Greet him politely with a “Nice day isn’t it Sir?” and he would furrow his brow and reply that yes, the air temperature, the dew point/humidity, the solar illumination (in other words the sun was shining), and other clement conditions all indicted a nice day. Gee Fred… Sorry I even asked.

Yet Fred was a real Air Force fighter pilot. He had flown the F-15, was a graduate of the Military College of South Carolina (The Citadel), and no doubt had a fine future before him in the military. His ramrod posture and meticulous grooming were always parade ground perfect—a parade ground he sadly never seemed to have left.

I was always amazed at how my mother could draw even the most anti-social recluse into a rip-roaring chat, but I think she would have reached her limit with Fred. His über-rationality bespoke an oozing arrogance that made you feel guilty for not being as coolly pragmatic and razor-sharp as he was. You know the type I am sure.

Yet I find that there are worse sticks-in-the-mud than even those like Fred—namely that crowd of elite commentators who pound on about how the world is going to Hell in a handcart. The tune of these unhappy Pied Pipers is that we are under attack, at all times and from all directions, by forces that are greasing the downward slope to our personal and national ruin.

No worries dear reader, I am not going to start in on politics. Even though I very much enjoyed 8th grade civics class and have tried ever since to adhere to the ideals of good citizenship, I gladly leave to others the rabid (and rancid) partisan discussions and all that goes with them—the tribal identifying badges, loyalty oaths, tropes, clichés, and shibboleths.

Why? Because the purveyors of these political “discussions” are playing me for profit. I never have figured out how advertising-filled “news” with its ever-too-frequent “Explosive Revelations” fits into the model of informed citizenship. Frankly it reeks of hucksterism. Am I trying to be too pure about this? Perhaps, but it boils down to not wanting to play the fall guy in a ratings and advertising war.

Criticize one of the Gloom Gang however, and defenders rush in saying that their beloved commentator is the holder of all wisdom, is preaching the gospel of freedom, and is “owning” (a particularly distasteful term if I might say) the other side. Of course this is just pure ingroup/outgroup or us versus them stuff, but irrespective of the politics per se of these elite talking heads, it is their sheer gloom that riles me.

The Roman Emperor-Philosopher Marcus Aurelius challenged us 2000 years ago in his Meditations to see that the world around us does not change much. The way things were is how they always will be. Aurelius obviously is not the only person to have thought of this but I like his phrasing:

Good words to remind us to back off on our hubris a bit. Although we live in a world of technological marvels and conveniences, unless we humans are on the cusp of a remarkable evolutionary leap forward, we are not always quite as good as we think. We need not get too philosophical about this—just take it in stride and change that which we can and avoid despair at that which we cannot. In doing so though, we definitely should keep a lookout for those who are professional pessimists.

In mediaeval times, the going phrase and imagery to keep a check on ourselves was encapsulated in the Latin words memento mori. This buzzkill phrase, which means “remember death,” was inscribed near and far. It appeared in well-known works of art (as skulls, candles burning low, and once they were invented, timepieces indicating the late hours), spoken by the clergy, and chiseled into masonry—all in ways that even the illiterate could easily understand. Slow as I am on the uptake, even I would have gotten the idea pretty quickly.

It does make me wonder though just how much of a reminder people needed of their mortality in an age when life was already short, brutal, and decidedly uncomfortable. Frankly I would have preferred more positive reinforcement if you know what I mean.

Yet the beating of this grimness drum flourishes even today—in fact it has become rather good business. The modern practitioners of gloom that we find on television (in those rare moments between commercials) and elsewhere could have just as easily been in their heyday in the good old days of 1350 A.D.

Not that I give a pass, mind you, to the overly optimistic who reside in their own happy place among the permanently cheerful. Frankly I find their high-energy ways annoying. They demand a lot of themselves, which is fine, but unfortunately all too often their demands spill over onto us. We average folk are then left with tired minds and aching limbs as we lift the heavy stones of their ambitious ideas up steep hills.

I have often wondered which generates more cash—the ne’er a care in the world gospel of unbounded optimism or the gloom of negativity. Both seem to be extraordinary lucrative fields to hoe. After all, one man’s gloom is another man’s meat and mead.

While Winston Churchill said that he got more out of whiskey than whiskey ever did out of him, I cannot say the same about my internet usage even if I do claim to keep it somewhat high-minded and utilitarian. I like to read a lot of commentary and it is here that I have run across elites like Victor Davis Hanson and Peter Hitchens just to name two examples—although there are many more of any and all political stripes I assure you.

As a quick aside, perhaps you can give to me a good reason for the naming conventions of those such as Victor Davis Hanson, the actor Haley Joel Osment, the golfer Davis Love III, the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, the writers David Foster Wallace and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Henry David Thoreau, or the English historian A.J.P. Taylor. Would someone not have been able to recognize them if they just went by Vic, Hank, or Haley? Am I wrong in finding this just a touch pretentious? Would there be a chance of mis-identifying them if they just had a first and last name?

A colleague of mine summed it up nicely when he asked what their wives call them in the midst of passion. Do they trot out the full multi-syllabic name such as “Davis Love the Third?” or “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? Not to intrude on the intimacy of their private lives of course, but it is a question that does cut to the heart of the matter.

