Clueless

I confess that I am clueless. Not about everything, of course, but a great many things. Editing Merriam-Webster, I can come up with the definition most applicable to my situation: “completely or hopelessly bewildered…or foolish.” I have deleted “unaware” and “ignorant” because I’ll deal with those equally applicable adjectives in a subsequent post, and really, “bewildered” and “foolish” suit me to a T.

I suppose I’ve always been bewildered or foolish, sometimes completely and, even on a good day, substantially. It took me longer than you would suppose to catch on to the law of gravity. Jumping off a shed roof at the age of four was instructive. And possibly contributed to my fear of heights. I was clueless about personal grooming. I thought my dad was a movie-star-handsome man mostly because he always had perfectly combed and parted, thick hair and that feature overshadowed his big nose and double chin. I tried to emulate his hair style but no matter how much greasy kid’s stuff I plastered onto to my thin hair, I always looked more like Alfalfa than Cary Grant. (For those too young to have a clue about Alfalfa, substitute Dagwood Bumstead. For those too young to have a clue about Cary Grant, I give up.)

I was naturally clueless about politics in grade school, but quickly learned to avoid beatings by playground bullies in 1952, by telling would-be torturers that I was in favor of Adwight Stevenhower. That was the extent of my political education until college. When I entered my teens and my doctor told me that milk shakes and ice cream were contributors to my blossoming pimples, I was skeptical. In my clueless world view nothing as good as a milk shake could result in anything so bad as pimples. Although athletic, I was clueless about sports. I became a fan of the St. Louis Hawks basketball team and, studied all the players and memorized their vital statistics. Familiarity bred clueless overconfidence. I foolishly thought they would win every game, every title. I was certainly bewildered when they lost. After they abandoned the city, I transferred my clueless allegiance to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. By then I was more mature and wiser, somewhat, and did not expect them to win every game but believed that they would always win that day’s game. Like most devoted fans, I cluelessly thought, as an act of faith, that I could affect the play, help them win.

After puberty, I searched long and hard, but found few clues about sex, certainly not enough to overcome my innocence. If ignorance about sex is innocence, then, like the Ivory Soap ads of those days, I was ninety-nine and forty-four one hundred percent pure. All sexual innuendo in pop music and jazz were too many for me. I was a literalist. When J. Cash sang that he was “gonna open up your gate” I pictured him opening a white picket garden gate. I was clueless about sex into my 30’s. Well, I might as well confess: I was clueless well into my 70’s. But never so clueless as to qualify for membership in INCEL. I feel certain that had I applied, INCEL’s Master Celibates would have blackballed me because, contrary to their prime directive, I blamed my cluelessness for my problems.  

I was certainly clueless as to what I wanted to do with my life. But I hope to get a clue one of these days soon.

I was raised in the Midwestern state of Missouri. I lived in St. Louis, the state’s largest metropolitan district. I was clueless as to how the rest of the state felt about life, race, politics, foreign policy, the cold war, etc., until I lived in a college town in the center of the state. I began to realize that Missouri had been a slave state, and, like most slave states, was still fighting the Civil War, like most losers, still fantasizing about a time when they were winners. Football was big time at the U of MO and the stadium was always full. I was charmed by the cheering, the music, the autumn weather, by being a part of the crowd, more than by the game. My third year, the U recruited, along with the usual hulking football suspects, a skinny black kid who was the nation’s best baton twirler. I had no clue about universities recruiting baton twirlers, but this kid got a full scholarship. I ate in the same cafeteria as the baton twirler and got to know him a little. He was a nice kid, but I was somewhat prejudiced and didn’t hang out with him outside the cafeteria, after all, I was a junior and he was a mere freshman. He could toss his twirling, silver baton to impossible heights, higher than the uppermost seats in the stadium. Four or five stories high it spun and spiraled and glittered in the autumn sun, and then plummeted to earth, twirling and whirling and accelerating, until Warren caught it with one hand reaching under his right leg, without missing a beat. He never failed to wow the crowd when he strutted onto the field at half-time, leading the marching band that played Dixie. I, at least, was deaf and blind to the irony. Warren was banned from a competition in some little town in rural Missouri because of race riot fears.

I slowly, all too slowly, began to have a few clues. I even suspected that the thrill Fats found on Blueberry Hill was something more than a bush full of ripe berries

Were cluelessness a crime, these instances would be mere misdemeanors. My felonies were in the department of politics. As far as politics and politicians go, if there were a National Clueless League, unlike the Hawks and Cardinals, I would be the undefeated champion every year. In p and p, I have reached the pinnacle of cluelessness. For instance, I have a long record of picking losers in Presidential elections. After my shrewd choice of A. Stevenhower, I avoided politics until 1964 when I voted in my first presidential election. I went for LBJ because somehow I had decided I was a democrat. I don’t know how or why. My family always got the Sunday Post-Dispatch. As a kid, I read only the funnies and later graduated to the big words in the sports pages. I don’t remember reading editorials or important news articles. On TV I was exposed to an unending series of white male newscasters and talking heads, including network heroes E. Murrow and W. Cronkite. I don’t know why, but I assumed that they were Democrats. I had taken a beginning course in government at the U and, thinking back, the prof was clearly a democrat. He adopted a cynical and sarcastic persona that appealed. After all, we were in the Show-Me state, in those days a solidly Democratic state. After all, Lincoln was a Republican. LBJ won and I was gratified to be on the winning side. It confirmed my quarter-baked world views.

