I formulated this law myself -- and it looks it. Still, it is one of the few products of my high school years worth retaining. I retain a great deal more from high school, but I should not.
I observed that various classmates would rejoice that they were now with someone who had dumped someone else. To male friends I said, "If she'll do it to him, she'll do it to you." I'd warn female pals, "If he threw over her to get to you, what makes you believe that he won't throw you over when someone else comes along?" These comments did not increase my popularity.
I expected the answer that I always got. Somehow my interlocutor presumed that the bond broken had been improvident and the bond just forged was meant to be. I suppose some such bonds endured. However, the odds favored a repetition of whatever mercilessness my interlocutor was presently celebrating. Soon enough it would be Judy's turn to cry [see infra].
Not that changing partners was particularly to be lamented. Some that high school had joined together cried out to be put asunder -- for good taste and eugenics if for no other reasons.
Indeed, a confluence of era and good feelings often reduced the trauma of pairings and partings so that my law was a promise and a different sort of warning to the bereft: "He threw you overboard, but he will throw your rival overboard, so do not be near the side of the ship unless you would break her fall rather than her neck. See what or who is shaking on the lido deck while you await word of the woman overboard." Cf. the works of Stephen Stills -- "Love the One You're With" or "Change Partners" comes to my addled mind -- for the crackpot realist attitude toward promiscuity; for a more sentimentalized view of orgies that progress at a more leisurely pace, Leslie Gore offers us "Judy's Turn to Cry." [Yes, Leslie, Johnny tossed you aside for Judy, but now Johnny has come back to you. Bit of advice, Leslie: do not host any more parties; do not go to any more parties; either do not let Johnny out of your sight or, even better, put Johnny out of your mind and out of your bed.]
But I digress. Again.
Haltom's Seventh Law not only is true but ought to be. Why shouldn't betrayal and infidelity and heartlessness get easier with practice and with profit? Why shouldn't cunning and craftiness and callousness desensitize and mithridatize the practitioneer who profits thereby? Why shouldn't the nearly infinite capacity to rationalize accommodate ill-using in the present and future once one has gotten away with ill-using in the past?
Yet husband and wife will chuckle at how they stepped out on previous spouses and thereby met. Like a Valentine's Day tale or a faint echo of Dr. Zhivago, the etiology of an unholy union will be rendered as if balls resting against one another after the break were not likely to end up in distant pockets. Let romantics assume that kismet broke up two couples to make this better couple. Let realists snicker at the presumed economy by which tearing apart two families is acceptable if it pleases two of the conviving parties slurping gin. I'll sit with the cynics near the chip-dip and mutter that faithlessness and faithfulness alike tend to be habit-forming.
Now in "Hungry Heart" Bruce Springsteen get much right but a little wrong regarding these matters:
###Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack.
###I went out for a ride, and I never went back.
###Like a river that don't know where it's flowing,
###I took a wrong turn, and I just kept going.
###
######Everybody's got a hungry heart.
######Everybody's got a hungry heart.
######Lay down your money, and you play your
########part.
######Everybody's got a hungry heart.
### ###
###I met her in a Kingstown bar.
###We fell in love; I knew it had to end.
###We took what we had, and we ripped it apart.
###Now here I am down in Kingstown again.
###
######Everybody's got a hungry heart.
######Everybody's got a hungry heart.
######Lay down your money, and you play your
#########part.
######Everybody's got a hungry heart.
###
###Everybody needs a place to rest.
###Everybody wants to have a home.
###Don't make no difference what nobody says.
###Ain't nobody like to be alone.
###
Sorry, Bruce, but John Hughes wrote about that last matter in "Some Kind of Wonderful" (1987) and did a little better. Amanda Jones [Lea Thompson] says first that she would rather be with someone for the wrong reasons than alone for the right reasons. However, in the course of the film she learns that she would rather be alone for the right reasons. Like Victor Laszlo in "Casablanca," Amanda Jones sees that we each have a destiny for good or for evil. Perhaps we play our parts, but we have some say about parts we accept and which plays we are part of.
###
Moreover, we are capable of foreseeing some consequences. We know that what this miscreant will do to another, the miscreant will do to us. Traffick in gossip; expect to be gossips' and gossip's target. Conspire, then wait to be waylaid by conspirators who acquired a taste for Machiavellian artistry under your tutelage. Betray if you must, but know that you will in turn be betrayed by one conversant with Haltom's Seventh Law who will do to you before you can do to him, her, or them.
I am at present unsure what Bruce Springsteen will do to me now that I have tossed his lyric aside for a script by John Hughes.
Coming Soon -- Haltom's Eighth Law: No one may be offended; one must take offense
3 comments:
I enjoyed this one very much. In institutions large and small, it's difficult to cut deals without being cut by a deal at some point--and usually one's intuition or common sense of right and wrong will detect when a deal is different from meeting someone half way, in good faith. I have learned to treat some who mean and do ill as if they were rattlesnakes. Such people often give off a signal that is equivalent to the rattle. Best not to hang around to listen to the "music."
Rather than rattlers, I have often invoked Hannibal's elephants. Combat elephants mowed down everything before them, but soon they spooked. When they panicked, the pachyderms menaced Hannibal's troops [who were close by] far more than Romans who were getting ever more distant.
The moral of this dreg of my classical education? If you deploy elephants to devastate opponents, do so from afar. What you want "your" elephants to do them, the elephants may turn about and do to you.
Against the claim that such wariness cheapens life, Housman answered:
There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt
I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.
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