Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2001-12-29- 9:46 p.m.

So Where The Hell Have You Been?

This holiday season, there has really only been one question on all of your minds, and I know what it is…
Where the hell have I been?
Yep, there I was, updating every day, rain or shine, and then just as the holidays struck and y’all were forced to spend time with your families until you just had to run upstairs and check to see if I’d posted a little something that could help dull the pain, I up and abandoned you. And let you in on the sad, sad truth.
I’m a thankless bastard. Well, that, or I’m an idiot who went down to D.C. to see his brother for the week and forgot to bring the power cord to my laptop. I’ll let you make up your minds as to which one of those two statements is true. Not that they are mutually exclusive or anything.
And what does this mean to you, my two dear and beloved fans out there? Well, not much, except that you’ve missed out on days worth of updates detailing my most recent adventures in our nation’s capital. Luckily, not much happened while I was there, except for lots of sex, drunkenness, and family dysfunction.
Which I know isn’t the sort of stuff that interests you anyways.
I’ve been thinking about some way to spruce this journal up somehow, to offer that little something extra. I also want it to be a source of some profound vision, like a really good fortune cookie. In short, I’m looking to find my own way of aping Anna Beth’s Lin Chao. So, after much soul-searching, brainstorming, product testing and an exhaustive focus group process conducted by J. Walter Thompson, Inc., I can now present the first ever installment of The Collected Wisdom of Man, As Documented in Public Men’s Rooms. So here is this week’s pearl:
P.S.U. Sucks
A close runner-up was “Bob sux cocks”, but I feel that the essential suckiness of Penn State put our victor in the winner’s circle. Because, one thing that every schoolchild knows is that Penn State sucks. I mean, what in the hell is a Nittany Lion anyways?
Stay tuned folks, because there is truly no end to the brilliant musings of the male gender when stenciled onto the wall above a urinal. And I pledge to be intrepid in my quest to find and record these pearls of wisdom.
Remember this people. I’m the man who is willing to go to the can for you.
Before I left Washington this afternoon, I had a conversation with my Grandmother that enlightened me about my family history. What I learned was that in the 1950s, my grandfather was not only investigated, but actually tried for anti-American activities under the Internal Security Act of 1950.
Now, none of you were so fortunate to know my grandfather. He was a gem of a man, and he is the model of manhood that I aspire to be. But more to the point, he was truly a super-patriot. He entered military service in 1938, and worked in national defense up to two weeks before he died. Seriously. I can remember him on conference calls to the Pentagon from his deathbed in a Buffalo hospital.
My grandfather had grown up poor in the Bronx, and attended City College here in the City. The entire reason for his prosecution was that two years before he attended City College, another student by the same name had once been a member of the American Communist Party. In the end, my grandfather was forced to retain the services of one of Chicago’s most expensive civil liberties lawyers (a daunting task for a father of two surviving on the salary of a low-ranking officer in the US Army) simply to be acquitted from an accusation towards a completely different person. After his acquittal, my grandfather chose to leave military service, scant years before he would have earned his full pension for twenty years.
Watching my grandmother talk about this now, nearly a half-century after these events occurred, was overwhelming. She could barely speak of it, and eventually broke down into tears. It must be hideous, I thought, to have one’s life nearly ruined for something that they never even considered doing.
Which seems of course to be quite applicable to what is going on in this country now. As much as anyone, I appreciate the situation our nation is in right now. But I despair that one day, what our government is doing right now to Muslims will one day be remembered like this, and that one day we will speak the name of John Ashcroft in the same breath as that of Roy Cohn or Joe McCarthy. How many innocent people are we willing to hold, in violation of their rights to due process, in the name of “saving lives”? Are we all so arrogant to forget the lessons of such actions in the past?
I can’t help but to think of someone not yet born visiting their grandmother in 2050, and having to see the tears in her eyes at the memories of events long past. I feel for that person, because I learned today how awful it feels to see someone’s lingering pain and be unable to say or do anything that will comfort. I like to think that we’re all learning things, not just from our present but from our past. And I remember something said a long time ago, that I would like to paraphrase now.
At long last, do we have no shame?

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If you want to make me
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jelias@diaryland.com

Older

Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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