On human nature and failure — a perfect pair
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- July 20, 2024
- 260
When Ed Harris squared his jaw and boldly asserted, “Failure is not an option,” America fell in love with its ideal self once again.
It was 1995, and a homegrown terrorist had bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168. The country also heard the phrase, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” for the very first time.
Timothy McVeigh and O.J. Simpson, both murderers, held sway.
Into that messy, swirling, toxic cesspool of a year was stirred a movie titled “Apollo 13,” which made us feel a whole lot better, if only for a couple of hours, but that was enough for us to catch our breath and remember a time when our country did the impossible.
The chances of returning the three-man crew safely to Earth after an explosion had done significant damage were not very good; in fact, the space program itself, once the crown jewel in the nation’s raiment of astonishing scientific achievement, was in steep decline.
Going to the moon, once the stuff of far-fetched fantasy, had become rather routine by spring 1970, so it took a potential catastrophe for Americans to care enough to pay attention again.
Failure, or the fear of it, proved to be a potent magnet, and that’s when Gene Kranz, NASA’s steely-eyed flight director, uttered the phrase that has become emblematic of our country’s resolve in times of crisis. If the story is apocryphal, so be it. It’s also history.
But let’s examine the nature of failure. For all the bravura of Ed Harris’s delivery in the film’s pivotal scene — and he’s brilliant in it — the fact remains that, like it or not, failure is always an option.
You’ve heard the expression, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” and decades before the exploration of space, the Wright Brothers failed innumerable times trying to get off the ground.
Steve Jobs, the man behind the modern computer, was not an overnight sensation, having been fired from Apple before revolutionizing the industry with his imagination and resilience.
The Beatles shopped their songs to every major record label in England and were routinely shown the door before EMI took a chance on them, thus forever altering the course of modern music.
Which brings us to me and my brief relationship with the guitar. Fueled by the Big Bang — the Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 — I began taking lessons in a basement studio on Main Street, hoping to learn how to play the songs I heard on my transistor, most of them by the Beatles.
Alas, my instructor wasn’t on the same wavelength, preferring “Red River Valley,” “Long, Long Ago” and “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” to “Love Me Do” and “Twist and Shout.”
So at age 10, I hung up my six-string and experienced failure.
Then came girls. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I had no game, nothing in the way of social skills, a total loser in love.
Late in high school, I had better luck, but what few relationships I managed to kindle — picture a cave man trying to spark fire using flints and twigs — were snuffed out in very short order. It was then I realized it took two to fail, an amazing discovery for me.
Remember that scene in “Kramer vs. Kramer” when Meryl Streep is being questioned by Howard Duff in the contentious custody hearing? If you do, then you’ll likely recall his devastating query.
“Were you a failure at the one most important relationship in your life?” he barks, breaking her down, forcing an affirmative nod.
Thirteen years later, when I was 27 and not exactly the best boyfriend in the world, I listened to a song called “Southern Cross” for the first time. In it, I heard Stephen Stills make perfect sense:
“And we never failed to fail,
It was the easiest thing to do.”
I’d like to make this clear. The woman I cheated on deserved far better than the likes of me, and the fact that she kept on loving me for another five years still strikes me as borderline miraculous.
Long past its expiration date, that relationship finally, inevitably, crumbled like a sand castle at high tide, leaving me stranded, alone.
I remember going back to church in late summer 1987, a place I hadn’t been since my sister’s wedding on Valentine’s Day. There was a priest from Ireland, of all places, filling in for the pastor, who was on some sort of pilgrimage to Lourdes. He seemed like a smart, empathetic, sincere man of the cloth, so looking for a lifeline in a time of quiet desperation, I knocked on the rectory door one night. He took me in, and our conversation helped me.
The point he made, in his reedy and reassuring Irish brogue, was I ought not allow myself to be consumed by self-loathing and remorse since, he said, logically, the damage was already done.
“There will be another lady,” he counseled. “Do better next time.”
Let’s close with this lyric from Jackson Browne’s “These Days”:
“Don’t confront me with my failures,
I had not forgotten them.”
Can I get an “Amen!” from you, my faithful readers? I thank you.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on his Facebook page, where human failure is a common denominator.