`An Idea Is a Mouth That Sells'

I recognized the type: young, smiling and earnest. They were seated behind a card table in front of the post office. They might have been Mormons but for the hand-lettered sign: “Can Bush’s I.Q. drop any lower?” One avoids such people as one does the insane but the closer of the pair rose to meet me and asked, “Sir, do you realize the entire financial structure has collapsed? Do you know what this means?”

A few minutes later, as I was driving my kids to the library and had time to evaluate my response, I thought of a line from “Life Cycle of Ideas” by the great Australian poet Les Murray:

“An idea is a mouth that sells
as it sucks.”

That’s it: Proselytizing is salesmanship, never altruism. This young man, transcendentally certain of his sentiments, believed he had something for me, a gift of enlightenment, when, in fact, he wanted something from me – membership in the flock. How I resent recruitment for any cause. It’s not in the Bill of Rights, I know, but the most precious right is the right to be left alone.

I ought to have kept quiet, smiled, perhaps said, “No thank you.” Instead (in my defense, I had spent the morning in the dentist’s chair), I said, “I don’t give a shit,” and stepped into the post office. In our box, with the Pottery Barn catalog and another 20-percent-off coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond, was a letter from Barack Obama. I walked out with the catalog and wished the young man a good day.