You Have No Idea

Winston Churchill once said: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." I have no personal knowledge that he said this, of course. Someone else might have said it. Who would take this comment seriously if, say, Alice Cooper had said it? Maybe he didn't say anything like this at all. Maybe he said: "If one more thing goes wrong, I am going to FREAK OUT!" No way his political handlers would have let that comment circulate among the liberal, elite media. And I may be misquoting him. Years of drugs and alcohol did a number on my short term memory and also on my long term memory. And on my ability to perform simple arithmetic at times.

The point I started out trying to make is that such a sentiment would be fine for someone facing the kinds of problems that he was facing. What did Churchill have to worry about? An evil Nazi regime bent on a global hegemony, the aerial blitz on London, thousands and thousands of his countrymen dying in a brutal war?

To that I say: Pshaw. To that I say: Open up my closet of Fears and feast your eyes on the menagerie of horror living there. Winston Churchill would have run screaming into the night. He would have wished for the good old days when the German Luftwaffe was raining down death and destruction on his city. Our final memories of Winston would have been a doddering old man peering out of a security window in the local sanitarium.

"If you had the problems that I have, you would drink, too."
Horseface Steve -- circa late summer 1986