WANNA BUY A BRIDGE?

Me ... on a good day

I suffer from what might be referred to in the taxonomy of the twenty-first century, a "learning disability." I'm neither dyslexic nor analphabetic nor dyscalculic or even dysgraphic. If anything my attention suffers a surfeit and my memory is as sharp as a sushi knife.

No, my problem exclusively relates to how I process information. I have a hard time believing anything anyone ever tells me. If this debility were recognized by the American Association of Pediatrics they would probably call it something like EFS.

Everyone is Full of Shit.

The first signs of EFS became manifest sometime during the Nixon administration. In those days folks tended to give our elected officials the benefit of the doubt. Nixon changed all that and this I believe is his true legacy. Forget China or the Environmental Protection Agency, the formation of OSHA or even Apollo 11 (which if you ask me, I think the moonwalk was staged), Nixon's gift to our great country was the legitimization of wholesale, guilt-free, voluntary confabulation.

No Nixon, no Facebook. No Nixon, no Fox News. No Nixon, no designated hitter rule.

If you don't like it, blame it on Nixon.

Not that this in and of itself is all bad. Quite the contrary. Imagine a world where you took everything at face value and where people traded in trust and good faith. Without lies there's no fiction and without fiction there's no Flintstones.

Or Breaking Bad.

Or Harps of Heaven.

So, as I look upon the horizon of a new year I am resolved and remain steadfast in my firm conviction that Everyone is Full of Shit.

Including me.