Resolutions: No High Priorities for the New Year, as Usual

I can’t remember that I have ever set forth my resolutions for a new year.

For one thing, it seemed such a cliche for a columnist. Furthermore, I have never even made New Year’s resolutions.

They usually are tedious lists of things one ought to have done in the year past, but didn’t. Also, they are not likely to be kept in the coming year.

The only resolution I can think of that would be worth keeping would be to quit smoking. But I quit smoking 25 years ago, and I can think of no other reforms that would do me that much good.

I suppose, considering my medical history, that I ought to quit eating bacon and eggs. But I go to the Pasadena Athletic Club three mornings a week to work out, in deference to my cardiovascular system, and I think I am entitled to reward myself afterward with a breakfast of bacon and eggs (usually with six pancakes).

I suppose I ought to resolve to quit drinking alcoholic beverages, but there is no use making an ascetic of oneself only to achieve better health and a longer life. I gave up hard liquor years ago, but I will not give up wine, even for my liver’s sake.

As the poet Thomas Moore wrote, “What though youth gave love and roses, age still leaves us friends and wine.” And does the Bible not count it among God’s blessings in the 104th Psalm: “Wine that maketh glad the heart of man?”

(May I bring the Bible up to date and observe that wine also gladdens the heart of woman, thank God?)

I do resolve that in this first year of the last decade of the 20th Century I will try to improve my mind. I hope to wean myself away from sex and violence on television and get back into reading the classics, though even Dostoevski may seem bland after a diet of bloody murder, naked passion and cataclysmic auto chases.

What has jaded me on sex and violence, though, is not the sex and violence itself; one grows accustomed to that--almost comes to require it. What is finally unacceptable is the improbabilities in TV movies: the keys left in ignitions for the convenience of escaping felons; the parking spaces always available in front of hotels, residences, apartment buildings and police stations. The incredibly stupid chances taken by the protagonists (I will not call them heroes since most of them are as sociopathic as the villains); the compulsion of every murderer to make a full confession when he is confronted by the flimsiest circumstantial evidence (usually some gossamer patchwork of improvisation like those concocted by the ubiquitous Jessica Fletcher). And why do criminals fleeing policemen always run up winding stairways to rooftops?

Without really resolving to do so, I have already given up weekends saturated with television football. Throughout the season I have watched only half a dozen games, including that improbable 45-42 thriller between USC and UCLA.) I am no longer a weekend football shut-in.

However, I am not yet free enough of the sport to black out the Super Bowl. Super Bowl Sunday has become pervasive in our society. Next to Easter, it is our most important Sunday. Not being a religious person, I can hardly afford to give up the closest thing to an epiphany that I recognize.

Perhaps I should say for myself that my wife and I have season tickets to the Philharmonic, the Mark Taper Forum and the Los Angeles Theater Center, so it can’t be said that our cultural life is non-existent. Several of the plays we’ve seen at the Taper and the Theater Center have been beyond my understanding, which is a good sign, I suppose. It means that I am not afraid to test my mind against superior intellects.

However, since the theater is not subject to the restraints that television is, the sex is even more stark on stage than on the tube. Recently, in two successive plays at the Taper, we saw full frontal nudity: in one play a woman was undressed, and, in another, a man emerged nude from a bathroom in a state of partial tumescence. How he managed that I don’t know.

If those scenes achieved nothing else, they reminded the audience that the theater happily remains free of censorship. I resolve in 1991 to do what I can to promote artistic freedom, even if it means giving up partial nudity on television and going to the theater, where the necessities of the plot are not constrained by wowserism.

By the way, since this day isn’t over yet, I’m going to backslide by watching the Rose Bowl game on television. I have predicted that Washington will defeat Iowa, 24-10. I have not bet on it, however. Years ago I resolved not to gamble, and, except for an office pool now and then, in the spirit of camaraderie, I have not.

I might have a glass of wine, though.