You Do What You Gotta Do

Maggie,

Here's one I heard the other day. I can't stand this response. Upon being asked a question or opinion, one replies: “You do what you have to do...” I have many feelings on this, but I am sure you can put it into words better.

Jen

Jen, let’s see if I can’t convert you on this one because I’m a big fan of “You do what you have to do,” or at least the variant “You do what you gotta do.”

I refer you to that most compelling of cases, the cop-perp standoff.

Picture it: FBI agent Anthony LaPaglia, mostly suppressing his Australian accent on a riveting episode of Without a Trace, aims a gun at a cornered, skittish perp whose own gun jabs the sweating temple of a hostage. The perp threatens LaPaglia: “Drop your weapon! You shoot me, I’ll kill him! I SWEAR TO GOD I’ll kill him!”

The simmeringly intense LaPaglia stands his ground: “Do what you gotta do.”

The perp drops his weapon.

As would I, Jen. So you see, the phrase comes in handy if you ever find yourself fingering a trigger in the back room of a seedy strip club when your sting operation goes sour.

What I like about the above example is that in that sentence, the word you actually means you. It’s the balls-out dare, the close-to-the-vest hint of peril to come. It’s potentially a bluff: chance in hell LaPaglia wouldn’t have shot the guy—but it puts the ball squarely in the other guy’s court. I love the sportsmanship of it.

Constrastly, in the following sentences, the word you doesn’t mean you, it mean I. This use of “You do what you gotta do” is cagey instead of cool, and therefore I don't care for it much.

You Do What You Gotta Do

you = I

In this version, the speaker half-acknowledges and wholly defends indefensible behavior by attributing it to some moral imperative, as if anyone in that same situation would have done the same. The sneaky switch of “you” for “I”—“You do what you gotta do” instead of “I do what I gotta do—does two things: It blurs the distinction between you and I, and it shows an unwillingness in the speaker to admit his or her willful action.

examples:

“Maybe what I did wasn’t exactly playing by the rules, but hey, you do what you gotta do.”

“I’m not proud of what I did, but in that situation, you know, you do what you gotta do.”

“Some people call that cheating, but you do what you gotta do.”

“She told me I wasn’t being ethical, and I was like, lady, you do what you gotta do.”

"Move Beyond" = "Flip Flop"

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA -- President Bush asked Canadians on Wednesday to move beyond their deep opposition to the war in Iraq and get behind his vision of democracies blooming from Baghdad to the West Bank.

--SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press

Buy, American!

An article about American Apparel founder Dov Charney this weekend must have been kicking around in my head because a thought occurred to me as I stared at the tag inside my pants this morning: I should buy American next time.

Then another thought occurred to me. Note the implication: "next time."

“I should buy American” sounds like a decent idea--again, assuming that I must and will buy something. An alternative to buying even more crap is to not buy anything, to stop buying so much. “I should buy American” not insignificantly begins with the imperative: “I should buy.” In fact, "Buy American" might just be missing a comma and an exclamation point: Buy, American!

“But the fact of the matter is, you will buy again, and so, at least you’re buying American! The least you can do is make sure you support American workers! It’s the least you can do!”

True, but I’m reminded of Bill Maher’s retort to the phrase It’s the least you can do: “Yeah, literally.”

The American Apparel ad--I mean, article--directs us to shop, albeit at a particular store, one sanctioned by righteousness. It helps us do the least when we inevitably go shopping.

Being a conscientious shopper--refusing to buy clothes made in sweatshops, buying American, etc.--is akin to recycling. What’s my beef with recycling? Nothing, except that it is the easiest of the three tenets of environmental responsibility, the other two less popular tenets being reduce and reuse, both of which involve something that is alien to our culture: not buying.

Recycling was first introduced to me as something I could do for the environment when I was in sixth grade. Ah, sixth grade. Mrs. Miller was my homeroom teacher, I’d just flicked the last of my chicken pox scabs (from my scalp so the scar didn't matter), and I had presented to the class a report on solar energy ending with the endearing line, “…will soon be a reality!” Ah, hope. Was I ever that young?