Full disclosure: While you can see that I do not like the multi-names, I very much appreciate what they do in the South with female names. I think of a young woman I knew some years ago. Her name, Mary Beth, when spoken aloud as if it almost were one word has a wonderful euphony that in her case was matched by her equally striking pulchritude. I think of others: Anna Clair and Anne Lauren to name just two that I have encountered over the years. These have absolutely no hint of pretension and elide nicely in the Southern accent.

Ok, back to Hanson and Hitchens. Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist with a PhD from Stanford University. He edits scholarly journals, has written many books for both popular and academic consumption, and has been lauded for his contributions to classical scholarship. He grew up on a farm and, apparently hewing to the ideal of physical labor and book smarts, still runs an active one in California’s San Joaquim valley. He is no stranger to very strong opinions and the controversy that follows them. Oh, to round it off he is a Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Although I had heard him in interviews and read his general writings for a number of years, it is his last 18 months in publications such as the National Review that have caught my attention. Irrespective of his politics (remember, thats not my schtick), his tone is one that we have, and still are, on a most perilous path—due to those naughty, so very naughty, men and women in the past administration.

He is not overtly strident—he is too wise for that but he is relentless. He is also clever enough to use a lot of adjectives and phrases such as alleged and reported to make sure that he does not get caught in a fact trap. I find that for a scholar of his status he almost runs afoul of that old maxim that correlation does not imply causation.

Frankly I find it hard to believe that the entire readership of his opinion pieces (not his books—I leave those for scholars and academics to critique) could be this relentlessly grim in outlook. Is the sky about to fall, is it falling as we speak, or has it already fallen? Either way, if it is falling, shouldn’t we start building some pretty tall tent poles to keep it above our heads? Let’s crack on!

Peter Hitchens, meanwhile, is the younger brother of the late and quite famous Christopher Hitchens but that does not mean that his efforts are any less energetic. While Christopher decamped to the U.S (eventually becoming a citizen) to work as a speaker and journalist, Peter stayed in England to take up the same tasks. His output of commentary has been nothing if not robust through the years.

It was not however, until sometime in the early 2000s that I picked up Peter’s book The Abolition of Britain that I saw how much he differed from his brother. Now this book has an average 4 Star rating on the U.S. version of Amazon so obviously, there are those who agree with his commentary, but I have to admit that it is one of the few books that I actually stopped reading. The gloomy and constant drumbeat of England/Britain being in constant existential peril was just a bit too much for me. Maybe I did not read closely enough, but he seemed to do a lot of pining for the days when Churchill and the like were still in the saddle—nothing wrong with Winston of course, but he did pass in 1965 and we are well into the 21st century.

It was his comparison with a walk in Hyde Park, then and today however, that made me quickly realize what lay ahead in the book. Heaven forfend there are people out in the park these days exercising in….well…exercise clothes! Back in the days of coal and soot-choked London they might have been smoking and sitting in a pub and, of course, headed for an early grave. I would wager a brand-new dime that a good 90% of the folks “back in those days” would have gladly jumped at the chance to be alive today instead. As the expression goes: The old days were not always as good as we wish to imagine.

That said, I think Hitchens, while even gloomier than Hanson, comes out ahead in delivering commentary. Hanson strikes me as one who enjoys his flights from serious scholarship to political comment. It is as if he has become besotted with and enticed by those in the political class—always a perilous position in my opinion. Hitchens, on the other hand, never purports to speak with the voice of an academic. Nothing wrong with speaking as an academic mind you, but he takes his positions from his experience in the trenches of covering British politics. So while I disagree with his ominous views, I respect his work in arriving at them.

Now at this point dear reader I am going to depart from what we all learned about essays from our 7th grade teachers, namely the thesis, antithesis, and resolution or recommendation model of putting forth an idea. I know that I should be giving at least two clear-cut examples of Hanson’s and Hitchens’s writings where I find them to be full in the Hell in a handcart mode.

In fact, my teacher would call me lazy for not doing so, but I would protest that my point is not to pick through each of their writings (Lord knows I have read enough of them already) to say “Ah ha!” “Here is something even more negative than what they wrote last week—just look at this!”

My goal rather is simply to make us average folk much more aware of the portending doom that we hear from many professional commentators on any given day. All of us should keep our eyes and ears open for those who pounce on, and then profit from, our all-to-human tendency to think the worst of things. Sure I could give you, to the point of painful boredom, scores of examples of this negativity, but our time is better spent being on the lookout when we hear these seductive tunes that all is lost.

Can things get worse? Yes, indeed they can. Adam Zamoyski wrote a wonderful (if that can even be the word about a topic so grim) book called Moscow 1812 – Napoleon’s Fatal March in which he brilliantly details Napoleon’s ill-fated foray into Russia. Zamoyski quotes the wife of the Prefect of Warsaw who said “Just when we thought things could not get worse they did—and did so without measure.” Ask anyone who has been in a war, the victim of horrendous crimes, or lived through an epidemic and they will tell you that our comfortable lives are very delicately balanced.

Yet as I try to avoid the modern flood of negativity, I admit that I keep a bit of that memento mori exhortation of the Middle Ages in my mind. I like how Lord Byron phrased is when speaking of the lifespan of empires in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

“There is the moral of all human tales; ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First Freedom and then Glory — when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption —barbarism at last.”

In the meantime, Stay Average!