I was out of the country, all expenses paid, for the ’68 elections. The patriotic Post-Dispatch sent me their paper free of charge, which sometimes arrived only a week late. I knew it was a well-regarded newspaper, but still only read the sports pages and the funnies. Well, I scanned the headlines and read any articles about Vietnam. I knew Nixon claimed to have a secret plan to end the war. I had adopted my old prof’s persona and was skeptical as well as clueless and thought Tricky Dick had as much chance of getting elected as I did of finding a snowball outside my hooch in the morning. In ’72, I was certain that TD would get re-elected, but clueless as to how so many people could believe him and his light-at-the-end of the tunnel nonsense. I was clueless as to how TD’s “silent majority” could blame the students for the massacre at Kent State. I was clueless as to how the secret bombing of Cambodia was kept secret from the people being bombed. I no longer lived in Missouri, but I was still a Democrat and voted for McGovern despite his cluelessness in the Eagleton affair, the Missouri Senator he backed for Vice President 100% until he didn’t.

The more I read and learned, the more clues I gathered, the more I disliked both major parties which were busily engaged in swapping sides on the race issue in the 60’s and 70’s. I drifted into various cult parties. Perhaps it’s a characteristic of cluelessness, but I’ve always favored underdogs and candidates with a snowball’s chance on a sunny Vietnamese day of winning. I voted for Fred Harris in the ’76 Demo primary and Independent E. McCarthy in the Pres elections. In 1980, my cluelessness kicked into overdrive. I was certain that the American people would not elect a third-rate actor like Reagan, although I was not clueless as to Carter’s shortcomings. One early poll confirmed my certainty. A few days before the election, I was in a truck heading to the Mendocino with three friends who had also sent in their absentee ballots. Our exit poll showed four votes for the Citizen’s Party candidate, B. Commoner. With that commanding lead, I didn’t see how a man whose principal qualification was a starring role in Bedtime for Bonzo could be our next President. Never having seen the movie, I believed that Bonzo was a chimp and Reagan a buffoon. I was stunned when I learned how clueless I was about the American preference for buffoons.

Note: although never a fan of the sanctimonious J. Carter, I will confess that he has won my vote for the best ex-president in our history (not a high bar), and I’m willing to bet the ranch that he is not likely to lose his crown to D. Trump.

After the Citizen’s Party I went, at the urging of friends, to a Green Party meeting. I was put off by the number of NIMBYs and xenophobes and the uniform whiteness of the room, but, as they had the same chance as your typical Vietnamese snowball, I stuck with them.

In 2016, a fifth rate-television character took the ratings crown from Reagan and ran for President. Never having seen his TV show, I was clueless as to what it was about other than a chance to humiliate people eager for humiliation. Once again I was certain that the American people would not elect a buffoon. I broke my rule and voted for the candidate of a major party, not because I approved of her so much as because I believe in affirmative action, another losing issue, and thought it was time to sweep the Y chromosomes from the White House with the biggest broom possible. Well, I did think she would be a better President than her husband, as would most first ladies. The white ones anyway. (As I wrote in my confession to being a racist, I am prejudiced against old white men.) I was certain H. Clinton would win in a landslide, and I wanted her to get many millions more votes than her sixth-rate opponent. Speaking of her seventh-rate opponent, I almost didn’t vote for H.C. because she caved under pressure: She retracted her statement that half of Trump’s supporters were deplorables, that they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic.” Well, she retracted the “half” part. Giving her a break, I decided she was merely bad at fractions, and the correct answer, “eleven twelfths,” was beyond her grasp.  

Note: I am cluelessly conflicted about who’s a deplorable and who isn’t. Being a lower class kid myself, I have some sympathy for the lower class deplorables, as well as few illusions. They might do deplorable things, like the coup attempt at the Capitol, but at the same time they are victims, victims of an unjust class system, victims of propaganda from the upper class. But at the same time once again, they are responsible for their actions. And they seem to be nearly all white males, just like the playground bullies who hit me when I said “I like Ike” or “Adlai”, only bigger and meaner. I suffer from no clueless conflict about the deplorableness of the affluent class that exploits them.

