Appendix A
It’s tricky how the same word can mean so many different things. Take the word “is,” for example.
At a low point in his presidency, Bill Clinton came up against a perjury charge when his own lawyer, Robert Bennett, told a federal judge that “there is absolutely no sex of any kind” between Clinton and then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Confronted with the obvious lie, Clinton argued that the statement might nonetheless be true if one took “is” to mean “is none” rather than “is and never has been.”
Clinton was a Rhodes scholar, so there might have been more to this than meets the eye. Prolly, his point was simply that “is” isn’t the same as “was,” and at the very moment Bennett was mansplaining to the judge, Clinton and Lewinsky were just chillin. Had Bennett’s statement been “there was absolutely no sex of any kind,” we can only imagine that we’d now live in the reality author Ray Bradbury conjured up in the closing of “A Sound of Thunder.”
OK. So where does that leave the team from Failure - the Podcast? Other than our usual free-associating, not much of anywhere.
Perhaps, though, we should look at the word “appendix” in this episode’s title. To many a writer, that’s a postscript of sorts. Lawyer’s use them all the time. Corporate execs and start-up CEO’s, too. It’s a free country. Why should any of these be stuck with saying less when, through the vehicle of a simple appendix, they can say so much more?
But we digress, as is our wont. Join us and learn even less about the novel coronavirus, remote computing software, the new iPad and, yes, the multiple meanings of “appendix.” We weren’t any better off for recording this episode, and you won’t be either for listening to it.
