Road Apples
March 9, 2009


Creeping incrementalism and other modern maladies

By Tim Sanders

Last week I received an email containing a YouTube video attachment. The video showed a heavy-set matron with Gary Larsonesque hair piled high atop her head, wearing a dark, sequined pantsuit. She walked across a dimly lit stage amidst thunderous applause, and began singing a song that I recognized immediately. It was "Where the Boys Are." I’d heard the song over and over again on my little transistor radio when I was a youngster. But who, I wondered, was the old lady singing it? Well who it was, was Connie Francis herself. I was shocked. She certainly didn’t look like that the last time I saw her. In the early ’60s on American Bandstand she only had one chin. She was kinda cute in those days. Petite, you might say. "WHOA," I said to Marilyn, "c’mere and lookit this!"

She did, and was likewise amazed. But since Connie Francis was a big hit a few years before my teenage hormones shifted into high gear and caused me to actually believe I could dance without injuring myself, I decided to look up musicians from my own era on the YouTube website, just to see how they’d withstood the ravages of time. I didn’t want to look up the Rolling Stones, because they’ve never really retired, and the whole world has watched Mick Jagger transform himself from that young, skinny, ugly guy with a tremendously huge mouth who yelled a lot, into an old, skinny, ugly guy with a tremendously huge mouth who still yells a lot. No surprises there.

So instead I found some videos of a group I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of in years, the Dave Clark Five. That group had several hits in the mid-’60s, including "Glad All Over," "Bits and Pieces," "Because," "Anyway You Want It," "Catch Us If You Can," "Over and Over," and "You Got What it Takes." They weren’t the Beatles, but they were pretty darned good. I watched a couple of clips of them when they were in their prime, back during the old British Invasion days, and then found one from last year, when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was very depressing. Two of the Dave Clark Five had died, leaving only Dave and two other elderly gentlemen (the Dave Clark Three, I guess) to receive the award. The contrast between those youngsters in the old clips and the grandfatherly types at the 2008 ceremony was unnerving.

If you’re a Baby Boomer, I’m sure you’ve had the experience of meeting someone you haven’t seen in decades and thinking, "Old Bob should’ve taken better care of himself. I didn’t even recognize him." You’d probably be surprised to know that old Bob walked away thinking to himself, "Old Tim should’ve taken better care of himself. I didn’t even recognize him." Particularly if your name is Carl.

But we seldom realize just how much WE’VE changed over the years because of something called Creeping Incrementalism. To us, when we see today’s Connie Francis or The Dave Clark Three or old Bob, we see only the stark contrast between what they looked like decades ago, and what they look like today. On the other hand, we’ve looked at ourselves in the mirror day after day over the last half century, and those changes have snuck up on us. My hair has been thinning (and I use the term "thinning" euphemistically) for years, but only a hair or two at a time. So I’m used to it. Imagine, however, my reaction if I were to have fallen into a coma, all skinny and hairy, in 1966 watching the Dave Clark Five on the Ed Sullivan Show, and only awakened a few moments ago. Then imagine if I were to crawl down the hall, stagger to my feet, and look at what I’d morphed into in a full length mirror. Now imagine me screaming bad words at the portly, balding guy who’s taken over my body, then running to the nearest window, and diving headlong through it to the street below. Fun, eh?

The fact that most of us experience that Creeping Incrementalism, that daily physical drip, drip, drip which is not nearly as alarming as a sudden deluge, is probably a good thing. We lose a hair here, a tooth there, gain a couple of pounds, forget why we went into the basement in the first place. So what? We can handle it. No, we can’t do all the things we used to do, but hey, that was a long time ago, and who cares anyway? We may not be swimming laps anymore, but least we’re still treading water. There’s something to be said for really bad things happening to us so slowly and over such an extended period of time that they go unnoticed, and only occasionally remind us that we’re falling apart.

I suppose the same thing could be said for a country which transforms itself from a young, energetic capitalist system into an old, flabby socialist community, but does so ever so slowly. Over the years. Bit by bit. Drip, drip, drip. I could go on with the political metaphor, but that would require another, completely different column. And I’m a humorist, not a political pundit.

Suffice it to say that if you just awoke from a 50-year coma, you might want to take a good, stiff drink of something stronger than coffee before you turn on your TV set. You’re gonna see some pretty goofy stuff: doctor assisted suicides, impoverished loons giving birth to octuplets, global warming alarmists hawking carbon credits, government subsidies to find out why pigs stink, multi-trillion dollar federal deficits, tongue piercing and, of course, hip-hop. But don’t worry, that’s not necessarily an elderly Connie Francis singing "Lipstick on Your Collar" on some nightmare version of American Bandstand. Now that the lunatics are running the asylum, it might only be a cross-dressing congressman from the West Coast. From what I hear, they’re thick as fleas out there.