When I am listening to the radio and one of those alleged “songs” consisting of perhaps five words harshly repeated seemingly without end comes over the airwaves, I am reminded of the immortal words of an optimistic friend upon being subjected to such torture. “Well, you can say one thing for it — it sure didn’t take long to write,” he said of the high-decibel caterwauling.
Aware that a similar critique may apply to my 2010 Christmas gift wish list for humanity, I nevertheless plow on as an unwritten obligation to produce such seasonal boilerplate kicks in. Were I the Christmas czar, gifts under the public tree next Saturday would include some old chestnuts pulled from the roasting fires of Christmases past.
A swell stocking-stuffer for Mainers come Christmas morn would be the correct pronunciation of certain place names by rip-and-read radio and television reporters who betray their non-native roots much as I might were I in New Orleans and trying to get the hang of the local “Naw-leens” articulation for that great city.
“Woolwich” seems to trip up some announcers. And “Bangor,” of course. When I hear a talking head on radio or television mangle the likes of “Piscataquis” or “Sagadahoc,” I am every bit as grateful as he must be that the script does not also include mention of the Passagassawakeag River that empties into Belfast Harbor.
A related gift would be having the Federal Communications Commission summarily yank a station’s license should an announcer refer to an old person as a young person, as in “the lady is 89 years young” — as though the act of uttering such an absurdity might fundamentally transform the octogenarian into a Roaring Twenties pinup girl.
These are the same politically correct reformers who long ago browbeat a large segment of the population into calling a chairman a “chair,” saddled some jurisdictions with “selectpeople” for “selectmen,” and, in the military establishment, have taken to referring to coffins as “transfer cases.”
Another swell present for humanity would be a law mandating the immediate arrest and incarceration of those sorry exhibitionists you often see in the background maneuvering to get into the picture as a television reporter gives a standup report from some city sidewalk.
Ditto, their cousins who sit behind home plate at big league baseball games, cell phone glued to their ear as they wave madly to their mistress in Hoboken. Nine innings of that can get a bit tedious for viewers. Psychiatrists can no doubt explain this human compulsion to make a fool of oneself by publicly mugging for the cameras, but I sure can’t.
An offering that might be cherished by former ink-stained wretches in the newspaper business would be a promise by editors to run more stories about periodic attempts in Washington to eradicate secrecy in government. Stories that contain nuggets of comic relief such as I recently rediscovered in a 1993 newspaper clipping describing the declassification of millions of government documents might lighten the load in these grim times. “The predicate here is greater openness,” the wire story reported, quoting “a White House official who asked not to be identified.”
A Christmas gift that stands no chance of having the fat guy in the red suit deliver would be a promise from political leaders to simply be truthful with taxpayers in matters of hiring and firing of staff on the public payroll. It is not uncommon to watch someone in a high public office profess surprise and extreme sadness that a key adviser or aide has suddenly resigned “for personal reasons,” only to learn later that the reason the boss had been so despondent was because he hadn’t figured out a way to ditch the deadbeat three months earlier.
On the other hand, perhaps the better Christmas present in this age of increasingly sophisticated technology would be that the politicians continue to forget that their public utterances are likely preserved for posterity on videotape in some archive, somewhere.
Of such forgetfulness are great “gotcha” moments made. When a politician vehemently professes not to have changed his position on an issue, only to have network television haul out an old tape showing him making a rousing speech in support of the opposing view, it’s always a crowd pleaser.
May your politically incorrect Christmas be merry.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.com.