The Politically Incorrect Show - 02/02/2001

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Friday February 2, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.

[Music up, music down!]

Friday. I'm about to head home to Mum's for four days - I'm taking Monday off, & Tuesday is, of course, a holiday, commemorating the Holocaust. My mother always puts me in mind of my grandmother, whom she resembles in spirit & appearance. My grandmother often used to say to me, "Just remember, other people aren't like us." I didn't know what she meant at the time, but I should have gleaned clues from her occasional denunciations of the "bourgeois respectability" of the local Country Women's Institute - its gossipy cliqueishness & prudish pseudo-rectitude. My grandmother was the exact opposite, unconcerned about other people's opinions, completely straightforward & uncalculating - & generous -  in her dealings with them. Her opinions were unpopular, but she never hid them. The modern idea of cultivating an "image" would have sent her into gales of derisive laughter. Her children & grandchildren were like that too, & I guess that's what she thought made others "not like us." Problem was, it didn't prepare us very well for the world as it is, where all too often one has to "read between the lines" to figure out what's really going on in one's dealings with people - one has to figure out what "front" they're trying to present to the world in order to make sense of their behaviour.

Me, I still tend to say, the hell with it - here I am, warts & all; to mine own own self I shall be true; this is the real me; take me or leave me. Usually it's the latter that occurs! Too bad! I'm convinced that the prospects for freedom would be much brighter if more people worried less about being respectable & more about being real.

All of which is by way of introducing an inspirational quotation of the kind I like to cite every Friday. This one is from Theodore Roosevelt, someone with whose politics I would disagree sharply, as I did, ultimately, with my grandmother's. I still look back on her spirit & love her for it, as I love the spirit of these words:

"It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust & sweat & blood, who strives valiantly, who errs & comes up short again & again because there is no effort without error & shortcomings, who knows the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the high achievement of triumph & who, at worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows his place shall never be with those timid & cold souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

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