The devil and shrinking frontal lobes made me say it

All those times when you may have had the urge to tell some young street punk to pull up his pants so he’s not walking around mooning half the town or suggest to some still-wet-behind-the-ears state trooper what he might do with his little old speeding ticket, you may have thought it was just the devil making you want to do it.

Now comes a story in Newsweek magazine reporting on an article in the October issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science claiming that such politically incorrect impulses that become more common with age are a result of shrinkage of your frontal lobes, the circuitry responsible for inhibiting unwanted speech and behavior.

In other words – if you want to get technical about it – the anterior division of each of our cerebral hemispheres tends to dry up with age, and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it other than relax and enjoy it, I suppose.

Age has its privileges, and speaking your mind – or what may be left of it after reaching a certain age – is surely one of them. Which is why some of the better quotes down through the ages have come from members of the shrinking-frontal-lobe set who fully understood what they were doing, but were past the point of giving a damn.

Master of the genre, of course, was Harry S. Truman before, during and after he was president of the United States. On the eve of the 1944 Democratic convention at Chicago, then Sen. Truman was visited by Bob Hannegan, the Democratic National Committee chairman. Hannegan told him it was time for Truman to withdraw his support of James Byrnes for the vice presidency because President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted Truman on the ticket as his vice presidential running mate.

“You tell him [Roosevelt] to go to hell,” Truman advised Hannegan. “I’m for Jimmy Byrnes.” By week’s end, however, his frontal lobes having not shrunk further, Truman had accepted his party’s nomination for vice president. He was, after all, a politician, which by definition means he was of a species unable to resist the siren call of such a powerful proposition.

As you may recall, Truman’s most celebrated lobe-shrinkage-induced outburst came after a Washington Post music critic panned a musical performance by Truman’s daughter, Margaret, at Washington’s Constitution Hall.

After threatening to punch the guy in the mouth, should he ever meet the man, Truman added in a note to the critic, “[Syndicated columnist] Westbrook Pegler, a guttersnipe, is a gentleman compared to you. You can take that as more of an insult than a reflection on your ancestry.”

Cultural historian Russell Lynes is said to have observed that if an insult is such that you cannot ignore it, top it, or laugh at it, it is probably deserved. I’d guess that the Post critic likely chose Option No. 3 and had a good laugh over Truman’s reaction.

I don’t have any idea how far along in the lobe-shrinkage process Gen. Robert E. Lee may have been in 1863 when he blasted newspaper editors, a sport every bit as popular in Civil War times as it is today. Lee’s comment, sent to me by a friend, was a classic that is now spiked to my bulletin board alongside other such keepers.

“It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most-gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers. In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late.

“Accordingly, I am readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I will, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials – after the fact.”

An e-mail forwarded by a fellow UMaine sports fan features a colorful poster in which a little ankle-biter of a talking dog faces up to a huge Dalmatian seemingly 40 times larger than the pipsqueak. The little guy, his bark far worse than his bite, is giving the big guy a serious ration of grief. A caption reads: “Never be afraid to say what you feel. You can only die once.”

That apparently is the mantra of a grumpy old lady quoted in the Newsweek story about research on blunt speech and behavior in the elderly. When asked about her loss of inhibitory control the woman replied, “I’m 91. What the hell do I care?”

The old gal’s frontal lobes inhibiting blunt speech may be frizzled. But there’s obviously nothing wrong with the neurological gizmo that controls her logic.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.