Admissions

Closing yesterday’s “Hockey Central” broadcast on Toronto radio, host Jeff Marek stated, “My preseason predictions: I should be fired.”

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I'm a glum one

It's explainable

I met someone

Unattainable

Life's a bore

The world is my oyster no more

All the papers

Where I led the news

With my capers

Now will spread the news

"Superman

Turns Out to Be Flash in the Pan!”

Vernon Duke/Ira Gershwin, “I Can’t Get Started”

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“When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past,” I find that almost all those remembrances are negative: mistakes, errors, assumptions jumped to, enthusiasms uncurbed, passive aggressions, insults received and delivered, and on and on. I look in the mirror and proclaim: “You big dummy!”

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How could you believe me when I said I love you

When you know I've been a liar all my life

Burton Lane/Alan Jay Lerner

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Without a doubt the most astonishing admission of the past week was delivered by Sidney Powell, a lawyer in the forefront of efforts to negate the results of the election for president of the United States, in order to keep Donald Trump in that office. She asserted in her work for Trump that she would “release the Kraken,” supposedly killer evidence of illegal behavior and fraud in the voting and the counting of ballots. Among her numerous outrageous claims,* aspersions against the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems have led to a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against her.

Now, in the shadow of Dominion’s lawsuit, Powell’s lawyers released an alleged defense of her many claims about fraud and other misdeeds—asserting that “[n]o reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.”** 

The mind boggles.

You go on television, you hold press conferences, and, most importantly, you argue before courts of law—and now you try to get off the hook by claiming that all of your “evidence,” your “truths,” were complete bullshit, and on that basis you should be let off the hook for the damage that you have done. After all, you claim, reasonable people weren’t going to buy what you were selling. And what of all the unreasonable people. . . ?

I have to lie down. 

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*  Too numerous to list here. Wikipedia has a compilation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Powell

**  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/23/sidney-powell-trump-election-fraud-claims

Rain

"For the rain it raineth every day."

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

I don’t exactly wear out my television set. Except for NHL hockey games and English Premier League football, practically the only time I turn the set on is to watch Hockey Central, a Sportsnet Canada talk show broadcast in the US on the NHL Network. One of the hosts of the show, Jeff Marek, likes to proclaim that “the good is the enemy of the great.”*

Now, Marek is not wrong; when one is content with what is good enough, one stops striving for what is the best or ultimate or ideal or perfect.

But the reverse is also true; the great is the enemy of the good. Here is a letter of mine that was published in Science News (July24, 1999): 

Better early than never

I have two comments to add to the fine article about making decisions based upon less-than-total knowledge, "Simple minds, smart choices" (SN: 5/29/99, p. 348). It quite aptly starts off citing former big leaguer and current baseball analyst Tim McCarver on the need to go with one's first instinct. I wish to add McCarver's famous dictum: "Think long, think wrong."

The second comment I would like to cite is an old military adage about making choices under pressure and time constraints: "A good plan now is better than a perfect plan later."

Harold Gotthelf Jersey City, N.J.

Think about being part of a military unit trapped by your enemy. You are going to try to formulate a plan of escape. After considering the alternatives, are you willing to reject a good plan in hope that the perfect plan will fall into place later? You might be wiped out before that opportunity arises. 

Gregers Werle in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck makes it his life’s mission to advocate for “the claim of the ideal.” In doing so, he destroys the satisfactory middling life of the bumbling Hialmar Ekdal, and, more importantly, causes the death of his daughter. 

Beware of the peddlers of the Ideal. They may just be selling death.

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Annie may sing that 

The sun'll come out

Tomorrow.

But Annie is a child. Adults know that life is filled with obstacles and compromises, and that even by exerting all one’s effort in an attempt to achieve greatness one will not reach the ideal or the perfect. 

Thus adults sing,

Well, the sun went down

And tomorrow brought us rain.

(Count Basie & Jimmy Rushing)

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Jeff Marek also often quotes John Maynard Keynes:

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

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Grab the good when it comes. 

For another Keynes saying is:

In the long run we are all dead.

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* I know that I discussed this in an earlier blog, but for the life of me, I can’t locate it.