Fads and such

Fads come and go, of course; that is the nature of fads, after all—they are as temporary as Japanese cherry blossoms; and so long as the fad does no real harm to life, limb, or property I see no reason why we should not ignore the uproar until the fad disappears on its own. How many people today remember that the Pet Rock, leisure suits, and lava lights were once things no respectable household could do without or that millions of people once did the Macarena without once realizing that they were making complete asses of themselves?  Fads come and fads go almost as quickly, leaving us all more than a little embarrassed that we had gotten so caught up in something so fundamentally silly. On occasion, however, a fad comes along that is so clearly a threat to the public order that decent people must band together and put a stop to it before someone gets hurt, and I think I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that the current practice of dropping catfish on the heads of innocent passersby is such a fad.  Someone has to stop this now before a kid gets hurt. The catfish could put someone’s eye out, you know. It could happen.

I do not know why dropping catfish on unsuspecting passersby had become the thing to do these days, nor can I explain why this fad requires using a catfish instead of a cod, a flounder, or a box of frozen fish sticks. I assume that on some deeper, more profound level of existence being hit on the head with a catfish is funnier than being hit on the head with a smelt, a pike, or a humpback whale and a potted plant thinking, oh no, not again. Fads invariably have rules that are as ironclad as they are evanescent. For example, no one who wanted a Pet Rock could simply go outside, pick up a rock, and declare that said rock was a Pet Rock. Nor would taking said rock to a church and having it baptized Roscoe Le Rock, which is by no stretch of the imagination a French name. No, to own a real Pet Rock a petrophile had to go to a department store and shell out four dollars for the thing. And, in an early example of the evils of globalization, the rocks that all here in this our Great Republic fell in love with were all, and I mean every last one of them, Mexican rocks. It seems that there were no American rocks available; being a pet rock was apparently one of those jobs that Mexican rocks would do and American rocks would not. I hope that the people behind the catfish-dropping craze would have the common decency to use American catfish for these ichthyologic bomb runs, but it would not surprise me if they did not. The lure of cheap goods will trump the patriotism of many a good man, I fear.

And no, I will not bring up the silly season, which you may think I am going to because I used the word trump. Too many people have said too much about it and I see no need to add to an already vast sea of verbiage that is now threatening to swamp this our Great Republic’s amber waves of grain and get our feet wet. I think that we should all simply admit to ourselves that we have reached the final years of the American experiment and we may as well just kick back and enjoy the transition to a decadent monarchy as best we can. Waiter, I will have a Harvey Wallbanger with my bread and circuses, thank you very much.

P.S. My apologies for the prolonged hiatus; I had stuff to do and it needed to get done, so I had to take a break. Sorry.