TRADITION!

Tradition is all very nice, but it does tend to go on far too long and doesn’t seem to change much. If you’re not careful, it can end up being the same damn thing all the time.
That’s why American traditions, outside those silly ones the Texas A & M football team invent and then cling to as if they mean something, are always being refreshed. That’s why we demolish any building built before 1965 and buy a new car every two years. It’s also why the Los Angeles Goodwill stores are full of clothes that still have the price tags. You have to admit, it can get boring looking at the same stuff, day after live-long day. Innovative thinking is what we do best in the US of A and I’ll give you a perfect example.
My neighbor in our Portuguese village is a shepherd and owns a bunch of big brown sheep he takes to pasture on his burro - they walk, he rides the burro. He lives at the bottom of the hill and the pasture-land is at the top. Now, every morning he gets aboard his trusty burro and herds the sheep up the hill. They chomp away at the grass all day, converting it into wool, meat and those black marbles they poop incessantly, and then he herds them home. It’s all very traditional and unbelievably quaint, but is it efficient?
I did a little cost analysis and came to this conclusion. Traditional it may very well be, but it ain’t good business practice. I explain thus: the sheep trundle two miles uphill, burning calories and ejecting little black marbles every inch of the way. Then they eat grass until it’s time to go home the same way they came up. If, for the sake of argument, they expend ten units of energy on their journey and gain ten units of energy from eating, then all this wandering about the landscape is for nothing. Surely it would be better to let them stay at home and maybe give each one them a Power Bar and some multivitamins?
I’m not even adding the time/energy of the shepherd and his burro into the equation. If the sheep stayed in one place they wouldn’t need to go galloping all over Portugal. He could find a job, say in a factory making Portuguese souvenirs - little statues of shepherds are popular with the tourists - and the burro could be put to work giving thousands of overweight bratty kids a ride on the beach. That’s efficiency for you and tradition put in the right perspective.
But it’s no good explaining this to him because even with all those hours with nothing to do but stare at sheep he hasn’t taken the time to learn English, and it’s all a bit too complicated for his simple rustic mind anyhoo.
Then there’s the other neighbor, the one who looks like Mussolini -- but is much nicer. He’s old, there’s no getting around that, and so is his wife - one of the sweetest old ladies you’ll ever meet. His son, who happens to be my landlord, visits his parents every day, driving up that steep hill from the village below. What a great son. Then, every other day a van (a Citroen Jumpy) bounces up to our farm and the baker pops out and sells bread. Good bread it is too; still warm and wonderful with my coffee for breakfast.
This has been going on for donkey’s years, so it’s become a tradition in a way. And there’s the problem. The more efficient American way would be to slide Gramps and Grandma into a nice clean nursing home where they’d have cable TV and company and meals made for them. Then the son wouldn’t have to slog uphill everyday and could renovate the cottage and rent it to German tourists every summer. The nursing home folk would make a little bit of money to tide them over and the baker could stay behind his counter out of the weather. It’s win win all the way around, which shows how it’s always always wise to let the marketplace decide what’s best. Of course, I wouldn’t get my fresh warm rolls for breakfast anymore, but hey, isn’t that why they made frozen food and microwaves?
Then there’s the kissing-women-thing tradition. In Portugal if you meet a woman you know, you’re supposed to kiss her on both cheeks instead of sensibly saying Hi or shaking hands, or high-fiving if she’s a cool chick. The kissing thing sounds charming, but it gets to be a real problem fast. Let’s say you walk into a business meeting where there are half a dozen guys and half a dozen women. You all start kissing each other on the cheek and pretty soon the place looks like it’s filled with a bunch of bobbing penguins. And if you screw it up by starting with the wrong cheek – always the right side is kissed first – all hell breaks loose. You can smash your nose into someone’s face or get an earful of some babe’s chin. It can ugly real fast, and God forbid you count wrong and miss one, or kiss Carlos by mistake. Hi, hon, gimme five, works just fine for me.
As I said, tradition has its place, there’s no denying that, but it’s only good when it doesn’t go on too long or get into multiple kissing. So be a man, an American man, shake that hand, flatten that building and buy yourself a new Cadillac.