The Right Answer Will Trump The Truth Every Time
In the spring of 1931, after I made my unscheduled nighttime getaway from the Lyman School, a place where taking a joy ride, which is what I had done, was the only tuition required to take up residence, I made it home to pick up a few cloths and my cornet before heading off to New York. It was late at night and my mother came into the kitchen as I was heading out the back door. She knew where I was heading. I had told her many times that I would go as soon as it was expedient. She looked at me, and I asked her what she was going to do. The truthful thing was to avoid aiding and abetting a fugitive of the state of Massachusetts, but the right answer was to say wait a minute while she went into her room and came out only to hand me a hundred dollars and change (an awful lot of money during those early depression years) and say to take care of myself. I told her she should do the same and headed on my way.
When I got to the Big Apple I looked up Eddie Condon who told me to go see Benny Goodman who I had met a few times when my old man would bring me over to the Sunset and Apex Club to listen to all the wonderful Jazz on the South Side during those Twenties of my childhood. Benny said I wasn't seasoned enough for alot of what he was doing, but because he knew I read well and had good tone that he would talk me up to Red Nichols who headed up the Gershwin "Girl Crazy" pit band. It was an incredible show that introduced songs like "I got Rythym" and "Embraceable You" and a future Broadway star named Ethel Merman.
He told me I had to join the union. I told him I was only sixteen, and I knew you had to be eighteen. He said the truth is that you are sixteen, but the right answer is that you are eighteen. They just want to make sure you know the right answer. Then he said something I will never forget. He told me that the truth is for people who have never been hungry in this life, and the right anwer is for the rest of us. And he followed it up by saying the the right answer will trump the truth every time. So I played the cornet in "Girl Crazy" from April till it closed in June of that year. I was sixteen, rolling in dough, with a gig and a girl friend within a few weeks of my arrival, all thanks to connections and the right answers.
The boy ran into some trouble recently playing in a club at fourteen. He's way ahead of me in so many ways. So the truth is that he is fourteen and the right answer was to get himself an ID that said he was eighteen, acquirable from some of the more resourceful kids who hang out at the park, usually for those folks who weren't lucky enough to be born here, but they are not fussy as to who their clientel ends up being if the price of admission is paid.
I tell you, this lesson I learned from Benny just keeps popping up, because today I was sitting with this young woman who is telling me that they blame Hillary for raw ambition and act like this Obama fellah is as pure as fresh fallen snow before the dogs lift their legs. We talked it over for a while and then she said that it didn't matter what the truth was as long as one these people get it right in the end. She said she was hungry for someone to just get it right. I thought of Benny who came out of the Chicago Ghetto and the lesson that helped him to rise to the top of the business and stay there all his life. Does it matter if Obama is a tightly wrapped ball of ambition if his message of hope is the right one for the time. If it is the right one, then by its very nature he will soon enough loose any rights to it and it will take on its own life that all right ideas possess, and if he is wrong then it will have the stillborn life of all that is by its nature wrong. The messenger need not be as pure as snow before the dogs lift their legs, just so long as their message is the right one for the time.
RSS Links
