In defense of my clown shoes
Dear H,
Most men, I think, have a tendency to make themselves look better than they are. I’m no different than most of these, but I prefer sometimes to make myself look worse.
This is mostly for fun, of course. For instance, telling a random frumpy middle-aged woman anything for you, miss, or telling the worst boss in the building (who knows you don't like him) that you missed him dearly, or adding so I don't go to jail again to an explanation of a legal policy, or when people ask me how many kids I've got, saying four that I know of.
Each of these is done with a wink and a smile, and is calculated to make me look so silly and sleazy that anyone with a moderate level of intelligence (or good will) will recognize me immediately as I am — a clown and an actor — and will appreciate me for it. I slander my own feelings and my record loudly and brashly to make others feel better for a moment: in my opinion much better than the modus operandi, which is to pretend in total seriousness and make myself look saintly.
My mode of clowning has its downsides, though; the first being that not everybody has a good will towards me or a sense of humor, which leads my detractors to call me a liar — which I am, I suppose, but with this one caveat: that at the end of the day my friends saw through it and got a good laugh out of it; and at the end of my detractors’ day, maybe they look "better” than me, but the people around them are worse off. (They never look better than me physically).
When it comes to serious things, of course, like when it’s time to give an account for my behavior, I’m probably more scrupulous than most — only God knows. My policy is that you have to pay to have people trust you, and that the currency you pay with is your imperfection. Taking responsibility when you don't have to, for instance; confessing when you could have gotten away with a mistake, or with violating a policy, and just saying “I messed up” instead of making excuses — these things buy people’s confidence, over time; and instead of making you look like an ass, they lead others to say “he screws up sometimes, but he always owns it, and when he says he'll fix things, he does.” A much better thing to own than a spotless record: a good and honest heart.
When there’s a chance to buy into honesty I look at it that way: I've found two crisp hundred dollar bills on the floor before and turned them in immediately*. Whether it’s twenty or two hundred, I look at that as a worthy price of trust between me and my bosses, or me and my friends, or me and my kids. I could blow the two hundred dollars and forget about it; or I could give them up and always, from that moment forward, be the guy who was worth more to himself than money.
I confess at church when I don’t believe something, too: it boosts others’ belief in me; and when I say I don’t know if I have the Holy Spirit, I believe it boosts God’s belief in me too. I try hard to be honest with God and myself**— and in the end, this is proof whether I have faith or not: not whether I ascribe to a creed.
How others interpret me is their own issue: I can manage their opinion of me only so far, and if I manage it too much, it’s bound to get reset to where it belongs anyway. Thus I like to confess some shortcomings at church and to my boss and my kids: it's much better to cut myself down on purpose than to get knocked over — a leveling is going to happen sooner or later, so I try to take the initiative and get it over with quickly on my own terms.
Church is the place where we’re most likely to defraud our neighbors about our perfection — much worse than at work or home, in fact; a fear which haunts me from time to time, and which, quite frankly, makes me not want to talk about God sometimes. When you go into church on a mission, to be about God, you’ve only got an hour or so to do it; and if this is the only time church people see you, you start to wonder if they see you as you really are or if you’re ending up a caricature — hopefully not a holy man, which is a disservice to both them and yourself.
I don’t want to end up like a coworker of mine, who's an ass on the clock, rude as can be, but he has people from church stop by, and tell everyone what a great saint he is. I would almost rather be the opposite: to have everyone at church think I’m a scoundrel, or a heretic, and have everyone at work think I’m a saint. One of these places is easier to fake, and if I’m going to be impressive, I’d rather it be at work.
Hume says of the clergy, in one of the footnotes to his essays,
Though all mankind have a strong propensity to religion at certain times and in certain dispositions; yet are there few or none, who have it to that degree, and with that constancy, which is requisite to support the character of this profession. It must, therefore, happen, that clergymen, being drawn from the common mass of mankind, as people are to other employments, by the views of profit, the greater part, though no atheists or free-thinkers, will find it necessary, on particular occasions, to feign more devotion than they are, at that time, possessed of, and to maintain the appearance of fervor and seriousness, even when jaded with the exercises of their religion, or when they have their minds engaged in the common occupations of life. They must not, like the rest of the world, give scope to their natural movements and sentiments: They must set a guard over their looks and words and actions: And in order to support the veneration paid them by the multitude, they must not only keep a remarkable reserve, but must promote the spirit of superstition, by a continued grimace and hypocrisy. This dissimulation often destroys the candor and ingenuity of their temper, and makes an irreparable breach in their character.
— a barb I hope nobody will ever level at me, and for which I prefer to make myself a clown.
Yours,
-J
*There are of course limits to turning things in. There has to be a system in place to get things back to their owners and people running the system who I believe in. I wouldn’t turn $200 in to a gas station employee, for instance. I’d tell the employee I'd found some money, and give him my number, and have anyone call me who came looking for it. But even then there would be a catch. They would have to tell me how much they lost. I heard this system from my dad and I’ve been impressed with him ever since.
As there are rules with turning things in, there are rules for how to tell a joke. If my joke contains a falsehood (as many of them do), I have to do it in a way that’s too absurd to take seriously. If I’m joking about someone else and making stuff up, it has to be right in front of them so they can object immediately ("Sorry we’re late: Mondo and I were sobering up”) — no harm, no foul. And last, if anyone thinks I’m being serious, I need to let them know I'm kidding around. If they consistently think I'm being serious, I avoid them at all costs.
But never be Schrodinger’s Douchebag. That’s the guy who says something mean, looks around to see if anybody’s mad, and then decides whether he was dead serious or “just joking.”
**I said I try hard to be honest with God and myself, but even this I say with an asterisk: that the heart is deceitful above all things; who can know it?
When do we lie to God? I imagine mostly when we say sorry; but if you’re in the average evangelical church, probably every Sunday. That’s the place you “worship” by singing things about Him you don't mean, half-heartedly, and with a stone face. I'd rather not sing at all — and, in fact, most times I don’t. He can get a thank you from me later, in my own words, when I'm feeling it.
***“Father Zosima says, in The Brothers Karamazov,
Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures [...]. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea — he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility."
— a reminder that once you tell an honest-to-God lie, you feel you have to defend it — and that the first person too intelligent and upright for you to fool becomes an enemy.
That's a good one. Really made me think...about myself. ;-)