Saving Face

"When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet.” Lec

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There's a lot of need for face saving in these times. Impeachment hearings may have been the best thing that's happened in America lately. Such gushing rubbish is entertaining the wrong people and making the right ones question their sanity.

There, on the stage of C-Span, a made-for-TV sleaze script was written by beggars, hack-stabbers and underwritten by a circus of media propaganda. So much pretense. Some trying to be what they're not, and others trying not to be what they are. We'll soon see who's face cracks first. But I have my own problems, like you do.

Losing face can happen anywhere, anytime. Just the other day I'm standing in a group, everybody's talking about impeachment. I open my mouth and out it comes...my opinion. As soon as the words slide off my lips, I know what's coming. Too late to call it back.

They look at me in shocked horror like someone who just developed a lethal case of leprosy. Humiliation attacks my fragile and carefully crafted ego like a savage assault of terminal arthritis. Face saving is out of the question. Dementia is the only solution.

It happens early, this need to deflect the humiliation of being caught, red-handed, resembling a bumbling fool. My very first recollection of needing to save face was in first grade, age 6. It didn't stop there.

It started innocently. My grandfather let me run wild under the bleachers at a baseball game where I entertained myself by breaking RC Cola bottles for fun. The penalty was a lacerated knee. I no longer spend time under bleachers and RC Colas have long vanished.

The embarrassment came when my father had to take me in his arms, like a baby, and carry me into class at school. Forget that I couldn't walk. But being carried like a tiny baby into class? The lacerations from humiliation leave scars.

In that class was a beautiful girl. Even at 6 it was obvious that she would be something special in about ten years. And there she was, looking at this lacerated imbecile being carried by his father into class. She never ceased to remind me of it. Rejections hurt.

I remember the last dialogue I had with my best friend Jimmy. It was on the day of high school graduation.

"Do you remember when your daddy carried you into first grade class?"

"I'm still trying to forget that day."

"What ever happened to you and what's-her-name? The romance didn't last, huh?"

"Guess not. I could never live down that day of embarrassment.”

But given time, things usually work out for the best. We never really got it on, so to speak, despite her early beauty. And at the 50th high school reunion the light of Providence shined brightly. She could have used serious ‘face-saving’ work herself. Rejection payback is a beautiful thing.

Humiliation happens to everyone sooner or later. Frank, a friend, shows up at this fancy formal and extravagant wedding wearing different shoes. But Frank's a quick study, has a strategy already planned out to save face.

"Uh, Frank, what's with the different colored shoes?"

"They're metaphors of marriage," he says.

"What?"

"Yeah. Male and female, different people. So, it seemed to be the proper thing to do."

It's a pretty thin argument, but at least it's a strategy. And that's what we need to develop, a strategy to avoid embarrassment and explain away being dumb and clumsy, because dumb and clumsy are facts of life.

I guess you're asking just how we might craft up a strategy that fits all circumstances? Beats me. But I venture to say that finding someone or something to blame will go a long way.

Take the situation in DC. Vengeance runs deep. Crucify, they scream; Blood, they shout. Why? Seems they want to send this fellow packing because he occupies a bigger house than they do. But what does he care? They're tramping on him like dirt in the street, some of which he created. Dumb and dumber are twins, don't forget.

So, what does he do? He moves on, mounts his helicopter and disappears. Taken as a strategy, ‘moving on’ is about as good a face-saving strategy as it gets.

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Get creative, you'll come up with something to fit every faux pas.

As for me. I'm trying to save face and explain away why my unzipped lips cause so many problems.


Bud Hearn

December 6, 2019