There’s a special poster, in a frame like a picture frame, that has three meaningful words… ‘Kiss the Cook.’ Years ago, my wife and I got the poster for my dad, who loved to cook, when he wasn’t running his construction company.
For several decades now, we’ve had ‘Kiss the Cook,’ in our kitchen.
Twice, it’s fallen over. We can’t figure out why. It’s securely anchored in place.
We’re thinking something spiritual… maybe someone’s trying to reach us?
And out of somewhere, the word ‘irreverent’ came from somewhere. That’s how this story begins.
Having “a lack of veneration” is a definition of ‘irreverent,’ with ‘veneration’ defined as “a feeling of profound respect or reverence.”
And then ‘clumsy’ and ‘clumsily’ came from somewhere… and then ‘clumsy irreverence’ and people acting ‘clumsily irreverent.’
And one other word… ‘upheaval.’
Borrowing a lyric from the Disney song Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, “Put them together and what have you got?”
Upheaval, perhaps that? It’s happened before, with dictators – authoritarian rulers – being clumsily irreverent and crushing things, like peoples’ veneration, their respect, their reverence of things that often keep things — like nations — from coming apart, from toppling over.
Clumsy irreverent rulers, and ruler wannabes, can get really thuggish sometimes. That’s happened throughout history, and it’s happening now.
I’ve know people who were nearly crushed by clumsily irreverent autocrats.
They joke around, some of them, even seeming affable sometimes, like they’re just messing around. Until they get all messianic, promising some sort of deliverance from whatever they happen to have in mind. Iron-fisted dictators can be clever at that.
Maybe that poster of ours, toppling over, was something to be thinking about.
Harvey Radin is former senior vice president in charge of corporate communications and media relations, Bank of America Western Region. He makes his home in Redwood City, CA.