Posted on 05/13/2002 10:09:44 PM PDT by mikeb704
Last month a reader took offense at a gentle, balanced, well-reasoned column I wrote about Boy Clinton. So that person rightly responded with a letter to the editor.
The reader had reviewed my "latest tirade" against The Impeached One "with disgust" and asked the editor if he’s running "a fascist newspaper" and if he "encourage(s) idiots to write such hate-filled garbage." Oh, and by the way, "Such feelings prompted September 11, 2001" and blah, blah, blah. Next time, could we strive for just a modicum of originality, please? Really, that’s not asking too much.
Amply proving that the writer’s daring is as great as his/her insight, the letter wasn’t signed by name, but by "A concerned resident of Oak Lawn." Yep, a real profile in courage. What did the writer fear, that I’d go over to his/her house and toss stained blue dresses from the Gap at him/her?
I don’t mind criticism at all, even, as in this case, from the agonizingly feeble-minded. If one can’t take disparagement, he shouldn’t be dishing it out. I’m a big boy – boy, am I ever big – and I can take it. Especially if my blankee is handy.
What I particularly liked about the letter, though, was the part in which the reader claimed to have met me a few years ago. And, "I thought he was a stuffed shirt then."
Stuffed shirt. How charmingly antiquated. I haven’t seen the term used in a very long time. Perhaps I do come across as a stuffed shirt. I’ve never been able to affect an immediate intimacy with someone I just met. I leave phony familiarity to others. I make an effort to not have an imbecilic smile plastered on my face. Sometimes, anyway. When running for office, which is probably when this person saw me, I never promised voters someone else’s money. Disingenuousness isn’t a strong suit.
So, yeah, maybe I am a stuffed shirt. I would have preferred it, however, if the courageous concerned resident had used another out of date expression and called me an "unmitigated cad." That would have placed me in the same class as the late actor George Sanders.
Mr. Sanders played in many movies, usually as the heavy and often as a pompous, urbane, extraordinarily malevolent man. In these roles, he didn’t actually like women, but had no difficulty in using them. In his 1960 autobiography, "Memoirs of a Professional Cad," he displayed a realism that’s rare in Hollywood. Consider these gems:
"If I have occasionally given brilliant performances on the screen, this was entirely due to circumstances beyond my control."
"For a long time I was considered the ideal actor to play sneering, arrogant, bull-necked Nazi brutes. Nobody, it seemed, could enunciate the word Schweinehund, which constituted a large part of the dialogue in such films, quite as feelingly as I."
"I had had since the beginning a profound sense of unreality about my newly acquired profession which the atmosphere of Hollywood did nothing to dispel. I never really thought I would make the grade. And let’s face it, I haven’t."
I found that I share Sanders’ affinity for idleness. Life has habitually been a struggle between lethargy and me, with lethargy often winning. Sanders’ wrote: "Perhaps my curious indifference to success will be more understandable if I explain that the driving force of my life has always been laziness; to practice this, in reasonable comfort, I have even been prepared, from time to time, to work."
George also attended to the subject of taxes: "I sometimes wonder if it’s worthwhile trying to get on top if all one’s savings are going to be taken away by the government. High taxation is nothing more or less than a practical application of the communist theory. Everyone gets leveled out."
Sanders went through four wives (two of them being Zsa Zsa and Magda Gabor), numerous psychiatrists, and lots of money. Leaving a suicide note saying he was bored, he dispatched himself with booze and pills. Quite clearly, he wasn’t a role model, but George Sanders still appears to have had some common sense, a singular commodity in the movie business.
I intend to emulate him in at least one respect and practice enunciating – and spelling - Schweinehund. I have the feeling it will come in handy the next time we hear from a concerned resident of Oak Lawn.
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