On Arthur, the Electric Prunes and a Fantastic Fouth

  • By Mike Dewey
  • July 9, 2014
  • 415
                        
SUMMARY: When a hurricane -- even a weak one -- looms offshore, people react in vastly different ways. This week, Mike Dewey tries to explain why he reacted the way he did which, in a word, was calmly. In a scene not often remembered from the almost-perfect movie “Bull Durham,” an exasperated and desperate manager asks the career minor-leaguer Crash Davis how to motivate a team of chronic underachievers. “They’re kids,” says Crash, played by Kevin Costner. “Scare ’em. That’s what I’d do.” What follows isn’t exactly textbook baseball but, in terms of a plot device, the whole notion of instilling fear to enact positive results has a disturbingly modern resonance. Anyone ever read “The Peter Principle?” Published in 1969, it posits the disturbing theory that “in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to the level of his incompetence.” Think about that for a second and apply it to your current situation. Hmmm. At the time, the slim volume was treated with the kind of harmless praise accorded to a one-hit wonder on the Top 40 charts. This was, after all, the time of the Electric Prunes and the Chocolate Watch Band, not to mention the Blues Magoos and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Speaking of Arthur, what kind of name is that for a hurricane? When the TV heads intoned “Arthur” with the gravity owed a serial killer, all I could think of was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose fevered imagination conjured Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson and the Hound of the Baskervilles. Or Arthur Ashe, the first African-American to win a Wimbledon men’s title, by all accounts a decent gentleman, whom AIDS claimed. And then I thought of King Arthur and his Knights of the Roundtable, but that just led me down the Monty Python avenue of the absurd. There was that mutant Arthur Bremer who shot the proud racist George Wallace in the parking lot of a Maryland mall back in 1972, but he was brain-dead to start with and succeeded only in making the former Alabama governor even more pathetic than he already was. So, no I wasn’t afraid of Arthur. But here’s the thing about hurricanes you might not know. No matter how remote their landfall potential, despite the history of July storms down here, there’s no underestimating the desire for those in positions of hierarchical authority to play the scare card. Works every time. HEADLINE WRITERS must have had fun. I know I did when I was entrusted with triggering that kind of summertime scare tactic when I designed front pages down here. But who can blame us? It’s too almost too easy. “ARTHUR TAKES AIM AT YOUR VACATION HOUSE!” “ARTHUR WORSE THAN OBAMACARE!” “FORGET JUSTIN BEIBER – ARTHUR’S MORE AWFUL!” The world is filled with folks who have nothing better to do than overreact. They lack not only common sense but the intelligence to know the difference between possibility and reality. What’s worse is that they hide behind other’s guesswork/patchwork predictions. Scare ’em, indeed. Oh, yeah, this place was poised on a knife’s edge. You’d have thought that that Beelzebub himself was riding a surfboard of fire and brimstone – a seaborne menace of Biblical proportions – ready to howl ashore with the hateful intensity of Dick Nixon compiling his Enemies List. Vivid examples of the Peter Principle abounded as the word was spread and fears mounted. Now, could Arthur have morphed from an aimless rain-wind event into something far more sinister? Sure. Was it likely? In this, my 15th summer down here, I doubted it to the extreme. But then again, the mayor of Amity Island thought the beaches were safe in “Jaws.” Look how wrong that moron was. Again, the Peter Principle in action: this person of in a position of authority did precisely the wrong thing. True, it’s only a movie, but then again, so was “Dr. Strangelove” and look how prescient it was. It’s times like this that it’s important not to lose perspective, but cool, rational thinking – like that evinced by Sheriff Andy Taylor or Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch – is regrettably in rather short supply in today’s world. More’s the pity. MY WIFE CANCELED a camping trip she’d been planning for months when Arthur got close to the coast. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” she confessed in total candor. “Everyone was talking about bad it was going to be.” I arched an eyebrow and replied, “Everyone?” She smiled. “Well,” she admitted, “everyone but you.” I was tempted to quote a bit of Rudyard Kipling – “If you can keep your head when everyone around you is losing theirs and blaming it on you” – but I refrained. It wasn’t my wife’s fault that the Peter Principle was in play again, on full display in all its Late Sixties irony. Arthur was just a tool to scare people. Then I thought of an old, nasty fast-food franchise – Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips – that died a quick and deserved death and decided that there’s no sense in being right just to be able to gloat. No one likes to be reminded that they got fooled again. But speaking of seafood, I’m happy to report that Arthur-mania had at least one positive result; specifically, my wife and I were able to spend the Fourth of July on the beach because someone cancelled his reservations at an oceanfront resort, fearing the storm. We scooped up that room and spent a fantastic time in a pretty place we’d never dreamed might be available. My wife found the vacancy. I called to make the reservation. And together, we rode a wave of rejuvenated optimism to the shore, reveling in the way life and love can sometimes turn stormy skies into a blissful blue horizon of toes-in-the-sand happiness. So Arthur did us a favor and, in the final analysis, I’ll thank him for the once-in-a-lifetime fireworks show my wife and I experienced that Friday night. If you’ve never witnessed an Independence Day sky-streaked celebration of colorful explosions over an inverted mirror that is the ocean, you must do it soon. As we sat in our beach chairs and simply enjoyed the pyrotechnics, I dispatched all scary thoughts scurrying into the long, good night. Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to hang out at his Facebook page.


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