A friend and I recently commiserated about the plight of a woman we both admire. Her son chose to hang out with some young hoodlums and ended up in juvenile detention. Our discouraging conversation ended with my friend voicing a truism: “You gotta choose your friends carefully.”
And listen to Mama. I’m reminded of a Randy Newman song that the rock music group Three Dog Night turned into a Number 1 single in 1970, “Mama Told Me Not to Come.” It was about a partygoer who wished he hadn’t gone.
Mama told me not to come
Mama told me not to come
That ain’t no way to have fun, son.
That ain’t no way to have fun.
Live and learn. If each of us began living independently at, say, age 30, we’d avoid a lot of bum choices. Not all of them, sure, but a bunch. Yet I look around and see people quite old enough to know better becoming entangled in foolish causes. I’d like to blame it on their friends, but these people are more independent than that.
I think it’s a matter of being victimized by groupthink, a societal condition wherein contradictory thoughts not only are unwelcome, they’re disrespected. This either-or dynamic has riven America: Either you agree with me or you’re an idiot.
Consequently, nuance of thought seems to be a devalued skill. Degrees of conviction are frowned upon—it’s all in or all wrong. Critical thinking has been sacrificed on the altar of ideology—actually, a better word is “dogma,” the altar of dogma. Today’s most impassioned adherents of ideology are dogmatic to the point of irrationality.
Where’s Mama when you need her! Telling us to quit having such a high opinion of ourselves. Cajoling us to get along and not talk catty about others. Reassuring us we don’t have to follow the crowd, but not to look down on it either. “They’re good people, too.”
The 20th-century comedian Groucho Marx would have had something to say about all this. Marx tossed out succinct witticisms that almost made sense. The story is told about him reluctantly joining New York’s Friars Club at the behest of a friend and eventually resigning from it. Asked why he was leaving, he responded, “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.”
The ironic putdown was a typical Marx response. He was a clown but not a fool. Were he still around, today’s political keening would have had him subtly chiding people left and right—politically speaking.
To a self-righteous haranguer, the Marx comeback might have been, “Yes, the secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made,” To a patronizing hostess at a sniffy political affair, Groucho might have wiggled his bushy eyebrows and offered this zinger: “I have had a perfectly wonderful evening…but this wasn’t it.”
We all should choose our friends carefully, listen to our mamas, and speak enigmatically, if at all.