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Drooling on the Pillow

Sunday, November 02, 2003

If My Friend Snubs My Cat, May I Debone Her? 

Randy Cohen's The Ethicist column in the Sunday New York Times is usually good for an extra 10 or 15 on my dystolic reading. Or course, like the Your Problems Solved column in the London Spectator, that's partly the point. And, as with Miss Manners, its not Mr. Cohen that gets the rise; its just a newspaper gig, after all, and he does it, generally, with humor and often with good sense. No, its the questions.

Today a typically fussy individual has a real poser. He has an ass**** of a brother-in-law. I say "he" though the sex is not specified. If its a woman I'll eat the want ads. It's the bad luck of this writer that the brother-in-law is dying of cancer. "We provide comfort and friendship, but must we offer cash or a place in our home? Given his unruly personality, he'd almost certainly unravel our peace and enjoyment." Well.

This guy is transparently looking for the ethical high-sign for turning his back. In fact he wants to be able to see his back-turning as an ethical act. A difficult one. A not uncomplicated one. But a sign of a developed moral imagination.

I'm going to relate this to another annoying development in the Times.

If you live in the North-East you've been seeing television ads for years and years for home delivery of the Times. It used to be annoying partly because they ran the same ad for probably ten years. A group of yuppie nit-wits talking about how reading the Times made them better than people who read the News. Smarter, cooler, hipper people with less plaque. They looked like a road show version of "Friends". Not too long ago they finally started running a new ad. Impossibly, these people were even more annoying. This ad features a family. Dad talks with his hand in his chin about how deep the Times makes him. Mom is a beautiful meat-grinder with a briefcase who has just enough time zooming out the door to say how the Times allows her to crush the competition. The daughter is a very scary 15 year old who likes that the Times keeps up with the net. I don't think she's talking about Napster.

Point is, it's Dad who wrote that letter. If Mom knows about the letter applying for license to consign her brother to the bone-yard, she's square with that. The daughter will absorb the lesson and log back in to "The Nation".

The actual point is: within the family, when "peace and enjoyment" are being defended against the "unruly" I think that "unruly" needs to be a euphemism for "bi-polar" or "sociopathic" before "responsibility" can be "qualified". I do not speak without experience.

Otherwise "peace and enjoyment" take on the values of one of those old Startrek civilizations where unpleasantness is illegal.
Posted by: Sluggo / 10:08 AM
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