Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

I don't know about you, but I'm worried about global warming, plenty worried. What puzzles me is that scientists can't seem to figure out just what is causing the phenomenon. First it's El Nino; then it's automobiles; then it's industrial waste; a couple of environmentalists went so far, and I kid you not, as to blame herds of flatulent cows! How on earth can you fix something if you don't even know what's causing the problem in the first place?

I figured this is such a serious crisis that I had better take a look at it before the Disney people started searching for sites in Antarctica. Fortunately I'm old enough to remember what the world was like before global warming. So I sat down and wrote out a list of what we had then, but don't have now and, perhaps more importantly, what we did not have back then, but do now.

I checked out all the wonderful things that modern times have given us: computers, cell phones, Velcro, frozen pizza, etc., nothing made sense. I really broke my noodle on this one folks, but then it came to me in a flash. And it's so simple that it's hard to believe no one has thought of it before. Ready? It's the proliferation of the washer/dryer; GE, Whirlpool, Maytag - those shifty corporations are all guilty!

Here's how it works: what's the first thing you do before you move the wash from the washing machine to the dryer? You remove the pinkish tinted lint that the dryer had extracted from the previous load. But for the past several millennia when our forebears washed whatever it was we were wearing then - from sheepskins to argyle socks - they hung everything out in the fresh air to dry.

And that's the difference! The lint that was in the clothing when it was hung out to dry wafted up into the atmosphere where it blocked all the harmful rays - ultra violet, gamma, whatever - from beaming down on us. Now I don't know what you are going to do about this, I can only tell you what I am not going to do: I am not dashing out to buy my wife a wash board and run a line from our laundry room to the nearest telephone pole.

And while unrestrained flatulence is not against the law, at least, not yet, I would have the environmental collective quietly tip off the trial lawyers about those herds of cows standing around passing gas. Believe me, if there is a class action lawsuit lurking there the lawyers will sniff it out soon enough.

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I don't mind telling you that I am fascinated, particularly as a writer, by that run-a-way hit television show, the Sopranos. And I wondered how the show would have turned out had all the characters been Jewish instead of Italian. After all, the first big time gangsters in New York were a bunch of Jewish boys who formed a gang that the newspapers called, Murder Incorporated. Just in Brooklyn alone we had: Louis 'Lepke' Buchhalter, Abraham 'Kid Twist' Reles, Martin 'Buggsy' Goldstein and Harry 'Pittsburgh Phil' Strauss, to name a few.

But if such a show ever gets off the ground the writers would have a tough time with the language, because those boys spoke Yiddish amongst themselves and there aren't any "dirty" words in Yiddish. For instance, there is no way to say go f… yourself (a phrase which seems to begin or end every sentence in the Sopranos); nor are there any words or phrases that would make a proctologist or gynecologist blush. Yiddish speakers have to rely on their imagination, poetic images and some metaphorical magic to make a point. To illustrate this and based on my personal acquaintance with a few of those boys together with my fluency in Yiddish I translated how a conversation amongst them might have taken place:

Lepke: You heard what that miserable DA, Tom Dewey, wants to do to me?

Kid Tw:ist: Who didn't? He wants to give you the Chair! It's all over the neighborhood already.

Lepke: That little louse, he should only bust.

Buggsy: He should also get killed.

Kid Twist: It's that bastard Meyer Lansky - he should only grow like an onion with his head in the ground - I bet he put Dewey up to it. And those no-good Italian friends of his, they should all be made with a head shorter.

Pittsburgh Phil: No, no! It's all that Dewey guy, that anti-Semite. He should only get the ground that's coming to him.

Lepke: Well, if it is Lansky, that scoundrel, may he not have enough water to make kasha.

The drift of the conversation, you will note, is quite dramatic and realistic. All that is needed for a hit show here is a Scorsese or a Spielberg to see the potential and get to work. Already I can see the title up on the marquee: The Singers.