It's Good For The Soul To Hear

Of All The People Expressing Their Mental Vacuity, None Has A Better Excuse For An Empty Head Than The Newspaperman: If He Pauses To Restock His Brain, He Invites Onrushing Deadlines To Trample Him Flat. Broadcasting The Contents Of Empty Minds Is What Most Of Us Do Most Of The Time, And Nobody More Relentlessly Than I.

Few Expected Very Much Of Franklin Roosevelt On Inauguration Day In 1933. Like Barack Obama Seventy-six Years Later, He Was Succeeding A Failed Republican President, And Americans Had Voted For Change. What That Change Might Be Roosevelt Never Clearly Said, Probably Because He Himself Didn't Know.

So There He Is At Last. Man On The Moon. The Poor Magnificent Bungler! He Can't Even Get To The Office Without Undergoing The Agonies Of The Damned, But Give Him A Little Metal, A Few Chemicals, Some Wire And Twenty Or Thirty Billion Dollars And Vroom! There He Is, Up On A Rock A Quarter Of A Million Miles Up In The Sky.

How Many More Years Will Our Educators Continue To Lecture Us On The Evils Of Whipping Children Until They Bring Home High Grades? Year After Year We Listen To These Fellows Tell Us That It Is Not The Grade That Counts But The Development Of The Child's Personality. After The Lecture They Go Back To All The Best Schools And Reject Our Children Because They Have C Averages.

Sending Grown-ups Up The Wall Is One Of The Things Adolescence Is All About. A Few Years Ago It Was Done With Rock 'n' Roll Music. Now At Least They Can Do It Quietly With A Home Computer.