I am clueless as far as understanding what seems to me to be hereditary party loyalty. I took some physiology classes at my first U but must have dozed off during the Cell Phys lecture on the party loyalty gene. I don’t think it was a case of the lecture being beyond my grasp, although many lectures were. Perhaps I was busily trying to grasp what E. Waters had in mind when she sang: “He shakes my ashes, greases my griddle, Churns my butter, strokes my fiddle.” When I first heard that song I imagined some nice guy preparing to make pancakes by melting some butter on a griddle. I got so hungry that I forgot about the ashes and fiddle parts. In any case, I slowly came to realize that there must be a party loyalty gene. There is no other logical explanation for much of American politics.

A big clue was the case of the GA Sec of State who defended the fairness of the Pres vote count in GA and even went so far as to rebuff the Pres himself in a one-hour phone call in which the Pres asked him to somehow find 11,800 votes. The Pres must have known it was taped, but felt safe enough to cajole, flatter, and threaten the Sec. Because of the rebuff, the honorable Sec was vilified and threatened and even his family was threatened by rabid Trumpistas. The Sec of State stood steadfast on the burning deck. When asked whom he was going to vote for in the two Senatorial run-offs, he said he would vote for the very candidates who vilified him and encouraged and abetted the threateners because, obviously, the party loyalty gene trumps threats to his family and him.

My cluelessness overwhelms me when I see a talking head like the WAPO contributor I saw on PBS the other night. A 50- or 60-something white guy from somewhere in Ohio. He deplored the insurrection at the WH and was bravely critical of Trump, but mitigated his heresy by stating that he was glad that Trump had been elected in 2016 and thought he had done a lot of good up until the insurrection. I was not so clueless as to be upset with him; he’s an old white guy from Ohio where his cohorts who don’t carry the Republican loyalty gene wear Republican-colored glasses. But the interviewer? I wanted to shake her and make her ask some critical questions: What good was he talking about? Getting out of the Paris Climate Change? Taking kids from parents and putting them in cages? Trump’s great success in handling the COVID-19 pandemic that made the U.S. the world leader in deaths and cases? His non-existent health plan that covered pre-existing conditions? His successful handling of the deficit—always a biggie with the conserves—that grew by a measly four trillion before the pandemic? His insistence that all our traditional allies sit at the children’s table while dictators in N. Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Russia got to sit with the adults? His perfect telephone call to the President of the Ukraine? Did he approve of Donnie’s 25,000+ lies? The race baiting? The pandering to the white supremacists? Remember some are very fine people? The corruption in the sleaziest administration in our short history? His failure to drain the swamp but his success in polluting it? His moral integrity? Paying hush money to porn stars? Bragging that his fame gave him impunity when he grabbed women by the pussy? His rollback of environmental protections (don’t forget his pollution of the swamp)? I am truly clueless as to how this made him a good President and why the interviewer didn’t challenge this interviewee. She claimed to be a journalist. I know. I know. She wanted to appear impartial and unbiased and not hostile. I know that FAKE NEWS journalists strive to appear unbiased, as opposed to the performers on the ALTERNATIVE FACTS NETWORKS, such as Vulpine News that likes plenty of raw red meat, no matter how rotten, and whose baying-at-the-moon heads are proudly biased, as well as proudly propagandists.

I am repelled by spinners, spiders, no, but pols, yes. And when I hear a pol spin I struggle to maintain my equilibrium not unlike a fly struggling to free itself from sticky threads. The leader of the House Repubs, after saying that the Pres instigated the insurrection, reversed himself a week later and said the Pres did not instigate the insurrection and should not be impeached, but he magnanimously said he would let the Repub Congresspersons vote their conscience. Let’s think about that. I know I’m clueless, but I thought the job of Congresspersons was to vote their conscience? Are their votes normally determined by their party loyalty gene and not their consciences? By bribes? By favors? And are their consciences rusty from disuse? Voting your conscience should not be confused with the idiom about having the courage of your convictions because, as clueless as I am, I believe the spinners and enablers to be in short supply of courage while only the lower class deplorables will be convicted.

What then, is a poor, clueless person like me to think about politics and politicians? As an aid to combat indecision or overthinking, humans invented proverbs, like the one about dogs lying down with cowardly pols and coming up with fleas. I have invented a proverb of my own (some might call it an aphorism, but that doesn’t convey the religious flavor I want the way proverb does). It’s concise and cuts through the spinners’ webs: If the Nazis support you, you must be doing something wrong.

It may seem that I am picking on poor Donald.  I don’t really mean to (see my post in which I confess to being a Liar). It’s just that Donnie and I share one redeeming feature, and I am taking advantage of that feature. When I was a young boy, for reasons I was clueless to understand, my father got into the bad habit of saying that I was good for nothing. My always helpful brother tried to cheer up by telling me that Dad was wrong. He said that I could always serve as a bad example. The same can be said of poor Donald, his enablers, and minions (“coterie” is too elegant to describe them). Some say that poor Donald, after his clueless coup attempt, will go down in history as our worst President ever. The competition is stiff, from Jackson, Buchanan, the first Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan, and the quantity of clues can be overwhelming. No matter. Even if Donnie doesn’t make the grade as the worst President, he can still stand and serve…as a bad example.