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Tuesday, February 22, 2005
The Grade B Effect
This is a topic about which your Curmudgeon would prefer not to write. Nevertheless, he feels he must; exchanges with several friends and acquaintances have put it at the top of his thoughts.
Many years ago, a reviewer in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction commented on a book from a very prominent and well-regarded author to the effect that it had disappointed him -- not because it was terrible, but because it was a Grade B effort from a Grade A source. (If you simply must know, the author was Roger Zelazny and the book was the multiple-award-winning This Immortal, previously published in somewhat shorter form as "...And Call Me Conrad!") Even in his tenderer years, your Curmudgeon felt free to disagree with a reviewer's assessment of a book, and in that case he most certainly did. However, the overarching statement -- that one expects excellence from the excellent, and that anything less will look worse than it really is, specifically because of the expectations attached to the source -- has remained with him over the four decades since.
The observation is no less applicable to the ordinary behavior of private persons in more common walks of life. "You can do better than this" is a statement thousands of classroom teachers have made to millions of students. What does it mean? Not that the student has failed, but that his standards ought to be higher; that his demonstrated gifts suggest that he's capable of far more, and that the quality of his efforts has fallen short of his potentials. It's a serious criticism, and it ought to be taken seriously.
Your Curmudgeon still remembers the sting of the last occasion on which a respected colleague told him "you can do better than this." The colleague was right, which made it worse. Much, much worse.
We tend to grade our friends and acquaintances. Who is not familiar with the concept of the "asshole buddy": the guy with whom you do the stupid, unsanitary, somewhat demeaning stuff that your wife deplores and you'd prefer not to have noised about at home or work? If you have one, it's doubtful that you consider him a source of wisdom or well considered advice about important things, no matter how many times the two of you have gone out together to drink yourselves senseless, watch mud wrestling, or water-ski through a flooded parking lot behind a pickup truck.
In contrast, many of us are fortunate to have the friendship of "gray heads": persons whose wisdom, knowledge, and virtue are well beyond the norm, and whose advice can be relied upon to be well considered and rendered without guile. We listen to them with full attention when they deign to offer their views. We pay them full respect and always take their arguments seriously, even if we ultimately decide we disagree. But we don't invite them to the mud-wrestling extravaganzas.
And were we to learn that Smith, our gray-headed friend to whom we habitually recur for wise counsel at need, was an asshole buddy to Jones, a ne'er-do-well who lives in a tar-paper shack, scrapes by as a garbage picker, and drinks himself insensate five nights out of every seven, we would be shocked speechless -- even if Jones were our asshole buddy on alternate nights. It would be low-grade behavior from a high-grade person; even though we were prone to it ourselves now and then, it would lower Smith in our eyes.
What grade of person do you take yourself to be? What grade of person do you want others to take you to be? Consider the following list of peccadilloes, and ask yourself if you'd want your gray-headed friend, assuming you have one, to think of you in their light:
- Excessive verbal vulgarity.
- Slovenliness of dress.
- Carelessness with others' property.
- Crudeness toward women.
- Overindulgence in intoxicants.
- Voyeurism.
- Sexual obsession.
- Sexual incontinence.
- Marginal dishonesty in matters of money or money-related obligations.
- Routine sloughing of accepted and admitted responsibilities.
- Envy-driven malice toward others, expressed in word or deed.
If you want to be seen as Grade A, these are sins you must take care to avoid, or at least conceal. To dabble in them publicly will relegate you to the lower strata; the degree of your indulgence will determine how far you'll sink.
Your Curmudgeon can already hear the legions that march beneath the banners of "Anything Goes!" and the standard of "No Standards!" massing to barrage him with their most fearsome weapon: the charge of hypocrisy. "Everybody does it!" they cry, neatly eliding the tacit assertion that "it," whatever that may be, therefore ought to garner no disapproval. But to say "everybody does it" is merely to say that you do it; is that really an admission one would want to make?
But let it be stipulated that in some cases, everybody, or nearly everybody, really does "do it," at least on occasion. Your Curmudgeon is no saint, and the probability is high that you, Gentle Reader, aren't one either. Is that a justification for wallowing in the indulgence of one's lower nature -- and in public at that? What of the ethic of improvement, the mandate that we strive to be better tomorrow than we were today? And what of the regard of those whose regard we value, assuming there are such persons?
Do we want those around us forever to be saying "He could do so much better" about us, even if only to themselves?
This tirade was elicited by the conduct of a dear friend, who seems to feel absolutely compelled to rub your Curmudgeon's face in certain of his obsessions and failings. It makes it difficult for your Curmudgeon to retain a Grade A opinion of this man, who, apart from that habit, has so many competences and virtues that it would exhaust your patience to read them all. Yet there's no need for it. There's never been a need for it. The friend's confessor might need to hear about it, but no one else.
Verbum sat sapienti.
Comments
I must say, if only more of our fellow citizens were keen on the import of this post…
Certainly, those brave souls who defied the British Empire in the name of libery strove for excellence. The freedoms secured by their blood and treasure have all but been taken for granted. While one enjoys the unquestioned right to be foolish, one must not be shielded from the consequences of such.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 02/22/2005 at 09:40 PMNobody will ever mistake me for grade A anything, thank the Lord. Removes a lot of the pressure.
Posted by og on 02/22/2005 at 11:23 PM
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