The New Year’s Baby and the Bathwater

It’s official. We’ve once again tossed the New Year’s baby out with the Old Year’s bathwater. And what a sorry spectacle it is to watch this now annual ritual in real time. Apparently, our once pretty sane and generally civilized nation is in an uncanny free-fall, where crazy and hysterical have supplanted rational and composed as the new norms. When exactly did our fourteen-billion-year-old universe take a backseat to the less than fourteen-year-old Twitter universe, which—by the way—regularly erupts in moral indignation? At what, you ask? At virtually everything it would seem, particularly words and even sounds that sound like words. Little bangs.

I approach the sad state of current affairs this way: An insult-comedian of past renown like the late Don Rickles couldn’t ply his trade in today’s straight-jacket, hyper-sensitive environment, but an all-too-real insult-vulgarian can ply his in the quintessential bully pulpit. It’s a strange world indeed that we now call home, where a television classic like Seinfeld couldn’t be made because it crosses too many of the new and unimproved lines of the politically correct powers-that-be.

Jerry Seinfeld—whose stand-up act is rather inoffensive—has even stopped appearing on college campuses because of today youth’s newfound sense of what is and what isn’t comedic fair game. I read a university newspaper’s student-editor’s rebuttal to Seinfeld’s decision. He spoke of his generation’s absolute lack of tolerance for anything with a whiff of intolerance. For what you ask? I think you know. He then went on to list the various boundaries and strictures that comedians must abide in this enlightened age of supreme tolerance. The irony of his argument—in which he repeatedly insisted his contemporaries have a highly sophisticated sense of humor—was lost on him.

Permit me now to switch gears just a bit. It being the New Year, I can’t help but recall a certain faux-inspirational manager in a certain retail setting that is no more. Once upon a time, he lorded over a diverse group of mostly underpaid and decidedly non-motivated employees. The calendar year was 1994—a quarter of a century ago. At its inception, said manager had his lady friend print out on her then state-of-the-art computer a then state-of-the-art employee handbook. Its cover read: “1994: A New Year, A New Focus.” I don’t remember anything between its two covers, but suffice it to say the new focus was more or less a carbon copy of the old one. It should be noted here that the young adults who find Jerry Seinfeld too controversial wouldn’t know what a carbon copy is.

Interestingly, a lot of what would make Seinfeld, the television show, controversial in the here and now involves the modern-day third rail of speech. Ethnic characters who speak in certain accents—actually funny by some people’s standards—are not acceptable anymore. In that aforementioned retail venue in the New York Metropolitan area, more than a few patrons of ours spoke in accents right out of the Seinfeld playbook.

Granted, it’s still allowable to make sport of European accents. Comedians can—with impunity—mimic my ancestors’ elocution. That’s Italian and German, by the way, and that’s good. But I say, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. There was a customer in the bygone days known to us on the inside as “Fifty-pound para-KEET.” He was an Italian fellow—with a very distinctive Italian accent—who raised caged birds. Among other things, he would purchase fifty-pound bags of parakeet food. Of course, he asked us every time for “Para-KEET” food. There were many other accented clientele with nicknames that I guess I shouldn't mention here in “2019: Another New Year, Another New Focus, And Less Humor Than Ever Before.”

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)