomed to that particular form of rape of the King’s English because it is everywhere. It has even infiltrated the minds and tongues of news anchors who we let access our lives constantly, having possibly the greatest influence on its perpetuation. Try as I might, I can’t get away from the verbal carnage. There is no escape. Last night at a restaurant the waiter said, “Do you want, like, the salad first?” I wanted to ask him what was like the salad.
I threw the misuse of the word “like” into this particular scramble only for flavoring, and beginning the first sentence with “so” is rich fodder for a future rant, but not here. I mainly want to pick on three forms of speaking that, as I have observed, tend to reflect on and reveal a certain trend of attitude today. First, the tendency toward speaking in the present tense. It matters not that the event happened yesterday or a decade past, actions are related as though one were witnessing a live event. All tales need some form of reference to time and place. The time frame of the above story is revealed as two years ago, but the reader is immediately yanked back to the present by what follows. If this perspective of the past continues to the point where it becomes an accepted manner of speaking, it will call for the identification of a new tense: the Present-Past, as I have named it. At first glance it will be indistinguishable from the present tense, without the requisite setup. Had the Present-Past been in use in Abe Lincoln’s day, children would now be memorizing “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers bring forth…” and the nursery rhyme of choice would be “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse runs up the clock….”
On one hand this perspective creates a living history. Thomas Jefferson signs the Declaration of Independence, Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, and Neil Armstrong takes one small step for mankind. Every person who ever lived is still walking, talking, and doing. It’s as though a trillion videos were constantly playing, all accessible from one remote control. In 216 BC, Hannibal crosses the Alps and invades Italy (click) in 1611 AD King James authorizes a new Bible (click) Presidents Kennedy and (click) Lincoln, (click) Mahatma Ghandi, (click) Julius Caesar, (click) Joan of Arc, and (click) Aristotle — not to mention the innocent victims of Hiroshima, Kosovo, and Zaire (click-click-click) — all concurrently meet their fate in an ever-present conflagration of bombs, bullets, machetes, knives, poison, and fire. Martin Luther King goes to the mountain top while Einstein reveals the Theory of Relativity. The first telephone comes to life, the Hindenburg explodes, and the good citizens of Pisa are still observing a new tower being built.
Television news programs keep events alive by rebroadcasting the same four-o’clock coverage at five, six, nine, and eleven. We are inundated with endless repetitions of sound- and sight-bites for days and weeks on end. For example, how many times did we have to see the Twin Towers come down? That sort of over-saturation perpetuated the event, maintaining its “present tenseness.” This constant window of the world causes us to think only in the “now.” It is also possibly a carry-over from the 60’s “live for today” attitude. By living only in the present we discount the past by regarding it as some continuing, ever-present video game.
One of my favorite tools of learning history is the time line, by which one can observe at any given date the developments in politics, religion, science, inventions, and the arts. I credit my mother for this interest, she having made her own time line while studying Art History. I find it utterly fascinating to realize that the husband-king of three Catherine’s, two Anne’s, and a Jane governed England during the time of Michelangelo, the construction of St. Peter’s in Rome, the invention of the spinning wheel, and Spain’s acquisition of Cuba, Mexico, and Peru. Henry VIII’s lifetime also observed the accomplishments of El Greco, Titian, William Byrd, Paracelsus, Copernicus, and two Johns: Calvin and Knox. How can anyone not marvel at the fact that while James Cook sailed into Botany Bay in Australia, William Wordsworth and Ludwig von Beethoven were born, painters François Boucher and Giovanni Battista died, and the American colonies witnessed the Boston Massacre? Keeping people and events in their proper time and place in history expands our myopic perspective, preserves and maintains our heritage, as well as fortifying the impact of our ancestry. By squashing everything into the present, we cheapen the richness of chronology and lose the significance of sequence. We deny the vast breadth of humanity which has lived and died to bring us to where we are today.
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The second aberration of speaking is the substitution of the verb “to go” for the verb “to say” (John goes “Look out!”). Almost every English-speaking person on the planet, me included, is guilty to some degree of this solecism. While the youth of America take this mangling of the language to a new art form, the average citizen will find that saying “The horn goes beep” and “The duck goes quack” to be perfectly natural. The horn and the duck are not going anywhere, however we have spoken thusly for so long that it seems as though anything — including inanimate objects — has complete power of movement. Even humans sitting in a car can go (don’t forget that John went “Look out!”).
The solution would be to eliminate the word “goes” and simply say “The horn beeps” and “The duck quacks.” However, in this day and age people are always on the move. It’s the present, remember? We can’t sit still with everything happening all at once around us. We are compelled to always be on the go: in and out of movie theaters, video arcades, sporting events, restaurants, and dating bars. We constantly need entertainment. Reading a book cannot even begin to satisfy our visceral appetites, whose thirst for push-the-envelope, mind-numbing action can only be quenched by the latest special-effects technology.
