ONE NIGHT A fellow called my old man a windbag.
My old man said yes, he guessed that was quite true.
He said every man who gave off a lot of verbal gas was a windbag unless he made something out of it, like getting into Congress, or writing a book. and then he became a statesman or a philosopher.
My old man said the only difference between him and a lot of distinguished citizens of the world in the matter of windiness was that he had wasted his vocal breezes on desert air instead of wafting them into the ears of voters or readers.
He said if he had adopted the rostrum he might have achieved the reputation of being a tremendous thinker like a fellow he knew back in Kansas. My old man said this fellow used to stand around on street corners shooting off his mouth on every subject under the sun until everybody agreed that he was the biggest windbag in the State. He never worked if he could help it, so it was also agreed that he was a bum.
The fellow finally got into politics in a small way and from public platforms said identically the same things he had said on street corners, but what had passed for wind presently became regarded by the voters as the greatest wisdom they had ever heard, though the fellow merely raised his voice slightly above his street-corner tone.
He got elected to office and for years held the deepest respect of his constituency as a wise man, and when he died he was mourned by all, yet my old man said this fellow never once said anything different from what he had said in the days when he was considered a windbag and a bum. My old man said the fellow lived qUite comfortably most of his life off the public treasury just by transferring his wind from street corners to the rostrum.
My old man claimed that it was who you were, not what you said, that represented the difference between a windbag and a wise man in this country, with some reference to where you said it. He once made something of a test of his theory right there in our old home town of Pueblo.
There was a wealthy merchant who often dropped into the Arkansas Hall beer emporium where my old man hung out a great deal, and this merchant liked to spout his ideas on public questions of all kinds and he had quite a reputation as a thinker.
My old man said that it was the fellow’s money not his ideas that made people listen to him. My old man said the merchant never had a thought that was worth two cents, Mexican money. One night my old man loaded himself up with wisdom from the works of thinkers like Thomas Paine and Voltaire and Rousseau and went to the Arkansas Hall and started giving off quotations at one end of the bar.
He got a little attention for a few minutes but when the merchant came in and took his stand at the other end of the bar and called for drinks for the house, all but one auditor deserted my old man and gathered about the merchant and listened eagerly to what he had to say. My old man went on quoting from Paine, and Voltaire and Rousseau in opposition and that was when the fellow called him a windbag.
My old man said the chap who stuck to him was a fellow who never had anything whatever to say, and for that reason most people thought him an introvert. My old man said he had noticed that if you did not talk at all, people thought there was something wrong with you, and if you talked too much you were a windbag. He said the reason this chap never said anything was because he could scarcely read or write and was generally ignorant and did not want to expose his deficiencies any more than necessary.
Afterward the chap kicked up a gold mine over around Telluride and as a rich man he took to talking quite a bit. My old man said nobody called him a windbag, however. In fact, when he went traveling newspaper reporters would interview him at length and quite seriously on matters of public moment. My old man always got a great biff out of reading these interviews.
My old man said he had listened to a lot of speeches in his time and had done a lot of reading and he had come to the conclusion that about 75 per cent of what passed for profound thought was nothing but wind. He said he once took the trouble to read an issue of the congressional record from cover to cover and tried to analyze what was reported therein of the utterances of men who were paid nice salaries to do the thinking for the country, and that he had discovered that the utterances were mainly wind.
He said if you read any speech or proclamation by any public official and analyzed it, you would find that it was mostly wind and usually borrowed from the windiness of someone else. He said he admitted to being a windbag, all right, but one thing about him he was not costing the taxpayers anything and that was more than a lot of other windbags could say.