Mrs. Miller moved us on to recycling. Our project required us to collect all of the garbage our families would ordinarily toss in the trash. Mrs. Miller made a list of what she wanted us to bring in:

pizza boxes (cleaned and folded flat)
take-out containers
paper plates (scraped clean) and plastic forks
TV dinner containers
soda cans
individual juice containers (thankfully my youth predates the butt-clenching term sippy cups)
aluminum foil
paper towel cardboard

…and on went the list.

Simple enough project, right? Unless you’re the kid of immigrants, as I was and as more than half of my classmates were. To us, the above list was American. We didn't have that stuff lying around. We never ever bought take-out. We never threw out aluminum foil, barely used it, in fact, because we had containers to put leftovers in (leftovers we also never threw out, even if it meant bringing it to the neighbor’s dog). We never ate TV dinners, which seemed exotic to my brother and me--“Like the astronauts eat!” And we got our soda at a sugar-water warehouse that reused our crates and even bottles.

It was nearing the day we had to bring in the recycleables Mrs. Miller presumed we had all been filling trash cans with. Incidentally, we never even used store-bought garbage bags, but instead used only the plastic bags we got from shopping. Mrs. Miller was going to be mighty pissed with my paltry haul, and I was too stupid and wimpy to say, “Hey lady, we do better than recycle in my house; we don’t waste to begin with!” So what did I do? I bought. With my parents’ indulgence and money, I bought: a pizza, take-out Chinese, a TV dinner, a two-roll pack of paper towels, and a six-pack of Hawaiian punch. I bought stuff so that I could recycle it. I say again, I bought stuff so that I could recycle it. Bless my parents, who had no idea what aspect of American life this ridiculous practice reflected; they went along with it because I was such a Nervous Nelly about school. They figured it was some arcane requirement for good grades and future success.

Of course, if I had had the balls to tell Mrs. Miller the truth, she probably would have said, “Not wasteful, and so nothing to recycle? That’s great!” But my impulse was to buy as a means to doing the right thing with the surfeit. Reduce, reuse--still the better two approaches. Recycle? Well, it was the least I could do.

The day after Thanksgiving is traditionally the day we get up early, brace ourselves against the barricaded doors at the mall, and trample our fellow shoppers in a quest for the limited-edition toys our kids need for their weal. As a reaction to this buying frenzy, the day after Thanksgiving is also, less popularly, Buy Nothing Day. I learned this when I went to the theater to watch a show by a performance artist who railed against the evils of the cult of buying, the insatiability of acquisition.

Incidentally, the ticket for the show? $25. The experience? $25.

Go. Don't buy, American!

"Agree to Disagree"

"Why don't we just...agree to disagree?" And they left it at that--for now.

There was once a land where the words you spoke in winter froze midair, just beyond your tongue. But spring comes, and words thaw, and sting whoever happens to be lingering just beyond your tongue.

Eith-Air/Ur

Do you air on the side of common mispronunciation or do you ur on the side of pretentiousness?

I air. I know, I know, the correct pronunciation for the word "err" is "ur," but I tried saying it the right way once, and never again. It was about ten years ago, at work, and it came up in the usual context--in the phrase "err on the side of caution." Pronounced the insufferably correct way, the word came out of my mouth in cartoon slow motion and dropped two octaves with full-on burpy echo: "uuuuurrr."

At first, I was worried that the person I was talking to didn't know what word I was trying to say. The look on his face was at first inscrutable. I was all ready with a defense and a befitting lithp: "You'll thhhee that Webthter's preferthz 'ur' to the more common but erroneouth...," and then I realized that the look on Dean's face wasn't incomprehension but utter pity. He knew what word I was trying to say--succeeding in saying, in fact. He knew that "err" was supposed to be pronounced "ur." He just couldn't believe I would actually try to fight an inevitable linguistic shift. I pathetically apologized and explained: "I know it's 'ur' and I know you know it's 'ur' and I thought, man, if I have to hear one more person correct me when I say 'air' instead of 'ur'; if I have to hear, 'You know, it's really pronounced ur" one more time...." To no avail; Dean knew I was lying. Nobody had ever corrected my air-rror.

And so I vowed never to say err any other way than air. So of course a short time later I was talking to my friend Nell, and damned if I didn't say, "Blahdy blah air on the side of cau...." She put her hand on my forearm and said, "Hon, it's pronounced 'ur.'" Southern belle Nell waited a bit before smoothing it over: "But thank you for not saying it that way."

