Alliance, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third. ~ The Devil's Dictionary

*****

I was sitting in a coffee shop the other day reading a book my daughter bought me. It was a piece of fiction in which some old timers were holding forth around the cracker barrel and sharing their political views of the day.

I was reminded of the family gatherings we had in the back yard when I was a kid and my father and uncles would pull up a ring of chairs and do the same thing. It was on the fringe of just such a gathering that I first learned that Harry S. Truman was an S.O.B. Of course, that was before I knew who Truman was, why he was an S.O.B. or even what an S.O.B. was. But I filed the information away for later at my father's instruction without further explanation.

Of course, at subsequent gatherings I learned that Adlai Stevenson, Dwight Eisenhower and Billy Sol Estes were S.O.B.'s as well, not to mention most of the men my father worked with. Actually the men he worked with were also known as "knuckleheads" but I determined that the honoriffics were interchangeable.

It was with some manly pride that I discovered that Dad used "knucklehead" in front of my sister and mother but used S.O.B. in front of my brother and I. I still didn't know what an S.O.B. was but I felt special knowing my father would use it in front of me. Being 6 wasn't all bad.

I had no more than entertained the similarities between my father's meeting and this fictional one, when a gaggle of older gentlemen began to fill in at a table in the retaurant not ten feet from me. They had the look of regulars. They traded friendly insults and a couple of slugs on the arm as they took their seats. I began suffering from analogy overload so I put the book down.

As I eavesdropped on the assemblage in the restaurant I realized that while the names may have changed, there wasn't much difference in the substance of the discourse between these gentlemen, my uncles, and the conversation in the book.

Rustic male gatherings of this sort share some commonality. First, men enjoy debating about topics they could not possibly know anything about. This is not idle speculation. All men do it, including myself. I think it is a chromosome thing.

For example, international finance frequently rears its head. That few of the participants might have wandered much beyond the county line does not discourage them from jabbing an index finger at the heavens and sharing the "facts of the matter" with their cronies.

It always amuses me to hear someone state a woefully uninformed opinion as if it were incontrovertible fact. It's not that I think the ignorant should remain silent, I just don't know where their confidence comes from. But the truth is that in such no-holds-barred debates, style wins out over substance pretty much every time.

I find that during such confabs you can make as outlandish a statement as you like so long as it is delivered with conviction, and the index finger skyward, of course.

Sooner or later someone wll blame the whole mess on "international bankers" whereupon the participants will nod their heads like regning sages in mournful agreement. That none of them could pick an international banker from a lineup of tuba players is neither considered nor acknowledged.

I recall a conversation between my uncles when the price of postage stamps jumped from four to five cents. As I recall one of my uncles found a way to hang that one on Douglas MacArthur with little dissent. You'd have thought the union had disintegrated and we were on a bobsled ride into hell.

Come to think of it things have been in general decline since postage rates made that fateful jump.

Maybe my uncles knew more than I gave them credit for?

But I don't blame that hike on General MacArthur.

I think it was the international bankers.