Even seated in a chair one is going. I heard a woman say “I just sat there and went, ‘I’m going to the Mall.’” Not only did she say she went while she was seated, she “went I’m going.” How much further can the English language decompose? Every time someone opens his mouth I can smell the stench of a rotting corpse. Speaking has become a form of verbal tooth decay. Rigor mortis will soon set in. Language development will come to a complete stop, eventually atrophying to a Cro-Magnon system of grunts and nods. Perhaps we need that regression to slow us down again, to take us back to “square one,” and allow the rebuilding of a new and improved language. If the entire computer industry is based on zeros and ones, why can’t we do as much with a binary system of nodding and shaking our heads?
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The third order of business is the concept of self. How many times have people used the pronoun “you” when speaking of themselves? In the scenario that begins this diatribe, the “I” character says, “… I wasn’t OK because it really affects you …” when in fact he meant himself. Whenever people get around to expressing their emotions or feelings in situations that happened to them, they step outside the story and revert to the less personal “you.” Imagine a coal miner, rescued after being trapped at the bottom of a collapsed mine shaft for a week. The very moment that rescuers finally bring him up into daylight, news reporters jam their microphones in his face and ask, “How was it down there?” The names and circumstances are many and varied, but usually the nature of the answer is, “It was terrible! You can’t imagine how cold it was. You’re freezing, hungry, exhausted, and you’re too weak to move. You almost give up after awhile. You think this is the end,” — at which point I wish I could interrupt and say “Look, I wasn’t down there, you were! How did you feel?” “Well, the shaft was unsteady. You constantly worry about….” I probably would have pushed him back down the hole.
How do you feel, people? Don’t tell me how you think I feel! I wasn’t there! That’s why I was asking you! Listen closely to people interviewed on television. Invariably they will slip into the “you” pronoun when getting too close to themselves. It’s another part of our system of walls. Either we can’t connect with how we really feel or we won’t do so for fear that it would reveal a vulnerability. From another point of view, it could be that no one is willing to be accountable for anything. Everything is completely impersonal: someone else did it!
I heard a lottery winner, when asked how she felt, say, “You wouldn’t believe it! You can’t sleep at night, you wonder what you’re going to do with all that money!” For a minute it sounded as though the interviewer was the lucky winner. Even in the face of enormous fortune, she disallowed entrance into that inner sanctum called “self” and spoke of her winnings in the second-person.
We need to stand up and lay claim to our thoughts, emotions, and actions. The buck does not get passed in a thriving relationship. “I love you,” “I need you,” “You hurt me,” “I am sorry,” and “It was my fault” are bold, self-assured statements in a healthy marriage that progresses from strong to stronger. If a husband and wife are accountable for each of their individual mistakes, the couple can work together to rectify them. There is enormous power and respect gained in accountability. While working as Supervising Copyist at Universal Studios, on a scoring session for a certain film, I missed the fact that the second woodwind player was supposed to bring a tenor sax. Part of my job was to analyze all the scores and send a list of the instrument doublings to the music contractor so that each musician can be told what instruments to bring. My own boss urged me to put the blame on another department, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I owned that screw-up, and no one was going to take it away from me. I called the sound stage and advised that since I neglected to tell the second woodwind player about the tenor sax, he should switch parts with the first woodwind player who, by the way, did have his tenor sax with him. Case closed. It was my mistake, and I was responsible for fixing it. Imagine if, early on, a certain president had said, “I had an improper sexual relationship with an intern. I am sorry. I apologize to my family and to the country. Let’s now move on to the business of running this great country.” Unfortunately, he continued to spin webs of verbal gyrations around the truth, arguing the obvious, and painting white lies of many colors to avoid his deepest fears.
If we weren’t so blinded by our New Age spinelessness we could see that there is strength in accountability. By acknowledging that “Yes, the buck does stop here,” we could stand straighter and feel the power of admitting when one is wrong. How low can things get when Dan White was given only a minimum jail sentence for killing San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk? In his defense, White claimed he been influenced by an above-normal blood-sugar level from the Twinkies that he had eaten. Or President Reagan answering most questions at the Iran-Contra hearings with “I don’t recall.” Or Clinton, when asked if he understood the legal definition of sexual relations, reminded me of a panicked man on ice skates desperately trying not to fall down, by saying “My understanding — let me go back a bit. My understanding — I’ll tell you what it did include. My understanding was….” It’s my understanding that mankind’s tendency (with the emphasis on man) to transfer the blame and hide behind deceit goes all the way back to Adam pointing to Eve and saying to God, “She made me do it!” We’ve been trying to pass the buck ever since. Harry Truman’s administration tried to stop it momentarily, but it leaped over the Potomac and runs rampantly throughout our society today.
The way we speak reflects our unaccountability, our inability to stand still for anything, and our fragile and limited vision of ourselves: poor souls walking around wearing blinders. We are alone, stranded in the present, with each moment of our existence completely and forever replacing the last. We have no yesterday, and tomorrow doesn’t exist because we are too busy living, eating, speaking, working, and buying for today.
Allow me to propose a humble solution. I most heartily recommend a thorough study of world history accompanied by extensive genealogical research. Besides the fact that each of those endeavors alone will slow down the pace of one’s life, they collectively will re-orient one’s sense of place in time and underline the significance of who, why, and where humanity is today. By identifying our roots and discovering whence we came we can proceed into the future with heads held high, proud of our heritage and assured of our destiny. Then perhaps we will realize that accepting our mistakes and failures is not so bad after all.
