The Last WORD, 2008-2009

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The Fat Lady Sings, Off-Key, Drools

At about this time every year, like the swallows to Capistrano or the buzzards to Hinckley, Ohio, the WORD migrates to its summer musing grounds at the sanitarium—St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose.*

The reason is clear, and never moreso than as this season—the WORD’s 13th—peters out.

It’s been a fraught year of high palaver and eye-popping transition, both good and not-so-much. An interminable presidential campaign saga finally did end, and in extraordinary and historic fashion. Meanwhile, the bottom and everything that’s below the bottom fell out of the economy, with families, homes, entire industries and—of particular interest to WORDsters and the civic-minded—dozens of daily newspapers (“I don't so much mind that newspapers are dying—it’s watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.”—Molly Ivins). . . all evaporating. What replaces them, from the individual to the institutional to the societal? Are we looking at a future of in-depth Tweeting?

As any newsperson or firehorse knows, it’s hard to turn your back on day-to-day catastrophe—we just have to look at the car wreck. But even the most deranged and driven need a rest. As philosopher Lilly Tomlin once observed, “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”

So this morning, as a near-frost hovered over northern Utah, the unmarked van pulled into the driveway and the gentle, soft-spoken men in the white coats rolled the WORD out of bed and into a straitjacket for the usual summer trip to St. Mumbles, where the blathering one will be assigned a hammock and fed soothing, healthy foods—like tapioca and salmon—while recharging the essential muscles of cynicism, outrage, sarcasm, social engagement and high-mindedness, in preparation for the next edition.

This seasonal navel-gazing is essential to the process, of course. As deep-thinker John Alston once observed, “If you don’t control your mind, someone else will.” And since the WORD’s fondest hope is to control and corrupt the impressionable and fragile minds of its faithful subscribers worldwide, preparation and planning are required. Because as seamless and easy as it seems, “Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for,” as Jacques Barzun said—harassing an unsuspecting planet 170+ mornings a year takes forethought. Well, it takes something....

Because the WORD’s dearest hope is not, in John Kenneth Galbraith’s terms, to offer “[t]he conventional view [that] serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking,” in fact, the WORD was born and designed to cultivate cerebral discomfort. It is too easy and much too tempting to tune out all the noise that assails us these days (what was Hannity blathering about the other day? —“Apples of Liberty” being plucked by Obama into the “Crate of Socialism“?—who wouldn’t need to tune that crap out?). But there’s no easy out for devoted WORDsters: “There are two ways to slide easily through life,” Polish logician Alfred Korzybski wrote, “to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.”

As the WORD recharges its soapbox for the summer, devoted WORDsters know that it’ll be back in August. To paraphrase the late-lamented Molly Ivins, “There’s nothing you can do about being born a WORDster—fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed.”

So as the WORD trundles off to its halcyon summer of reflection and conjugation at St. Mumbles, we wish you all, devoted whacko readers, a safe, warm, pleasant and productive summer—with generous hammock time. “Be who you are and say what you feel,” as Dr. Seuss instructed, “because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don't mind.”

But Season 13, like all good things, must come to a —30—. As Karl Marx, the famous philosopher-comic, said, “Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.” So this isn't a Last WORD—Lord knows there are always more!—but just the end of this episode. Look for the WORD’s escape from St. Mumbles in August, once again to afflict, merrily, gaily, happily, an unsuspecting world

Summer well, friends.

* (See early column on the Birth of the WORD.)

Editorial Comment: That’s a wrap.
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