Variations on a theme of "You break it, you own it."

To no avail, Doctor Bawb has been
warned about buying much less
wearing shirts such as the one to the right. Even his late, great dad once spluttered: "You're 40-years old, not a goddam teenager! I bet your patients love a doctor who wears T-shirts and tennis shoes!" "They do," I said but veered the conversation away from our shared loathing of Beverly Hills' "Couch Canyon" pretention. I could leave. Go home, which would leave dad to cope with with Mommie Dearest's variations on the theme of "Mister Ph.D!" But kids I'd test DID love my "wierd-for-a-white-doctor" get-up. They knew they had freedom to ask Dr. Bawb to repeat ANYTHING they didn't understand because "sometimes-I-talk-like-I-got-mush-in-my-mouth" - which I DO sound like. The kids never asked me to repeat anything. They understood me the first time because I shot straight with them from Introductions through Instructions forward. Kids are like that. Mostly it's grown-ups who get wierd - South Central through Bev Hills. My only clothing rules were [1] Being immaculate, and [2] The t-shirt or base-ball cap HAD to mean something to me. Which is why I deeply envy that Noam Chomsky T-Shirt [above] and would wear it in a heartbeat. Retired Shrink or not.

Chomsky [here's a better picture of the man] is an unlikely
T-Shirt subject. He's way older than Dr. Bawb and far more "self-destructive" in a different, more effective way than wearing Pittsburgh Steeler jerseys while testing kids. Chomsky is Linguistics Professor-emeritus at MIT who derived the Deep Structure theory of verbal communications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_structure decades before becoming a Socratic corruptor of the youth, a semi-marginalized pain in the ass to polite society and, thus, a T-Shirt icon.

Late this afternoon I'd read Chomsky's decade-old article on Manufactured Consent. http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/z9710-mainstream-media.html The sounds of the LA Laker-Phoenix Sun big-as-a-regular-season-gets game grabbed my easy-to-takeover interest. After the game, tuning to an expected repeat of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, there was K.O. live - with a "BREAKING NEWS!" banner beneath.

And the news? The New York Times' story on John McCain's eight-year old May-December "thing" with a blonde Lobbyist will be Twice-Chewed Cabbage by the time anyone reads this. Don't get me wrong, here: Keith's as good as mainstream TV news gets. I remember him years ago as the sports guy on a high-rated local LA TV station. Bill Moyers on PBS's "Now" called Keith "TVs last honest newsman."http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12142007/watch.html. And the point? Absolutely amazing how dead-on that Noam Chomsky's and Ed Hermann's "Manufactured Consent" was and remains. http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufacturing_Consent.html