Sub: Dude

The word dude has gone the gelded way of man and guys: It's no longer male specific, though I know very few women who don't mind being called dude, except maybe ironically: "Dude, chug!"

I'm afraid there's no fighting the word's staying power, though, ladies; I don't predict a demise of the genderless dude, or dude's popularity in general. Once a word has transitioned from male specific to gender neutral, it usually sticks. Sorry, Charlie.

I am about ten years too old not to bristle when somebody calls me dude. I get all chest-thrusty to hint that "Hey, man, I'm a girl." In that context, man is gender neutral too.

The general use of dude is not just gender neutral, it's also intended as neither compliment nor insult, although maybe it leans toward compliment in the sense of that forced chumminess any nickname is supposed to convey.

I've kept myself under surveillance for a week now, and it turns out I say dude quite often. I never even heard the word outside of television until I was 20 years old. I worked in a bookstore. My co-worker and friend introduced me to her boyfriend: "Margaret, this is Dude, Dude, this is Margaret." What could I say? "Nice to meet you, Dude." No, his name wasn't really Dude; no, I never found out his real name; yes, his nickname was his favorite word.


My research reveals that I use dude in two different ways. The first is if I'm deliriously giddy, braying like a donkey about something really, really stupid:

"Dude, he forgot to hang up his cell phone. It's in his pocket. I'm eavesdropping on his errands. Dude, this is hilarious. Listen, listen, he's at Home Depot!"

"Dude, you know what this means? We can flip between the two channels and watch two episodes at the same time. Watch this: Mariska short hair, Mariska shorter hair!"


Dude deux in my repetoire is a euphemism, and one you should feel free to call me on if I hurl it yourward:


dude = dick

"Dude, blow that nose already. That snot-sucking sound's making me heave."

"Excuse me dude can you close your legs so someone else can sit thank you!"

"Dude, find a rhythm or stop drumming Deaf White Boy Shuffle."

"Be Positive!"

"Be positive!"

"What?"

"You have to have a positive attitude."

"I didn't say anything."

"But I can see it in your face. You need to have a pos..."

"I didn't say anything. If you followed your own advice, you wouldn't have come to such a negative conclusion based on a glance at my face."

"I just think it's important to be positive."

"I instead think it's important to be realistic."

"Where will that pessimism take you? You're giving too much energy to this."

"Giving too much energy too...the future of this country? OK, guilty as charged. Positive doesn't mean accurate; and negative, which is what you think I was being when I was silently melancholy, is not necessarily incorrect. A person can be positive and wrong. A person can be negative and right."

"It's not about right or wrong!"

"But you told me to be positive because evidently my being negative is...wrong, right? Like I said, this conversation started with your being negative, not my being negative."

"You have to...."

"Says who?"

"I just mean, if you try to think positively, blah blah blah...." [ed. note: Idle yammering takes backseat to eye-catching screen saver on neighbor's computer. Tuning back in at point of...] "...the only way you can effect a positive change in the world!"

"You said, 'If I try to think positively.'"

"Yes."

"OK, how do I do that? Just by willy-nilly thinking, 'It will get better, dammit!"

"Well, you don't have to be sarcastic. That's not very..."

"Positive, right. OK, so when you say, 'Think positively,' how do you think positively about negative things? What if you see negativity? You think positively nonetheless?"

"Yes. You just see the good in every circumstance."

"You're perilously close to the conversation crusher, 'I think everything happens for a reason.' Well, you do it your way, I'll do it my way. Remember, I was just sitting here suffering in silence, as all good people do, so this conversation started, I can't say it enough times, with your negative assessment of a silent girl sitting at her desk. You were negative. Physician, heal thyself."


I just stopped at this point because it was getting awful and stomach-turning. Look, the "MUST. THINK. POSITIVE." zombies strike me as terrified of reality, terrified of feelings, terrified of having to live with unhappiness. I think that attitude is negative, and an alternative attitude, a positive alternative attitude, is that nothing is unprecedented; shit sucks sometimes, but you live through it. And for me, living through it doesn't mean denial and forced positivity.