Road Apples
Nov. 21, 2005

In my expert opinion, we've got too many experts

By Tim Sanders

Everybody’s an expert. If you don’t believe it, go to your favorite barber shop and ask the customers there what either Auburn or Alabama did wrong in Saturday’s Iron Bowl. You’ll be amazed at how many guys sitting in that barber’s chair will convince you that they would have made excellent college football coaches, had they not suffered that unfortunate fishhook-in-the-thumb accident when they were eighteen, which, along with the fact that they were only 5'3", weighed 98 lbs., and spent all of their extracurricular time singing high tenor in the mixed chorus during their solitary semester at the local junior college, kept them from playing Division 1-A ball themselves.

We’re all guilty, of course. I can barely catch a potato with an oven mitt, but I’ve personally coached many college football teams, ranging from Auburn’s Tigers to Purdue’s Boilermakers and Michigan’s Wolverines, to what should have been easy victories. They’d have been easy victories, that is, if only they’d listened to me while I hollered unconventional yet inspired expert advice at the TV set–things like: "YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN TWO-YARD LINE. IT’S THIRD AND FORTY-ONE WITH THREE SECONDS LEFT IN THE GAME. TRY A QUARTERBACK SNEAK, THEY WON’T BE LOOKING FOR THAT!"

I’m also an expert at picking up fallen motorcycles. Several months ago I dropped my motorcycle in the garage. What happened was, as I started to back the bike out the door, I noticed that the cord from the battery tender resting on the shelf was still attached to the bike. Knowing full well that a four-foot cord wouldn’t allow me to travel far, I leaned the bike to the left, so as to set it back on the kickstand, which would have been a logical move had I not already popped the stand up. The bike slowly leaned, and kept leaning, leaning, finally coming to rest with its windshield balanced against a very low storage shelf, and I could not budge it. Unless you’ve recently received a dozen Claxton fruitcakes via UPS, you have no idea what it’s like trying to lift 650 lbs. of dead weight. So what this expert did was to back away from the bike, carefully assess the situation, measure the distance between the bike and the shelf, estimate the lean angle, wet and raise his finger to test for wind direction, and then ... call his wife, who told him he was an idiot and helped him lift the thing. There are Internet experts who will tell you exactly how to back up to the fallen motorcycle, bend at the knees, firmly grasp the frame of the bike, and lift with your legs, not your back or arms. Of course, they are only Internet experts, and do not have to figure out how to squeeze your body into a sixteen-inch space between a shelf and a bike. And it is a matter of complete indifference to them if you give yourself a double hernia. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that most people who post expert advice on the Internet are sadists.

But armchair football coaches and Internet motorcycle experts are only the tip of the iceberg. Think about the multitude of hurricane relief experts who came out of the woodwork, like so many water bugs, after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

Carpenters, plumbers, grocery clerks, nursing home residents, TV commentators, educators, editors, columnists–not to mention lawyers, congressmen, televangelists and other felons–all knew exactly what should have been done, and when it should’ve been done, and how, and why it wasn’t done and who was to blame for not doing it. There were even feral cats in our neighborhood who had opinions on what went wrong with the hurricane relief effort. Predictably, at least where the New Orleans disaster was concerned, the Democratic cats blamed the Republican administration in Washington, and the Republican cats blamed the Democratic mayor and governor. Such spitting and squalling–you’d have thought there was an election looming. I had my own theories about Katrina, but I mostly kept ‘em to myself, for fear of alienating my readers, both of whom dislike serious partisan debate because, like me, they have short attention spans and ... where was I? Oh yeah, they fatigue easily.

The media is full of political experts. Very few of the political experts you see on TV are pathological liars. That is, unless they are former politicians they aren’t. No, most are just folks like you and me, with the odd notion that they are "normal," while folks who disagree with them are delusional, possibly even psychopathic. Both right-wingers and left-wingers would like the public to consider them "mainstream" Americans. Rather than lying to prove a point, each expert will pick and choose actual bonafide facts, or partial facts, which support his position, and ignore other actual bonafide facts which tend to make him sound loony. You seldom hear a Republican bring up the Iran-Contra debacle, and you seldom hear a Democrat talk about the Marc Rich pardon. Likewise, Republican experts lose their expertise when explaining how a guy named "Scooter" ever got a top administration job, and Democrats are conspicuously silent about Sandy Berger visiting the National Archives and stuffing classified documents into his pants and socks. That is because political experts seldom have much of a sense of humor, especially where their own party is concerned.

Last week I saw an expert TV news commentator come very close to telling the whole truth, in a rather roundabout way. The discussion was about a horrific crime in the Northeast, and the expert criminologist was responding to a question by Bridgette Quinn of Fox News, who asked him to speculate on whether or not a family member was an accomplice to the crime. This character furrowed his brow, gave the camera a meaningful look, paused dramatically, and although I can’t quote him exactly, his response went something like this:


"Frankly, Bridgette, I believe that while at this point in time we are as of yet in the dark, so to speak, experience tells me that in the days to come we will see things come to light, and events will unfold in ways which we could never imagine."


I admired that response. It was expert-talk for "I ain’t got a clue."

As to next week’s column, [DRAMATIC PAUSE] frankly, I believe that while at this point in time we are as of yet in the dark, so to speak, experience tells me that in the days to come we will see things come to light, and events will unfold in ways which we could never imagine.

In the meantime, when that UPS truck arrives, all the experts agree that you should approach your box of holiday fruitcake cautiously, determine the wind direction, bend at the knees, lift with your legs, not your back, and set it carefully back on the bed of the truck. Tell the driver it’s your way of thanking him for a job well done. If that doesn’t work, remember that a fruitcake makes an excellent pontoon anchor, and Spring comes early in the South.