A Full Year of Pragmatism, Pith and Pontification

As an employee of RAND, the Santa Monica think tank, Bob Specht used to produce the annual RAND calendar, from which I take my inspiration for each new year.

For each month, the calendar quotes some illustrious educator, writer, philosopher or scientist on life, service, ethics, morality or some similarly uplifting subject.

Evidently Specht overdosed on inspiration, because he also produced his own calendar, which he called “An Expectation of Days.” It also offered quotations, some attributed, some not, but they were more irreverent than inspirational, more humorous than solemn.

Specht is still at it. I recently received his 1990 “Expectation of Days,” and found it, like its predecessors, astringent and thought-provoking.

In fact, the new calendar quotes me as saying: “Specht is likely to quote as much nonsense as philosophy, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.”

To save paper, Specht places months that start on the same day of the week on a single page--thus, the first page is for January or October, which start on Mondays.

A thought for January (or October) is attributed to Winston Churchill: “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”

As a person who has owned dogs and cats, but never pigs, I find that two-thirds true.

Like me, Specht likes terse verse. This one is by Harry Bender:

Imagine the appeals,

Dissents and remandments,

If lawyers had written

The Ten Commandments

Under February (or March or November) he quotes James Thurber: “I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.”

For April (or July) he quotes from Johnny Hart’s comic strip “B.C.”: “If man evolved from the ape, how come there are still apes around? Some of them were given choices.”

If I understand evolution, man did not evolve from contemporary apes. We are only cousins, though our genes and the chimpanzees’ are 99% alike.

For May he quotes cartoonist Bill Watterson: “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”

If they saw the crowds at Cleveland Browns football games they would surely give us a wide berth.

Also for May he quotes himself on the comparative longevity of men and women: “Men live shorter lives than women. It is often said that this is because of the stress in men’s jobs. But if men were to become, instead, managers of their children and their households, they would probably live even shorter lives.”

(During the Christmas season my wife and I saw a young woman with an armload of packages and two small children in a double perambulator. She pushed them up to her car, opened the doors, placed her packages inside, placed the two children inside and fastened their seat belts, then got in the driver’s seat and drove away. “How did we ever do that?” I said. “Where did we get the energy?” “You didn’t,” my wife said.)

Specht also honors me by quoting this bit of dialogue from one of my columns: “I turned to my wife. ‘If you were a young woman,’ I asked her, ‘just graduating from high school, what kind of advice would you like to hear from a man like me?’ ‘None,’ she said.”

And for June this is attributed to “Scientist”: “After two years of trying, scientists at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center have managed to get a chimpanzee pregnant.”

Which proves that no task is repugnant to a true scientist.

For August he quotes Paul R. Ehrlich’s definition of the human race as “a species that had the hubris to call itself Homo sapiens.”

Indeed we are cleverer than the other animals; but sapient (if that means wise) we are not.

For September (or December) Specht observes that “Charles Dickens would feel at home in the United States today. And we need him.”

Indeed, Dickens would find grist for his mill in our homelessness, our sweatshops, our slumlords, our litter, our rape of the environment, but he might enjoy radio, movies, TV, the telephone, computers and fast food.

He quotes Irv Kupcinet as asking: “What can you say about a society that says God is dead and Elvis is alive?”

At least we aren’t likely to be visited by intelligent creatures from other planets.