Aunt Harriet

Today’s topic, campers, is incontinence. Incontinence is washing over the nation as a fallback excuse for just about everything:

The pathetic local, state and federal responses to Katrina? Incontinence was to blame. All the misdirected funds, federal apathy and local corruption had nothing at all to do with it. It was just plain incontinence at the top, so let’s fire that Brown fella and that’ll take care of it.

The reason we’re in a no–win war in Iraq? Incontinence. Sure, the intelligence agencies maybe messed up a bit, but it was just a mistake, for pity’s sake, just a little incontinence. How can we expect them to get everything right? So we’ll get rid of that incontinent Porter Goss (a name, incidentally, which would apply equally well to either the sort of beer that might ordered by an effete preppie or, as here, to the effete preppie himself.)

The other day, I was watching an MSNBC special report on rip-offs. One segment was about a heating/air-conditioning repair service that charged a customer something like $4500 for a repair that involved, basically, flipping one switch. When called on the carpet about this, the repairman—who had been caught on tape not doing any of the things he claimed to have done—said--this was his excuse, mind you, “if anything, you could call it incontinence incompetence.”

It all puts me in mind of my Aunt Harriet, the one who always got things just that little bit wrong, like John Belushi’s Bluto in “Animal House” exhorting his fellow Deltas to take the fight to the Dean in what amounted to a kamikaze run: “Did we stop,” he yells, “when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” When one of his frat brothers starts to say something about the history there, another fellow tells him, “Forget it. He’s rolling.” In other words, it’s a lot like new math 40 years ago: The facts aren’t important; it’s the concept that matters.

Aunt Harriet, our family's Roseanne Roseanna Danna, used to bug my Uncle John in a similar vein. “Why,” she once asked him, “do our kids want to play fudgeball at all? Who would even want to be picked for a fudgeball team?” Uncle John, who didn’t get to be a mellow 80-year-old by getting all worked up about things, patiently explained that the game Harriet was talking about was in fact called “dodgeball” and the theory (which he, personally, thought was a lot of bushwah) was that a kid’s self-esteem might plummet to unimaginable depths if he or she were the last one picked for a team. Aunt Harriet, a dear old soul who liked to take the airs while sipping absinthe, blinked the way she did when she realized that her kindly befuddlement had caught up with her again, said “Oh. Well, it doesn’t matter. You know what I meant.”

The thing is, it looks like Aunt Harriet was a little ahead of her time. Or possibly Uncle John; it’s hard to tell anymore.

Just like with today’s theme. Incontinence; incompetence. It’s hard to tell anymore. In either case, it’s just more of the same. Thank God there’s always Oprah’s Book Club.